by W.D. Ehrhart
I first became aware of Noam Chomsky in the early 1970s after I came back to this country as a Marine Corps veteran of the American War in Vietnam and got involved in the antiwar movement through Vietnam Veterans Against the War. For well over half a century a rare voice of sanity and reason in the wilderness of American hypocrisy, lies, and dissembling, he is high on my list of American patriot heroes.
My acquaintance with the very much younger Nathan Robinson, founder and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, is much more recent, but he, too, is a truth-teller. Together they have co-written a 2024 book called The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World that is at once insightful, scathingly honest, and—if I am myself going to be honest—deeply depressing.
The first two-thirds of the book are packed with example after example of the vast gulf between American rhetoric and American actions, Chomsky and Robinson working their way systematically through the “Global South,” the Vietnam War, 9/11 and Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, China, NATO and Russia, nuclear armaments and global warming.
While the mythology versus the reality goes all the way back to our nation’s foundational documents—“All men are created equal”—Chomsky and Robinson focus on the post-World War Two era when the United States became the dominant global power. And while many Americans, certainly those who would be interested in a book like this, seem convinced that the re-election of Donald J. Trump is some kind of watershed threshold in American history, Chomsky and Robinson make it crystal clear that the phenomenon they are talking about is neither new nor the province of one particular political party.
We have Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower lamenting at the outset of his presidency, “Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” but who did nothing to stop this theft over his next eight years in the White House.
We have Republican Richard Nixon seeking “Peace with Honor” in Vietnam while secretly and illegally bombing the bejesus out of Cambodia. And Republican Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire while praising the Nicaraguan Contras—terrorists created and supported by the U.S. government—as “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” George W. Bush invading Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction he knew weren’t there.
But the record of the Democrats is no cleaner. John Kennedy, while insisting that “here on earth God’s work must truly be our own,” first invading Cuba, then instigating a systematic and sustained program to murder its head of state. Lyndon Johnson decrying North Vietnamese aggression in South Vietnam, but making no apology for invading the Dominican Republic.
Democrat Jimmy Carter insisted that “the government of the United States will continue throughout the world to enhance human rights” while escalating arms shipments to the government of Indonesia to be used in that government’s murderous suppression of Timorese resistance to the illegal Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Barack Obama, who said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that he would demonstrate his commitment to the Constitution by closing down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but did not.
Moreover, Obama authorized drone missile strikes that included the summary execution of American citizens without trial or due process. And Joe Biden has condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but continues to provide massive material support for the devastating Israeli invasion of Gaza, condemning Hamas’s killing of 1,189 Israelis as an act of terrorism, but using no such language in the face of Israel’s killing of 43,972 Palestinians.
In point of fact, U.S. foreign policy follows what Chomsky and Robinson call “the Mafia Doctrine”: the Godfather’s word is law. And in the case of foreign policy, the Godfather is us. But not us, really. Just some of us. That is: American elites.
What are called “American interests” are really the interests of the very small group of influential bankers, investors, lawyers, and business people who control both the government and foreign policy.
“The United States,” say Chomsky and Robinson, “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.” They convincingly demonstrate that were the Nuremberg Principles applied to U.S. actions, every American president from Truman to Biden would be found guilty of war crimes.
But the U.S. government doesn’t commit crimes. Our foreign policy is always altruistic, for the greater good, in self-defense, without ulterior ambition. We may make mistakes from time to time, but we always mean well. Our motives are never base or self-serving.
Meanwhile, the American people are constantly fed a diet of lies, distortions and falsehoods wrapped up in the language of freedom, democracy, and humanity that has gone unchallenged by a majority of Americans from the time of John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” through Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms of Speech, of Worship, from Want, and from Fear (neglecting to mention the Freedom to Dominate) to Jimmy Carter’s assertion that the U.S. “will continue throughout the world to enhance human rights” to George W. Bush’s “they hate us for our freedoms” to Joe Biden’s insistence that Americans “must be the bearers of the flame of freedom.”
The Russians have oligarchs. The United States has businessmen and women. Saddam Hussein tortured people. The U.S. uses enhanced interrogation. Serbia (not a member of NATO) engaged in ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Turkey (a NATO member) is just responding to Kurdish terrorists. The Iranians want nuclear weapons to attack their neighbors. Our nukes are only for defense. The Chinese are “shifting the global power dynamic” by establishing a military base in Djibouti. Seven hundred and fifty American military bases in eighty nations across the globe are just, well, I don’t know . . . being neighborly?
Over and over again, Chomsky and Robinson expose the enormous gulf between rhetoric and practice. Talk’s cheap, they argue. Look at what our government does, and has been doing over and over and over again. The book is a compendium of the yawning gap between words and actions.
The authors, however, are less convincing when they try to argue what can be done about this. On the one hand, they assert that “it is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state” and that “ordinary people [must] meaningfully participate in politics.” On the other hand, they make it painfully clear that “ordinary people” are constantly conned, bamboozled, and hoodwinked into believing that the U.S. is “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Indeed, the current popular skepticism of government has resulted not in pressuring the government to be more democratic and less hypocritical both domestically and overseas, but in the rise of Donald J. Trump and the complete overthrow of any pretense of constitutional governance, “ratified” by the millions and millions of “ordinary people” who voted for him.
The authors assert that popular mass movements of the 1960s for “Black civil rights, women’s liberation, LGBTQ rights, environmental protection, and an end to the Vietnam War made the United States a better country, in ways that are permanent.”
But the Vietnam War was followed by the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, the invasion of Somalia, the Afghani War, and the Iraq War with little objection from “ordinary people” and no significant antiwar movement. And the other mass movements the authors extol as permanent victories are all under assault and are rapidly being eroded or reversed.
In the end, the trouble with a book like this is that it will only be read by those few people who already know that we are living in a nation where “our belief in our own exceptionalism is the most unexceptional thing about us,” given that no dominant power in the history of the world has ever believed it wasn’t exceptional. The Romans gave the world Pax Romana at the point of a sword. The French called their colonialism civilisatrice, their “civilizing mission.” The sun of enlightenment never used to set on the British Empire. Japan called its brutal conquests the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Every ruling power is always the hero of its own history, not the villain.
Nevertheless, it is hard to argue with their conclusion. Impossible, really. As daunting as the future seems, in spite of the odds against significant change, Chomsky and Robinson offer “only two choices. One is to say, ‘It’s hopeless. Let’s give up.’ This guarantees that the worst will happen. The other is to say, ‘We want to make things better, so we will try.’”
There it is. Take your pick.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.