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    The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
    The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
    The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
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    The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World

    By Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson

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    “For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in . . . there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.” —The New Statesman

    From one of the world’s most prominent thinkers comes an urgent warning of the threat that U.S. power poses to humanity’s future as well as a sharp indictment of both American foreign policy and the national myths that support it.

    The Myth of American Idealism offers a timely and comprehensive introduction to the incisive critiques of U.S. power that have made Noam Chomsky a “global phenomenon,” one of the most widely known public intellectuals of all time.  Surveying the history of U.S. military and economic activity around the world, Chomsky and his co-author Nathan J. Robinson vividly trace the way the American pursuit of global domination has wrought havoc in country after country – without, ironically, making Americans any safer. And they explore how dominant elites in the United States have pushed self-serving myths about this country’s commitment to “spreading democracy,” while pursuing a reckless foreign policy that served the interest of few and endangered all too many.

    Chomsky and Robinson range across the globe, offering penetrating accounts of Washington’s relationship with the Global South, its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan –all justified with noble stories about humanitarian missions and the benevolent intentions of American policy makers. The same kinds of myths that have led to repeated disastrous wars, they argue, are now driving us closer to wars with Russia and China that imperil humanity’s future. Examining nuclear proliferation and climate change, they show how U.S. policies are continuing to exacerbate global threats.

    For well over half a century, Noam Chomsky has committed himself to exposing governing ideologies and criticizing his country’s unchecked use of military power. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to the conclusions he has come to after a lifetime of thought and activism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 15, 2024
    ISBN9780593656334
    Author

    Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and studied at the university of Pennsylvania. Known as one of the principal founders of transformational-generative grammar, he later emerged as a critic of American politics. He wrote and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues. He is now a Professor of Linguistics at MIT, and the author of over 150 books.

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      Book preview

      The Myth of American Idealism - Noam Chomsky

      Cover for The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, Author, Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson

      ALSO BY NOAM CHOMSKY

      Who Rules the World?

      Hegemony or Survival

      Imperial Ambitions

      Failed States

      What We Say Goes

      Power Systems

      Book Title, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, Author, Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson, Imprint, Penguin Press

      PENGUIN PRESS

      An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

      penguinrandomhouse.com

      Copyright © 2024 by Valéria Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson

      Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

      Brief portions of this work, by the coauthor Nathan J. Robinson, appeared in different form in Current Affairs during 2022 and 2023.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Chomsky, Noam, author. | Robinson, Nathan J., author.

      Title: The myth of American idealism : how U.S. foreign policy endangers the world / Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson.

      Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2024019958 (print) | LCCN 2024019959 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593656327 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593656334 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Hegemony—United States. | Idealism. | United States—Foreign relations—Moral and ethical aspects. | United States—Foreign relations—Developing countries. | Developing countries—Foreign relations—United States.

      Classification: LCC JZ1480 .C476 2024 (print) | LCC JZ1480 (ebook) | DDC 327.73—dc23/eng/20240611

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024019958

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024019959

      Ebook ISBN 9780593656334

      Cover design: Christopher Brian King

      Cover photograph: Wathiq Khuzaie / Getty Images

      Author photograph: Valéria Chomsky

      Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke

      pid_prh_7.0_148814534_c0_r0

      Contents

      Epigraph

      Preface

      Introduction: Noble Goals and Mafia Logic

      PART 1

      The Record: Idealism in Action

      1: Disciplining the Global South

      2: The War on Southeast Asia

      3: 9/11 and the Wrecking of Afghanistan

      4: Iraq: The Crime of the Century

      5: The United States, Israel, and Palestine

      6: The Great China Threat

      7: NATO and Russia After the Cold War

      8: Nuclear Threats and Climate Catastrophe

      PART 2

      Understanding the Power System

      9: The Domestic Roots of Foreign Policy

      10: International Law and the Rules-Based Order

      11: How Mythologies Are Manufactured

      Conclusion: Hegemony or Survival?

      Notes

      Index

      About the Authors

      _148814534_

      The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.

      —CALVIN COOLIDGE

      Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service when it is violating all His laws.

      —JOHN ADAMS

      We Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world…. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race…. We are the pioneers of the world…sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.

      —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE-JACKET

      Preface

      by Nathan J. Robinson

      I first encountered the work of Noam Chomsky when I was in high school, and a friend gave me his books Hegemony or Survival and Failed States. They were my first real introduction to left politics, and proved a life-altering experience. During the Bush years, as the country was gripped with war fever, Chomsky was a welcome voice of sanity, who cut through jingoistic propaganda and exposed the human toll of U.S. wars. He asked questions that hardly anybody else was asking and called attention to facts that were never mentioned in the press. From reading Chomsky, I learned to question conventional wisdom and to forensically analyze both government documents and the mainstream media.

      Many hundreds of thousands of others have been similarly educated and inspired by him, especially because of Chomsky’s legendary willingness to patiently engage with the public, answering thousands of letters and emails. He has changed the lives of so many who have encountered his written work, heard his talks, or interacted with him. Countless people have an anecdote about the time they emailed Noam Chomsky with a question or a request for advice and were surprised to receive a long, personal reply. That’s how I, too, got to know him. I can’t remember what the first email I sent him was, but I remember the feeling of delight when I received a thoughtful response.

      In 2015, I founded a left magazine, Current Affairs, that provided an outlet for the kind of humanistic libertarian socialist worldview that Chomsky represented. I was thrilled when he became one of our early subscribers. He has always been strongly supportive of independent left media, praising countless books from small presses and plugging the work of lesser-known writers. He boosted our work by giving us public endorsements and circulating Current Affairs articles to his correspondents.

      In 2018, I went out to interview him in Tucson, where he was teaching at the University of Arizona. After the interview, he drove me across the campus, and I was struck by how much time he had to spend hunting for parking. It was surreal to watch someone with a mind that has been compared to that of Plato and Marx, preoccupied by the search for a parking space. In 2022, another interview we did attracted a lot of attention, after Chomsky suggested that the United States bore a high level of responsibility for the war in Ukraine. Well into his nineties, he had not lost the power to provoke strong reactions with his sharp dissent from foreign policy orthodoxy.

      I have always wished that some of Chomsky’s ideas could be presented more systematically in a single volume. In 2022, I asked him if we could collaborate on a book. I explained to him that I would like to compile some of his most useful observations on how U.S. power is wielded around the world, and how our country’s violence is obscured through self-aggrandizing mythology. This would draw insights from across his body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy, including his deconstructions of the stories and propaganda used to justify our country’s extreme, abhorrent militarism.[1] He readily agreed to the project, and we spent a year sending chapters back and forth. First I would assemble a series of things he had said on the topic in interviews, articles, prefaces, introductions, written correspondence, debates, and books. Then I worked with him to edit them into a clear statement of his position, adding elaboration and further evidence, then incorporating his further comments, edits, and rewrites.

      It is of course a delight and a privilege to be able to collaborate closely with one of my intellectual heroes on a major project. But as we put the book together, that joy was tempered by the darkness of much of the subject matter, and by the knowledge that we are not writing about issues of purely intellectual interest, but of urgent and dire threats. This book is not only an attempt to set the record straight. It’s a plea for mass action by someone approaching the end of his own lifetime of activism.

      Chomsky has never been a cynic. He may criticize the hypocrisy of those who cloak power seeking in idealistic rhetoric, but he himself remains a sincere idealist. He believes in the global spread of freedom and democracy, which is why he detests those who pervert these concepts. He believes in the moral and intellectual capacities of ordinary people and rejects the idea that it takes special genius or insight to understand world affairs.

      He does not believe we should be resigned to a future of warfare and environmental destruction. We can, and must, fight for a future of world peace. Chomsky harbors a vision, in part inspired by anarchism, of a decentralized democracy in which ordinary people meaningfully participate in politics, rather than important decisions being made by a small coterie of plutocrats. Reading Chomsky’s work can be a troubling experience, full as it is of atrocities and exploitation. But it is worth remembering that beneath what can look like a pessimistic framework is a deep love of humanity, a hatred of violence, and a firm belief that things can be different than they are today.

      Introduction

      Noble Goals and Mafia Logic

      Every ruling power tells itself stories to justify its rule. Nobody is the villain in their own history. Professed good intentions and humane principles are a constant. Even Heinrich Himmler, in describing the extermination of the Jews, claimed that the Nazis only carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people and thereby suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character. Hitler himself said that in occupying Czechoslovakia, he was only trying to further the peace and social welfare of all by eliminating ethnic conflicts and letting everyone live in harmony under civilized Germany’s benevolent tutelage. The worst of history’s criminals have often proclaimed themselves to be among humankind’s greatest heroes.[1]

      Murderous imperial conquests are consistently characterized as civilizing missions, conducted out of concern for the interests of the indigenous population. During Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, even as Japanese forces were carrying out the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese leaders were claiming they were on a mission to create an earthly paradise for the people of China and to protect them from Chinese bandits (i.e., those resisting Japan’s invasion). Emperor Hirohito, in his 1945 surrender address, insisted that we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement. As the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said noted, there is always a class of people ready to produce specious intellectual arguments in defense of domination: Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.[2]

      Virtually any act of mass murder or criminal aggression can be rationalized by appeals to high moral principle. Maximilien Robespierre justified the French Reign of Terror in 1794 by claiming that terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. Those in power generally present themselves as altruistic, disinterested, and generous. The late leftist journalist Andrew Kopkind pointed to the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy. It is hard to take actions one believes to be actively immoral, so people have to convince themselves that what they’re doing is right, that their violence is justified. When anyone wields power over someone else (whether a colonist, a dictator, a bureaucrat, a spouse, or a boss), they need an ideology, and that ideology usually comes down to the belief that their domination is for the good of the dominated.[3]

      Leaders of the United States have always spoken loftily of the country’s sacred principles. That story has been consistent since the founding. The U.S. is a shining city on a hill, an example to the world, an exceptional indispensable nation devoted to freedom and democracy.[4] The president is the leader of the free world. The U.S. is and will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known, as Barack Obama put it. George W. Bush described the U.S. as a nation with a mission—and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace. The U.S. government is honorable. It is capable of mistakes, but not crimes. A crime would require malicious intent, of which we have none. The U.S. is continually deceived by others. It can be foolish, naïve, and idealistic—but it is never wicked.[5]

      Crucially, the United States does not act on the basis of the perceived self-interest of dominant groups in society. Only other states do that. One of the difficulties of explaining [American] policy, Ambassador Charles Bohlen explained at Columbia University in 1969, is that our policy is not rooted in any national material interest…as most foreign policies of other countries in the past have been. In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that we are good—we being the government (on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one). We are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. We are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level. The prevailing orthodoxy was well summarized by the distinguished Oxford-Yale historian Michael Howard: For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment…and, above all, the universality of these values, though it does not enjoy the place in the world that it should have earned through its achievements, its generosity, and its goodwill since World War II.[6]

      The fact that the United States is an exceptional nation is regularly intoned, not just by virtually every political figure, but by prominent academics and public intellectuals as well. Samuel Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, writing in the prestigious journal International Security, explained that unlike other countries, the national identity of the United States is defined by a set of universal political and economic values, namely liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets. The U.S. therefore has a solemn duty to maintain its international primacy for the benefit of the world. In the leading left-liberal intellectual journal, The New York Review of Books, the former chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace states as fact that American contributions to international security, global economic growth, freedom, and human well-being have been so self-evidently unique and have been so clearly directed to others’ benefit that Americans have long believed that the [United States] amounts to a different kind of country. While others push their national interest, the United States tries to advance universal principles.[7]

      Usually, no evidence for these propositions is given. None is needed, because they are considered true as a matter of definition. One might even take the position that in the special case of the United States, facts themselves are irrelevant. Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory, developed the standard view that the United States has a transcendent purpose: establishing peace and freedom not only at home, but also across the globe, because the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide. As a scrupulous scholar, he recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with this transcendent purpose. But he insisted that we should not be misled by this discrepancy. We should not confound the abuse of reality with reality itself. Reality is the unachieved national purpose revealed by the evidence of history as our minds reflect it. What actually happened is merely the abuse of reality.[8]

      Needless to say, because even oppressive, criminal, and genocidal governments cloak their atrocities in the language of virtue, none of this rhetoric should be taken seriously. There is no reason to expect Americans to be uniquely immune to self-delusion. If those who commit evil and those who do good always both profess to be doing good, national stories are worthless as tests of truth. Sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, because they are a universal. What matters is the historical record.

      The received wisdom is that the United States is committed to promoting democracy and human rights (sometimes called Wilsonian idealism or American exceptionalism). But the facts are consistent with the following theory instead: The United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population.[9] In practice, this means that the United States has typically acted with almost complete disregard for moral principle and the rule of law, except insofar as complying with principle and law serves the interests of American elites. There is little evidence of authentic humanitarian concern among leading statesmen, and when it does exist, it is acted upon only to the extent that doing so does not go against domestic elites’ interests. American foreign policy is almost never made in accordance with the stated ideals, and in fact is far more consistent with what Adam Smith called the vile maxim of the masters of mankind in every age of the world, namely: All for ourselves and nothing for other people.[10]

      We might also call this the Mafia Doctrine. Its logic is straightforward and completely rational. The Godfather’s word is law. Those who defy the Godfather will be punished. The Godfather may be generous from time to time, but he does not tolerate disagreement. If some small storekeeper fails to pay protection money, the Godfather sends his goons, not just to collect the money, which he wouldn’t even notice, but to beat him to a pulp so that others do not get the idea that disobedience is permissible. But Godfathers, too, are known to convince themselves that they are kindly and benevolent.[11]

      We might also think about this violence prerogative as the Fifth Freedom, the one Franklin D. Roosevelt forgot to mention when he laid out his famous Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The United States has always claimed a fundamental additional freedom underlying the others: crudely speaking, the freedom to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced. Maintenance of this freedom is the operative principle that accounts for a substantial part of what the U.S. government does in the world. When the Four Freedoms are perceived to be incompatible with the Fifth (which occurs regularly), they are set aside with little notice or concern.[12]

      We can turn to a single page of history to see how Mafia logic works. Here is an extract from a paper prepared by the National Security Council Planning Board in 1958, discussing issues arising in the Middle East. The paper poses a question facing the United States and presents the argument for two possible stances to take:

      Question: Should the United States be prepared to support, or if necessary assist, the British in using force to retain control of Kuwait and the Persian Gulf?

      The argument for such action: An assured source of oil is essential to the continued economic viability of Western Europe. Moreover, the UK asserts that its financial stability would be seriously threatened if the petroleum from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf area were not available to the UK on reasonable terms, if the UK were deprived of the large investments made by that area in the UK, and if sterling were deprived of the support provided by Persian Gulf oil. If [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser obtains dominant influence over the Persian Gulf oil-producing areas, Western access to this oil on acceptable terms might be seriously threatened. The only way to guarantee continued access to Persian Gulf oil on acceptable terms is to insist on maintaining the present concessions and be prepared to defend our present position by force if necessary.

      The argument against such action: If armed force must be used to help retain this area (or even if there is a public indication of willingness to use force), the benefits of any actions in the direction of accommodation with radical Pan-Arab nationalism will be largely lost and U.S. relations with neutral countries elsewhere would be adversely affected. Such accommodation would better provide the basis for continued assurance of access to Kuwait and Persian Gulf oil.[13]

      Note the complete absence of any consideration of the interests of the people of Kuwait, who are effectively nonpersons, or unpeople, a term from Orwell that Mark Curtis has updated.[14] Note, too, the absence of any discussion of rights. What right does the United States have to use force to help the British retain control of Kuwait and the Persian Gulf? What right do the British have to retain such control? Morally speaking, of course, the answer is none whatsoever. But it is accepted as a basic presumption that we are allowed to use force whenever and wherever we want in order to pursue our interests. The only necessary debate, then, is whether or not force does serve our interests. (There could be backlash, for instance, from Arab nationalists who resent us.) Immoral actions create public relations problems, but their immorality is irrelevant. Likewise, the Godfather might worry that excessive use of force could jeopardize certain crucial relationships. But when he shows restraint, it is not for moral reasons.[15]

      At the height of John F. Kennedy’s attacks on Cuba, to take another example, the pragmatic consequences for the United States were a subject for discussion, but the rights of the people under attack were simply irrelevant. In a review of internal documents, Latin Americanist Jorge Domínguez observes that: Only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S. government-sponsored terrorism. A member of the National Security Council staff suggested that raids that are haphazard and kill innocents…might mean a bad press in some friendly countries. The same considerations were present throughout the internal discussions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it. These attitudes prevail to the present, with only the rarest of exceptions. It is U.S. interests that matter.[16]

      But the term national interest is itself a euphemism, for what is usually meant is the interest of a small sector of wealthy domestic elites. The American working class, whose members die in the country’s wars, do not have their interest served in any way by the wars that kill them. Nor are their interests served by government spending money on weapons that could be used to repair school buildings. Indeed, when American actions abroad are exposed to the judgment of public opinion, they often prove deeply unpopular with the nation whose interests they are supposedly serving. A sophisticated propaganda system must keep the public in the dark, for if the truth were known, it would become immediately apparent that the public has a very different view of its interests than U.S. elites have.

      We should also remember this the next time we hear talk about what the Russians or Iran have done. Totalitarians wish us to think that a country speaks with one voice, that it has a national interest. While it is the convention to refer to actions by the state as if they were actions by the country as a whole, and is unavoidable in discussions of policy, the formulation is ultimately misleading. The thousands of heroic antiwar protesters thrown in prison by Vladimir Putin have just as much claim to represent Russia as their ruler does.[17] This is why it is an error to treat this book as arguing that the United States is terroristic and destructive, if the United States is understood to refer to some kind of collectivity of all Americans. Many in the United States have taken to the streets, and risked their lives and livelihoods, to oppose the acts of their government—when they have been permitted to learn about them, that is.

      THE PRINCIPLES OF IMPERIAL GRAND STRATEGY: WE OWN THE WORLD

      The basic principles of contemporary American strategy were laid out during World War II. As the war came to its end, American planners were well aware that the United States would emerge as the dominant power in the world, holding a hegemonic position with few parallels in history. During the war, industrial production in the U.S. more than tripled; meanwhile, its major rivals were either severely weakened or virtually destroyed. The U.S. had the world’s most powerful military force. It had firm control of the Western Hemisphere—and of the oceans. High-level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the U.S. should hold unquestioned power while ensuring the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with its global designs.[18]

      Winston Churchill captured the dominant sentiment when he said that the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, because rich countries had no reason to seek for anything more, whereas if the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations there would always be danger. Leo Welch of the Standard Oil Company expressed a similar aspiration when he said the U.S. needed to assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world, and not just temporarily, but as a permanent obligation.[19]

      From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department resulted in a policy they called Grand Area planning. The Grand Area referred to any region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy and was considered strategically necessary for world control. The British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear, mused one planner, and thus the United States may have to take its place. Another stated frankly that the U.S. must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement. The Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over. Ideally it would also include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions that were to organize and police it.[20]

      George Kennan, head of the State Department planning staff and one of the leading architects of the post–World War II order, outlined the basic thinking in an important 1948 planning document:

      We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction…. We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.[21]

      The planning staff recognized further that the foremost requirement to secure these ends was the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament—then, as now, a central component of an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States. This policy of military and economic supremacy is openly stated everywhere from the 1940s planning documents to the National Security Strategies put out by the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Implementing it has not just involved ignoring democracy and human rights, but often actively opposing them with tremendous ferocity.[22]

      The U.S. planners specified the function that each part of the world was to have within the U.S.-dominated global system. The major function of Southeast Asia was to be a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe, in the words of Kennan’s State Department Policy Planning Staff in 1949. The Middle East was a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history, as well as probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment. That meant nobody else could interfere, and nationalism (the control of the country’s resources by its own people) was a serious threat. As a State Department memo put it in 1958, in a Near East under the control of radical nationalism, Western access to the resources of the area would be in constant jeopardy.[23]

      Policy in Latin America, CIA historian Gerald Haines explained, was designed to develop larger and more efficient sources of supply for the American economy, as well as create expanded markets for U.S. exports and expanded opportunities for the investment of American capital, permitting local development only as long as it did not interfere with American profits and dominance. With regard to Latin America, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said, I think that it’s not asking too much to have our little region over here. President Taft had previously foreseen that the day is not far distant when the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.[24]

      The Latin American countries advocated what a State Department officer described as the philosophy of the New Nationalism, which embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses. Another State Department expert reported that Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country. These mistaken priorities ran directly counter to Washington’s plans. The issue came to a head in a February 1945 hemispheric conference, where the United States put forth its Economic Charter of the Americas, which called for an end to economic nationalism in all its forms. The first beneficiaries of a country’s resources must be U.S. investors and their local associates, not the people of that country. There can be no broader distribution of wealth or improvement in the standard of living of the masses, unless, by unlikely accident, that happens to result from policies designed to serve the interests of those with priority.[25]

      The basic missions of global management have endured to this day, among them: containing other centers of global power within the overall framework of order managed by the United States; maintaining control of the world’s energy supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent nationalism; and keeping the U.S. domestic population from sticking their noses in.[26]

      CONFRONTING THE IMPLICATIONS: THE REALITY OF VIOLENCE FOR ITS VICTIMS

      The human costs of the pursuit of dominance are for the most part kept out of the press, or not dwelt upon, and thus do not reach most of the public. Wars are sanitized. As Adam Smith pointed out, they can even become a kind of amusement for those who live far from the battlefield and only encounter conflicts as abstractions or collections of statistics. For those who safely inhabit great empires, Smith said, reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies is exciting, and peace can even be disappointing, because it puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.[27]

      Discussions of foreign policy are often cool, abstract, and antiseptic. Feminist scholar Carol Cohn, investigating the community of defense intellectuals who specialize in planning for nuclear war, was disturbed by the elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words. She found the men likeable and admirable, but was continually startled by…the bloodcurdling casualness with which they regularly blew up the world while standing and chatting over the coffee pot. Abstraction and euphemism also protect us from having to look into the eyes of the victims. They are removed from our consciousness. They do not speak.[28]

      Those who see war up close know just how much worse it is than even terms like horror and suffering can convey. Ashleigh Banfield, who was ousted by NBC after speaking critically of the Iraq War, said in the lecture that got her fired that Americans did not understand what the war was really like because they were seeing curated images that didn’t show the reality of civilian casualties. Journalists embedded with U.S. troops, for instance, would show soldiers firing M16s into a building, but not where those bullets landed or what happens when a mortar explodes. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me, she said. But the puff of smoke was what Americans saw, with the result that there are horrors that were completely left out of this war. Americans are never shown what it actually looks like when a U.S. drone strike hits a wedding party, or a child is crushed by a U.S. tank. They are rarely exposed to the accounts of those who have witnessed such gruesome spectacles, or to the voices of the family members who mourn the victims.[29]

      Chris Hedges, who spent decades as a war correspondent for The New York Times, writes:

      If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine and listen to the wails of their parents, the clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan or Ukrainian people would be obscene…. Television reports give us the visceral thrill of force and hide from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs, and artillery rounds. We taste a bit of war’s exhilaration, but are protected from seeing what war actually does, its smells, noise, confusion, and most of all its overpowering fear.[30]

      The casualties of war do not appear in U.S. armed forces recruitment material, and Donald Trump infamously specified he didn’t want wounded guys in his military parade, because they wouldn’t look good. War must be scrubbed clean.[31]

      A FOG OF PROPAGANDA AND MYTH

      In the United States, even to suggest that the country may have committed serious crimes can be considered scandalous and unpatriotic. For instance, when Samantha Power was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 2013, she was forced in her Senate hearing to disavow any previous comments that might imply that U.S. presidents had committed or sponsored crimes. I would never apologize for America, Power promised Senator Marco Rubio, and affirmed that this country is a light to the world. Power, widely regarded as a critic of U.S. foreign policy, would say only that sometimes we as imperfect human beings do things we wish we had done a little bit differently, citing U.S. nonintervention in the Rwandan genocide. Rubio pressed her to make sure she disavowed any possible implication that the country could ever have committed a crime:

      SENATOR RUBIO: So I would characterize the Rwanda situation as a crime permitted by the United States. Which ones did the country commit or sponsor that you were referring to?

      MS. POWER: Again, sir, I think this is the greatest country on Earth. We have nothing to apologize for.

      SENATOR RUBIO: So you don’t have any in mind now that we have committed or sponsored?

      MS. POWER: I will not apologize for America. I will stand very proudly, if confirmed, behind the U.S. placard.

      SENATOR RUBIO: I understand, but do you believe the United States has committed or sponsored crimes?

      MS. POWER: I believe the United States is the greatest country on Earth. I really do.

      SENATOR RUBIO: So your answer to whether we’ve committed or sponsored crimes is that the United States is the greatest country on Earth?

      MS. POWER: The United States is a leader in human rights, it’s a leader in human dignity. As you know, one of the things that makes us so formidable as a leader on human rights is that when we make mistakes, and mistakes happen, for instance, in the case of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Nobody is proud of that. Virtually every American soldier that is operating in the world is operating with profound honor and dignity. We hold people accountable. That’s what we do because we believe in human rights. We believe in international humanitarian law and we observe those laws. We are, again unlike any other country, a country that stands by our principles.[32]

      To be sure, there are those in the U.S. political elite who freely admit that considerations of elementary morality are absent from policymaking and believe that any savagery is justified if it serves the national interest. Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, writes in his foreign policy manifesto that the goal of American strategy is the safety, freedom, and prosperity of the American people. For him, that means that whether something is good for the United States matters far more than whether it is legal, democratic, or moral. Hurting others to help ourselves is legitimate. Cotton is frank that the United States should support dictatorships when those dictatorships support the U.S.: No one ever mistook Diem, Somoza, the shah, or Mubarak [a series of dictators supported by the United States] for the Little Sisters of the Poor…. But what matters, in the end, is less whether a country is democratic or non-democratic, and more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American.[33]

      Yet even Cotton, who happily endorses the principle that dictatorships are good if they support us, does not reckon with what violence actually looks like in practice. He is content to talk in pleasant abstractions about freedom. He would surely prefer the public not look at the victims or think about them too much.

      —

      It would be easy, but illogical, to mistake the core claim of this book as something like: The United States is the worst country in the world or The U.S. is responsible for all the problems in the world. Critics of the U.S. government have been labeled America haters or those who blame America first.[34] But the core claim is actually modest: the United States is not uniquely evil. It is no worse than many other ruling powers have been.[35] It is just especially powerful, and it is captivated by a dangerous false mythology. As the global superpower, the U.S. poses unique risks; it is more consequential if a powerful country departs from a moral standard than if a weak one does.

      The United States is hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. Arrogant self-delusions are common in the history of nation-states—and dangerous, because they prevent countries from reckoning honestly with their own conduct. No one would be disturbed by an analysis of the political behavior of the Russians, French, or Tanzanians that questioned their motives and interpreted their actions in terms of long-range interests, perhaps well concealed behind official rhetoric. But it is an article of faith that American motives are pure and not subject to analysis. The long tradition of naïveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history must serve as a warning to the world as to how our present-day protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.

      Still, why focus on American crimes rather than the crimes of Russia or China? It is not that they don’t commit major crimes. Instead, it’s a very simple ethical point: It is of little moral value to condemn the wrongdoing of someone else and ignore one’s own. Furthermore, we bear a responsibility for the predictable consequences of our actions. We are not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else’s actions.

      Thus, Americans should primarily criticize their government’s conduct, because it is the government they are responsible for and whose behavior they have the greatest capacity to affect. Even if we conclude that the United States is responsible for only 2 percent of the preventable brutality in the world, we should still criticize primarily the U.S. government, because it is the one we can directly influence.

      A moral truism that should be uncontroversial is the principle of universality: we should apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others—in fact, more stringent ones. On the temple at Delphi, the famous maxim was inscribed: Know thyself. It is helpful, when assessing U.S. conduct, to ask a simple question: How would we judge a given act if it were performed by a rival power rather than ourselves? If we take this question seriously, it is not difficult to find acts that we would condemn as grave crimes if committed by others.

      And so, let us try to apply basic moral standards. If we condemn terrorism, let us evaluate the actions of the United States and see whether they constitute terrorism, without treating it as axiomatic that terrorism is something only done by others. If we object to aggressive warfare and believe those who practice it ought to be sent to the Hague, let us see if we are willing to have the standard applied to ourselves. Let us test the proposition that the United States is a country committed to humanitarianism and democracy against the alternate hypothesis that the country is similar to virtually every other ruling power throughout the history of humanity, and that it acts in accordance with the Mafia Doctrine/vile maxim. Let us examine the interests and ideologies that guide U.S. decision-making and the use of power and have the courage to look honestly at what we find.

      These points are not just academic. Precisely because U.S. policy decisions are so consequential and so dangerous, altering them is of the highest possible moral urgency.

      POWER SYSTEMS IN GENERAL

      It can be hard to break through the prevailing assumption that one must be on one side or the other, that one is either with the United States or an apologist for its adversaries.[36] But if we are to have a hope of reaching a world where people rule themselves, rather than being ruled by others, we must be able to see the illegitimate features common to nation-states around the world.

      When we investigate the foreign policy of any state, we find first of all an official doctrine that attributes to state policy honorable intents, though occasional failure, due primarily to the machinations of evil enemies. For instance, during the Cold War, Soviet propaganda proclaimed the commitment of the Soviet Union to peace, democracy, and human rights, described the Soviet posture as defensive, and identified U.S. imperialism as the prime source of disorder and suffering throughout the world. Official U.S.

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