Let me restate what I’m doing here. My last blog post was a review of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence. Today I will discuss Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson’s The Myth of American Idealism. Why bring together Mead and Chomsky-Robinson? To facilitate a discussion between different perspectives and hopefully produce some insight. Mead represents the thoughtful articulation of a more or less mainstream, relatively positive appraisal of American foreign policy, while Chomsky-Robinson offer a thoughtful leftist critique.
For those unfamiliar with him, Noam Chomsky is a famous linguist, philosopher, and critic of American foreign policy, whose major works date back to the 1950s and 1960s. Nathan Robinson is the editor in chief of Current Affairs, a left-leaning magazine. Why did they write this book? In the preface to The Myth of American Idealism, Robinson explains the origins and purpose of the book, namely to coauthor a work that would bring together “into a single volume” Chomsky’s “central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.” (Preface, xii). Chomsky’s lifetime of commentary can be daunting, as it ranges across decades of books, articles, and interviews. For those unfamiliar with Chomsky’s critique of American foreign policy it is worth the time to set out the basic principles guiding his argument. This is what Chomsky and Robinson set out to do.
As a starting point, and contrary to what many critics of Chomsky think, he does not claim that the U.S. is uniquely bad or oppressive. Far from it. Rather, the U.S. acts in a manner similar to previous dominant powers. “The United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population.” (4-5).
This lack of uniqueness is key to the Chomsky and Robinson critique. Yes, leaders in the US often use the language of Wilsonian idealism (as Mead discusses in his book). But consider the British Empire. Does anyone doubt that its leaders often used lofty, benign, and sweeping rhetoric to defend their decades of global rule? And how seriously do we take those proclamations now?
Many imperial actors, and even leaders of aggressive states actively making war, declare benign intentions—witness Putin today or the heads of the Axis powers during World War II. The authors run through a gamut of world leaders offering lofty language to defend acts of violent conquest. Thus, declarations of benign intent are almost universal and should therefore be seen as largely meaningless. As Chomsky and Robinson bluntly put it, “sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, because they are a universal. What matters is the historical record.” (4).
As Chomsky and Robinson suggest, once you look beneath the public rhetoric and dive into the archive of classified conversations among American statesmen you generally find appeals not to high-minded ideals but to that concept known as the “national interest.” It is a fairly vague concept but one that mainstream accounts tend to take for granted. Again, the authors argue that this is a universal trait of powerful states, both now and in the past.
According to the authors this is precisely where we should start asking questions. For the “term national interest is itself a euphemism, for what is usually meant is the interest of a small sector of wealthy domestic elites.” (7).
This is an essential part of their analysis. Mead, representing a more mainstream perspective in my previous blog, doesn’t really offer a detailed account of how American foreign policy gets made. He discusses prominent policy-makers and gestures as national security elites, but his overall account generally presumes that American democracy works more or less as it should and thus policy tends to reflect the diverse mix of perspectives among the American public. In an insightful chapter late in his book Mead suggests that the foreign policy elite are becoming disconnected from the wider public. What for Mead is a concerning new development is for Chomsky and Robinson a basic, longstanding feature of American politics.
What exactly has this elite-dominated foreign policy looked like? Chomsky and Robinson focus primarily on American foreign policy in the past century, especially since World War II when the U.S. fully embraced its role as successor to the British Empire. Starting during World War II and continuing to today the United States has sought global “military and economic supremacy.” (10).
Why might this be a problem? They note that “discussions of foreign policy are often cool, abstract, and antiseptic.” (12). Yet in practice the stakes are often life and death for real human beings. This is a valuable contribution of the book. By focusing on American interventions abroad, whether overt wars or covert CIA actions, they draw our attention to the real, lived consequences of these policies. A coup in Guatemala leads to decades of brutal military dictatorship and civil war. Real human beings die by the thousands.
But why focus on the United States? Because, “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” (16). This connects to the basic moral standard guiding their analysis: We should focus on American crimes because a) the United States is the global hegemon, so its actions have major consequences, b) we should hold ourselves to the same or higher standards that we hold others, and c) because as Americans we have the most ability to effect the actions of our own government. In their words, “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?” (17).
Their guiding argument is that as Americans we should focus on our own policies. As Americans, we can exercise the most influence on our own government. Yes, we should unequivocally condemn the tyranny of the Chinese Government as it suppresses dissent, and likewise the grotesque imprisonment of anti-war protesters in Russia. But the government we have the most ability to influence is our own. Though oligarchic, America is remarkably free and we have the ability and responsibility to focus our attention on its actions.
In Mead’s typology this is a very Jeffersonian impulse and one that I fundamentally share. We should focus on making America more democratic and draw down our imperial commitments abroad. Unfortunately, as Mead notes in his book, the Jeffersonian perspective is not a dominant one in American foreign policy.
Internal policy documents also reveal a hubristic mindset that should be horrifying in any democracy—namely the assumption that we have the right to interfere anywhere, anytime, for any reason, all across the world. “It is simply assumed that it is U.S. prerogative to decide which leaders we will put up with.” (30). The book is replete with examples of Presidents and Senators simply assuming that we have to right to invade any country we want, whenever we want.
Chomsky and Robinson then provide detailed examples of key moments and elements in the history of American foreign policy. The chapter on the Vietnam War is a horrifying and damning example of what an unjust war looks like. There are also chapters on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Latin American intervention. These chapters in Part One of the book serve as a series of case studies in empire—this is what empire actually involves when you get past anodyne phrases about “intervention” and “regime change.”
Chapter nine examines the domestic power structure in the US and how it produces foreign policy. As they say, “the broad American public has little influence over U.S. foreign policy. In fact, divergence between public opinion and state action is frequently sharp.” (235).
Why? According to Robinson and Chomsky, “in highly unequal countries, the public’s role in decision-making is limited. In the United States, as elsewhere, foreign policy is designed and implemented by small groups who derive their power from domestic sources.” (239). Indeed, there is considerable social science literature on how a small set of wealthy, well-connected elites have the most domestic power. This research ranges from Mills and Domhoff writing in the mid-century to Gilens and Page, Winters, Hacker and Pierson, Ferguson, and other mainstream scholars writing today. It is all well-worth reading.
The most simple way of stating the principle is that “concentration of wealth yields concentration of power” and, as Piketty and many others have demonstrated, the US is an extraordinarily unequal society with massive concentrations of private wealth. (239). Therefore, public opinion tends to be far removed from foreign policy.
This is a strength of Robinson and Chomsky relative to Mead’s account—they have a much more clear, explicit theory for how foreign policy gets made. It is of course contestable. But compared to Mead’s work, which is vague and impressionistic on this score, Chomsky and Robinson are remarkably concrete and cogent.
Chapter 11 deals with media coverage of American foreign policy. They note that in the US we have tremendous freedom to say what we want. Unfortunately, mainstream media coverage does not actually give voice to a particularly wide range of perspectives. “Major media corporations…reliably reflect the assumptions and viewpoints of U.S. elites. They contain spirited criticism and debate, but only in line with a system of presuppositions and principles.” (272). This is merely a brief introduction to the media critique Chomsky offers in other works like Necessary Illusions and Manufacturing Consent (coauthored with Edward S. Herman).
The kind of critique undertaken by Chomsky and Robinson can be grim work. They realize that “to ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant.” (293). But it is necessary, as they argue at the outset of the book. The more common path, however, is just the opposite. “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.” (294). Chomsky has in other interviews and essays mentioned a famous passage from the New Testament to defend this perspective, in which Jesus says that we should focus on removing the “mote” from our own eyes rather than pointing out the “stick” in someone else’s eye. This is, frankly, a very different impulse from that which tends to guide mainstream foreign policy debate. But in its humility and decency, it is the right one.
Connecting to the previous post on Mead’s Special Providence, are Chomsky and Robinson Jeffersonians, in Mead’s sense? Overall, yes, not in the mild sense that Mead himself endorses but in the more radical Jeffersonian tradition dating back to Mark Twain. Chomsky and Robinson think that Americans, both statesmen and citizens, should focus on making American democracy more democratic, more peaceful, and more humane, setting a positive example for the rest of the world. This is how you promote and improve democracy, not by attempting to impose order on the rest of the world.
One key point of difference between Mead and Chomsky-Robinson is that Mead thinks the American public is fairly hawkish. I’m skeptical of this point, as are Chomsky and Robinson. Indeed, they cite a large number of opinion polls that demonstrate widespread public support for diplomacy, negotiation, resolving disagreements through the UN, and so on. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that American policymakers pursue wars because they are under intense public pressure to do so. The truth seems to be closer to the opposite, which is exactly what Chomsky and Robinson argue. Namely, politicians engage in concerted publicity campaigns in an effort to drum up popular support for war. And this “support” is often very shallow. In the run up to the Iraq War in 2003 polls showed that a majority of Americans supported military action. But as soon as the war became costly, and the reasons for war were exposed as deceptive, this support collapsed. The lasting unpopularity of the Iraq War not only impacted the elections of 2006 and 2008 but continues to exercise a substantial influence over both parties and the broader culture in America.
Chomsky and Robinson’s book can make for depressing reading and there are many more components that could be examined. But they end on a hopeful note, that democratic movements, led by ordinary citizens, can change the world for the better. In the case of US foreign policy this would involve a radical rethinking of our role in the world, one that serves the cause of democracy not by force but by example.