Andrew Rusk (CC BY 2.0)
Noam Chomsky, April 2011.
The U.S. left has no brighter guiding light than Noam Chomsky, the famed linguist, philosopher, and teller of unflattering truths about his nation's behavior on the global stage.
He’s the author of more than 100 books and an inspiration to generations of students, scholars, and activists. Now ninety-five, he has teamed up with Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, to bring his radical critiques of U.S. imperialism into a single vital book.
The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
By Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson
Penguin Press, 416 pages
Release date: October 15, 2024
The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World is largely drawn by Robinson from Chomsky’s prior writing, but does not feel like a compilation and is remarkably up to date. The book dissects U.S. military misadventures in Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other conflicts, and scopes U.S. relations with China, Israel, Russia, and elsewhere. It examines the dominant role of the United States in creating and perpetuating the existential threats of nuclear weapons and global warming. Chomsky shows how, time and again, America refuses to accept the same constraints on its conduct that it demands of others, with uniformly disastrous results.
Chomsky’s audacious and amply substantiated contention is that U.S. foreign policy misdeeds are not mistakes made in pursuit of “noble motives,” as commonly portrayed, but rather owe to the wholesale disregard of its leaders for self-determination, human rights, and democracy itself. Here’s Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, defending U.S. interference in Chile before the 1973 overthrow of its democratically elected government: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”
The people who concoct and execute U.S. foreign policy, Chomsky argues, are sometimes constrained by public opinion but never by considerations of right and wrong. Terms like terrorism “are used opportunistically rather than in accordance with a neutral definition.” Unnecessary conflict is embraced for indefensible reasons. China is seen as an enemy—not because it poses a military threat but because of its threat to U.S. economic dominance. Russia’s war against Ukraine, the book argues, could have been prevented, along with its attendant suffering, had some people in the United States not felt a war would serve the greater good of “depleting and diminishing the Russian military,” as Republican Senator Mitt Romney, of Utah, put it.
Penguin Press
Chomsky notes that the nation’s worst foreign policy abuses—including its complicity in Israel’s repression of Palestinians in clear violation of international law—enjoy bipartisan support. In Iraq, George W. Bush “intentionally offered false justifications for a war, destroyed an entire country, and committed major international crimes,” including the wholesale use of torture, but it was Barack Obama who decided not to hold him accountable, saying he wanted to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Donald Trump and Joe Biden have both cozied up to Saudi Arabia’s brutal regime, with the Biden Administration even going to court to shield its ruler, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, from a lawsuit filed by the family of slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
To facilitate all of this, the U.S. public is lied to or kept in the dark, lest it rise up to demand the modicum of decency its leaders lack. Chomsky believes that most people, if they had any say in the matter, would choose “a radically different set of policies, foreign and domestic,” that are far more humane. While questioning the nation’s foreign policy decisions is admittedly “often difficult and unpleasant,” it is necessary if international law is to be respected, democracy allowed to prevail, and the threat of annihilation eliminated.
“Once we see the consequences of the attempt to impose U.S. hegemony through force, we have an obligation to oppose it,” he writes. “It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. It is cheap and easy to deplore the crimes of others, while dismissing or justifying our own. An honest person will choose a different course.”
Throughout his life, Noam Chomsky has been that honest person, insistently calling on his nation to live up to its ideals rather than betray them. That’s what makes him a true patriot, someone who loves his country enough to stand up to it when it’s wrong.