The Indispensable Nation

The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson. Penguin Press, 416 pages, $32.

Imagine that the scales fall from the eyes of some egregious exponent of
American exceptionalism - Thomas Friedman, for example. Somehow or other, the horrendous toll of American policies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America since World War II is brought home to him for the first time, along with the complete lack of any relation between those policies and democracy, legality, or the welfare of the victims. Imagine also that, after donning sackcloth and ashes for an appropriate period, Friedman wishes to make reparation for the harm he had done by his cheerleading for American foreign policy over several decades.

So he writes a column expounding his new, more critical view. Unaccountably, despite his godlike status in the American commentariat, nothing happens. He is, however, summoned for a chat with the Times's executive editor, who suggests a period of rest and recuperation. Friedman declares that he has never felt better and writes another column along the same lines. This time the publisher, an old friend, takes him to lunch and probes gently for some emotional disturbance that might explain this otherwise incomprehensible behavior. Friedman tries enthusiastically but unsuccessfully to bring the publisher around to his new point of view. He then writes another column, a real stemwinder. The chairman of the board informs the publisher that he has heard expressions of concern from several fellow CEOs on the golf course and at Met galas. A few advertisers have even shifted their accounts to the Wall Street Journal. The situation is grave. Friedman has to go. The Pulitzer Committee rescinds Friedman's three Pulitzer Prizes. The Council on Foreign Relations revokes his membership. Friedman must now make a living freelancing for Jacobin, Mother Jones, and other disreputable left-wing rags.

Why, in spite of Friedman's legendary (indeed, mythical) intellect and eloquence, does his conversion have no effect in the mainstream? Because American exceptionalism does not derive its remarkable staying power from the force of arguments but rather from its serviceability to those who own the American economy and state. The actual purpose of American foreign policy, ever since the country emerged on the international scene by throttling the Philippine revolution in the early 20^th century, has been to maintain a world open to penetration and control by American corporations and financial institutions. Cheap labor, weak unions, low taxes and tariffs, few restrictions on capital movements or profit repatriation, lax environmental and occupational safety regulations - these are the ingredients of a favorable investment climate in a developing country. These measures, however, are likely to immiserate the population of that country. Naturally, the latter are prone to resist, by organizing or by electing sympathetic candidates. The. characteristic American response to such outrageous behavior (which is often labeled "Communist" in order to alarm American voters) includes: bribing venal politicians; arming and training the local military and police (with heavy emphasis on suppressing left-wing protests, which are by definition disorderly); overturning social-democratic (and even liberal-democratic) governments; installing corrupt and repressive tyrannies; and in extreme cases, sending in the Marines.

All this benevolent activity is costly. Given the extremely regressive American tax system, most of the costs of these policies are borne by the general population rather than by their main beneficiaries, the investor class. The population must be motivated to bear the necessary sacrifices. It would exceed even the matchless resources of the American public relations industry to convince the public to support murderous Third World regimes, and in some cases to carry out murder on a vast scale ourselves, merely in order to enrich the shareholders and executives of whatever American corporations and financial institutions operate in those countries (an objective often labeled "the national interest"). More elevated rationales must be found. During the Cold War, Americans had to be persuaded that such actions were necessary to keep an implacable geopolitical adversary at bay and prevent it from aiding the above-mentioned popular resistance movements. Since the Cold War, the rubric has been "democracy promotion": the purpose of American power is allegedly to defend and enlarge the international sphere of democracy, freedom and human rights. The purpose of American power is never, of course, to advance the interests of American elites, as is the case with all other great powers throughout history. This is the myth of American idealism, relentlessly demolished, region by region, policy by policy, atrocity by atrocity, in what will doubtless be Noam Chomsky's last book, co-authored with Nathan Robinson, editor of the journal Current Affairs.

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In 1948, the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff authored a classified memo that succinctly defined America's purpose in the postwar world:

... 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 without detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated on our immediate national objectives. 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 - for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of 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.

American foreign policy has rarely been so candidly characterized. The author was the universally revered George Kennan.  Kennan's call to plunder the resources of the underdeveloped world was certainly heard and answered by subsequent State Departments. He did not, however, foresee how crucial a part "idealistic slogans" would play in furthering the predatory policy he advocated.

As Chomsky and Robinson make clear, every empire has described its depredations as benefactions; every aggressor state, democratic or dictatorial, has insisted it is in pursuit of noble goals. But the self-righteousness of Americans is surely unique. Acting Secretary of State Charles Bohlen told Columbia students in 1969: "[O]ur policy is not rooted in any national material interest ... as most foreign policies of other countries in the past have been." Yale professor Michael Howard wrote: "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." The former chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in the New York Review of Books: "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 the [United States] amounts to a different kind of country ... [which] tries to advance universal principles." Madeleine Albright rallied support for military intervention and NATO expansion by reminding Americans that "we are the indispensable nation." This is American exceptionalism at full strength, though innumerable pronouncements in the mainstream are tinged with it, typically in the form of references to our "good intentions." The purity of our intentions explains why, though America sometimes makes mistakes, we never commit crimes.

The Cold War was the main theater of American foreign policy between World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. In American mythology, the Cold War was a titanic struggle between the Land of the Free and the Evil Empire. In reality, it was a mechanism whereby each superpower disciplined its subject populations. In the Soviet sphere, any democratic stirrings were condemned as harbingers of "capitalist restoration" and suppressed. In the American sphere, protests against exploitation and efforts at worker or peasant self-organization were labeled "communist" and suppressed.

But while the ideological function of the Cold War was similar in both spheres, the mechanisms of enforcement were not. After World War II, the USSR established client regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. From 1946 to 1989, a suffocating pall of repression descended on the region. Resistance occasionally broke out and was forcefully put down. Three thousand Hungarians were killed in the Soviet invasion of 1956, and 137 Czechs in the invasion of 1968. But except for the heroic few who persistently asserted their own or other people's rights and were consequently blacklisted or imprisoned, daily life in the Soviet satellites, however impoverished, proceeded mostly without violence.

In Central and South America, the US sphere of influence, the population was less fortunate. In numerous countries - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Uruguay, even tiny British Guiana - the US sponsored or supported violent and undemocratic but business-friendly governments. Often we actually brought such governments to power, bribing politicians, spreading disinformation, and arming and training right-wing military or paramilitary forces that routinely massacred opposition politicians, union organizers, teachers, priests, nuns, and even peasants suspected of being discontented. Traditional, exploitative ruling classes were shored up or restored to power. The cost in lives and suffering was enormous. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the military; tens of thousands more by paramilitaries and death squads, nearly all controlled by governments which were supported and supplied by the United States. The exception was Nicaragua, where the murderous paramilitaries, the CIA-trained contras, were attempting to overthrow the government, the only one in the hemisphere (except Cuba) not dominated by the United States.

US-Cuban relations illuminate one of the book's central arguments. When Cuba declared itself socialist after the rebels' victory in 1959, American policymakers were furious. When the US-sponsored invasion of 1961 failed, they were apoplectic. The atmosphere at the State Department, one high official recalled, was "emotional, almost savage." President Kennedy vowed to "bring the terrors of the earth" to Cuba. Robert Kennedy headed a task force aiming at "the destruction of targets important to the [Cuban] economy." A railroad bridge was blown up, a sugar warehouse was burned down, sugar shipments were contaminated, lubricating fluids for diesel engines were denatured, among other antics. "We were really doing almost anything you could dream up," a CIA official later admitted (or boasted). And then there were the blockade and sanctions.

         In 1962 a blockade and an array of harsh sanctions were instituted to "weaken the economic life of Cuba [and] bring about hunger, desperation, and [the] overthrow of the government." The first two of these goals were certainly attained. According to Amnesty International, "the embargo ... contributed to malnutrition that mainly affected women and children, poor water supply, and lack of medicine." According to the American Association of World Health, they caused "serious nutritional deficits" and "a devastating outbreak of neuropathy numbering in the tens of thousands." A "humanitarian catastrophe" was averted, the group found, only because of Cuba's exemplary medical system. The embargo and blockade - which continue - are illegal and are condemned every year by the UN General Assembly, unanimously except for Israel and the Marshall Islands.

          Why such ferocity? Cuba, like Nicaragua, is a tiny country with no strategic value and no vital resources. And Castro and the Sandinistas did not, after all, murder their citizens on anything like the scale of America's client states throughout the hemisphere. Nevertheless, this apparently irrational cruelty had its rationale. The State Department defined the "Cuban threat" as "successful defiance." Like any Mafia don - surely a just characterization of America's relationship toward the rest of the hemisphere in this period - the US can forgive much (in particular, human rights violations by its client states), but it cannot forgive disobedience. Tolerating public displays of disobedience would weaken the Don's authority.

Along with "successful defiance" as an explanatory principle of US foreign intervention there is "the threat of a good example." This is, in effect, the rational version of the "domino theory." The Soviet Union was never going to win control of one country after another and weld them into a military threat to the Free World. Soviet policy was generally ad hoc, opportunistic, and defensive, reflecting the vastly greater strength of the US; and Soviet allies in the Third World were motivated more by fear of American subversion than by an ambition to forge an Evil Empire. But even though the military-strategic importance of Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and British Guiana was negligible, they did pose a threat. If any country, particularly a small and poor one, could construct a viable, even attractive society on its own terms, free of economic dependence on the US and its international financial institutions, other nations might be encouraged to imitate them. One way to prevent this was to make benign development difficult or impossible in these would-be independent countries: for example, by dropping more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II, physically destroying the country and much of its population; by economic sabotage and a lethal, strangulating blockade, as in Cuba; by "making the economy scream" (Nixon) and encouraging a military coup, which was followed by the killing of thousands of leftists, as in Chile; or by recruiting, arming and directing a murderous insurgency, as in Nicaragua.

Sometimes the point is explained with great clarity. When the United States was preparing to overthrow Guatemalan democracy in 1954, a State Department official pointed out that the country's "agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon," its "broad social programs of aiding the workers and peasants" having a "strong appeal" to other Central American countries with highly unequal societies. Guatemala is therefore a "threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador."

Larger countries with more resources were not spared. In the Congo, the US conspired with Belgium to imprison and assassinate the charismatic Patrice Lumumba, placing a murderous but cooperative kleptomaniac, Mobutu Sese Seko, in power for several decades. In Indonesia, the army was encouraged to overthrow the neutralist prime minister Sukarno, assume power, and liquidate the country's only mass political organization, the Indonesian Communist Party, killing (with the CIA's assistance) 500,000 of its members. In Iran, a popular liberal nationalist leader was toppled by a CIA/MI6-organized coup and replaced by an absolute monarch with a fearsome secret police.

"What the United States wants," Chomsky and Robinson conclude, is "stability," meaning "security for the upper classes and large foreign enterprises. If that can be achieved with formal democratic devices, all the better. If not, the 'threat to stability' posed by a good example has to be destroyed before it infects others."

Are the authors right about the meaning of "stability" in American foreign policy and the entire absence of concern for democracy? Precisely this is the subject of Chomsky's voluminous (an understatement) previous writings, especially The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1 (1979, with Edward Herman), Deterring Democracy (1991), World Orders Old and New (1994), and Hegemony or Survival (2003). Amid the flood of evidence in those books, one chart near the beginning of The Political Economy of Human Rights speaks volumes about the purposes of American foreign policy. It is labeled "US Aid, Investment Climate, and Human Rights in Ten Countries." The ten countries are Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Uruguay, considered over a 20-year period (1953-1973). All but one of these countries (Thailand) turned toward authoritarianism at some point in those years, measured by cancelled elections, increased number of political prisoners, and increased use of torture or death squads. Those same nine countries also took measures to attract foreign investment: i.e., favorable tax and profit repatriation laws, reduction of social welfare expenditures, and repression of labor unions. And US military and economic aid to those nine countries increased, often sharply, a pattern seen frequently in the history of US foreign relations. It looks very much as though the United States rewards countries for a favorable investment climate, and that democracy has nothing to do with it.

Far from promoting democracy, American foreign policy forces us to consider whether America is itself a democracy. What should one call a government that - whichever party is in power - continually ignores or defies public opinion on a wide range of issues? According to Chomsky and Robinson, large majorities of Americans told pollsters that they favored abiding by international law; wanted an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to arming Israel carte blanche; disapproved (4 to 1) of Reagan's mining of Nicaragua's harbors; approved (by 88 percent) of the Kyoto Accords; opposed warrantless wiretapping even outside the US; strongly condemned the Iraq War once the Bush administration's pretext collapsed; and more.

Academic studies reach the same conclusion. According to John Mearsheimer, summarizing a large study: "[W]hat we discovered is that public opinion ... matters hardly at all in the decision making process. A small number of elites get together and they make the decisions." Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton write: "[Y]ear after year, decade after decade, there have been many large gaps between the foreign policies favored by officials and those favored by the public." Their examples include strengthening the UN, accepting the World Court's jurisdiction, expanding arms control, giving up the US power to veto otherwise unanimous Security Council decisions, and a strong preference for diplomacy over force.

These results call to mind the landmark study by political scientist Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence (2012), which demonstrated that the preferences of low-income citizens had zero effect - no influence whatever - on domestic policy formation. Perhaps the correct name for a government that allows only elite influence on policy is an oligarchy.

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         The ability of Americans - abetted, to be sure, by media laziness and academic timidity - to ignore the crimes committed in our name undoubtedly amazes and appalls the rest of the world. How, in the absence of repression, is the trick done? Chomsky and Robinson include a short chapter on "How Mythologies Are Manufactured." Briefly: there is no conspiracy, only a series of ideological filters that screen out unacceptable messages and uncooperative personnel at every level of [THOSE] institutions crucial to the formation of public opinion. You can think of it as an invisible hand. Chomsky has addressed this subject in great detail in Manufacturing Consent (2002, with Edward Herman). However it's done, American exceptionalism continues sailing before the wind.

Chapters on the Middle East, nuclear weapons, and the climate crisis rehearse familiar albeit powerful left-wing arguments. Finally, Chomsky and Robinson return to their main thesis:

Throughout all of this [i.e., the grisly record of American barbarity chronicled in the book], the myth of American idealism has persisted. The internal records often reveal that U.S. decision-makers were motivated by nothing of the kind, that they wanted to serve "national" economic interests or protect "credibility." And yet the unshakable belief in American goodwill and generosity continues to stultify political thinking and debase political discourse. Sometimes, foreign policy is portrayed as vacillating between "Wilsonian idealism" and "Kissingerian realism." In practice, the distinctions are mostly rhetorical. Every great power toys with the rhetoric of benign intentions and sacrificing to help the world. Our belief in our own exceptionalism is the most unexceptional thing about us.

The message of this book, and of Chomsky's nearly 100 others, is: we are citizens of a lawless, violent superpower that has wrought incalculable harm but that nevertheless leaves its own citizens (for the time being, at least) extraordinarily free to protest, organize, and change policy. What we do with that freedom is all-important.

If the American public continues to be deluded and manipulated by the myth of American idealism, there is very little hope that it will wrest control of its fate from the institutions that have always shaped and continue to shape American foreign and domestic policy. Everyone can make his or her own calculation of the odds of that happening, and consequently of our civilization's survival. In my view, the odds are daunting. I would say, though, that if the world does burn or blow itself up in the next century or two, Noam Chomsky will be wholly blameless. Very few of us can say as much.

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George Scialabba's The Sealed Envelope: Essays will be published by Yale University Press in 2025.