A Game Gone Tilt
Realpolitik and Noam Chomsky
The concept of a world governed by dialectics has always had its enthusiastic proponents. A central tenant of such worldview is the idea of the unity of opposites, sometimes more colloquially described as ‘everything turns into its opposite. The beauty of this idea is that the rules are general and broad enough that with some fancy footwork they can describe virtually anything. Perhaps dialectically, this is also the source of much tediousness and banality. In that spirit, can this dynamic be applied to the current state of the American Left? For instance, one prominent question at the moment is can striving to be anti-war morph actually one into being conservative, even a counter-revolutionary?
Norman Finkelstein, himself currently an ardent defender of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, once quipped about Leftist apostates and Noam Chomsky: ‘A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky. It’s the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signal that one has “grownup”-i.e. grown out of one’s childish past…Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out and he didn’t.’
It would be interesting to know if Chomsky ever came across this and what he would think of such an assessment. After all, what Chomsky take in recent times can be described as idealistic or childish? Emotional solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance? With the Syrian revolutionaries? Romantic displays of anti-imperialism?
No, no, and none. Rather what one will find in Chomsky’s various droning interviews and statements can only be described as ‘adult.’ Chomsky himself was never one for dialectics, once declaring ‘Dialectics is one word that I've never understood.’ But the word would seem to fit an activist famous for having anarchist leanings spending years espousing a steady stream of cold realpolitik.
The concept of ‘realpolitik’ goes back some ways. Perhaps one could say it is as old as civilization itself. As an overall philosophy Machiavelli is often put forward as an early proponent before the term even existed. The term itself was introduced by August Ludwig von Rochau in an 1853 work titled Practical Politics: An Application of its Principles to the Situation of the German States. This work would supposedly go on to influence Otto von Bismarck, another figure oft cited in realpolitik circles. The exact definition of the term probably would prove to be fluid, but Britannica seems to sum it up fairly as “politics based on practical objectives rather than ideals…a pragmatic no-nonsense view and a disregard for ethical considerations…relentless, though realistic, pursuit of national interests.”
It is particularly those last two points that have always rubbed Leftists and idealists the wrong way. To begin with, does every state get to define its own national interests? What if these interests deem it necessary to oppress other states and peoples? Does this include dictatorships and their treatment of domestic resistance? Who gets to define what is realistic? And what are things like democracy, human rights, and liberation if not ideals?
For example, when it comes to the war in Ukraine what you get from Chomsky to begin with are a whole litany of reasons the Ukrainian resistance should pack it in. The range of these given reasons over the past year has been quite wide, most of which have had nothing directly to do with the Ukrainians themselves: Food prices are high and the Global South is starving. Fossil Fuel companies are raking it in. Germany is being deindustrialized. Global warming. All of this is basically nonsense. Despite surging in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the FAO Food Price Index declined for 15 straight months from March 2022 to June 2023. The recent annual flagship report by the UN on global food security found no major increase in world hunger from 2021 to 2022. After an initial rise, even with a recent bump, oil and natural gas prices have held steady over the past year. Far from setting the energy transition back, the war has pushed momentum forward. For the first time more money is now being invested into renewables globally than fossil fuels. The Economist estimates that the war has accelerated the energy transition by a decade.
Chomsky has been scornfully raging about ‘fossil fuel companies’ and ‘not knowing what to do with all their profits’ while at the same time emphasizing what he calls Germany and Russia’s ‘natural trade commercial relations’ as if a return to the pre-war status quo, where Germany was largely dependent on Russia energy oligarchs, is both necessary and even desirable. At last check there are fossil fuel companies in Russia as well. As for Germany itself, far from seeking confrontation with Putin, its government had spent decades yearning for warm relations- former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder was on the Board of Directors of Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft for years and was nominated for the board of Directors at Gazprom, a state-owned gas company, at the time of the invasion.
Going on in that silly vain, Chomsky has called the U.S. the ‘only winner’ of the conflict, calling the invasion a ‘gift’ to the U.S. for pushing Europe ‘back in the U.S. pocket.’ It is not entirely clear what is meant by that. It is certainly true that U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) have increased as Europe strives to cope with much less energy from Russia, but plenty of LNG is sold from Qatar and Australia as well. Norway increased natural gas production by 8 percent in 2022 and saw its energy coffers expand by $100 billion. Meanwhile, India has been gorging on discounted Russian oil since the invasion, by one estimate increasing its oil imports from Russia by 400 percent. If one insisted on looking through this prism it appears winners abound. As for Europe being in the pocket of the U.S., if Europe means places like the UK, France, Belgium, and Germany direct U.S. foreign assistance adds up to exactly $0 a year.
Another typical populist canard points to starved social programs in the U.S. as a consequence of feeding the war machine in Ukraine. This is more hot air. For the entire first year of the invasion the U.S. spent 0.21 per cent of GDP on military support for Ukraine. If only prosperity for the American working class depended on that amount. Actually, the country that on a per-capita basis has aided the Ukrainians the most has been tiny Estonia, which has donated a third of its military budget. Latvia and Lithuania are next. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania- perhaps this ring of steel has some ghastly imperialist project in mind or some strange fetish for expanding U.S. hegemony, but such accusations have not come to light.
Still, war is obviously hell and the battle in Ukraine certainly has the potential to devolve into a bloody stalemate. The Russian offensive this past spring went nowhere and the Ukrainian counter-offensive has thus far been halting and faces tough odds. This is in no small part due to Ukraine’s supporters slow-walking military aid. For despite the allegedly thrilling prospect of seeing the Kremlin’s military bloodied and defeated, Ukraine’s backers in the West have been hesitant from the beginning. They dithered for months over sending even a limited supply of modern tanks and it sure looks like Ukraine could now use those F-16s Biden just reluctantly allowed other countries to supply after denying Ukrainian requests from the beginning. The planes won’t play any role in the current counter-offensive. Of course, one is free to oppose any form of military support for the Ukrainians, yet it seems a stretch to accuse the Biden administration of being both bloodthirsty for war and spineless when it caves to Zelensky’s weapons requests.
To be fair, Chomsky has consistently called the Russian invasion criminal. It is hard though to square this with the fact that he acknowledges most Putin talking points. In fact Finkelstein, understandably in a sense, criticized Chomsky for being among a lot that does the acknowledging but still then strangely has weak knees for the invasion. Finkelstein ranted on the Resistance News podcast in April 2022 ‘‘I can’t go for it. I can’t go for those who acknowledge the legitimacy of the arguments made by Putin but then call the invasion criminal. I don’t see it.”
If ending the war does indeed come down to negotiations of course Chomsky seems to know best, for instance instantly declaring Crimea ‘off the table.’ While a Ukrainian military operation to retake Crimea may likely be a bridge too far, given Crimea’s geography, is it at least worth noting that Russia illegally invaded the territory in 2014 and then hastily organized a bogus ‘referendum?’ The results of the referendum predictively showed overwhelming public support for joining Russia. As reported by Russia Today, 96 percent of voters went for annexation. The Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported it 93 percent to 7 percent in favor. In Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city, the turnout somehow reached 123 percent. If the presence of 21,000 Russian soldiers, lack of international monitors, and absurdly one-sided numbers, common in elections sponsored by dictatorships, don’t give it away, a report by the President of Russia’s Council on Civil Society and Human Rights was quoted afterward with these numbers: ‘In Crimea, according to various indicators, 50-60% voted for unification with Russia with a voter turnout (yavka) of 30-50%.’ Also worth noting: in an internationally recognized referendum in 1991, Crimea voted to join an independent Ukraine.
Chomsky’s view of this affair is apparent from an interview with Truthout in 2021 where he stated: ‘What happened in 2014, whatever one thinks of it, amounted to a coup with U.S. support that replaced the Russia-orientated government by a Western-orientated one. That led Russia to annex Crimea, mainly to protect its warm water port and naval base, and apparently with the agreement of a considerable majority of the Crimean population.’
So according to Chomsky, for starters like much of the Left falsely labeling the Maidan uprising as a U.S.-backed coup (strange that a popular uprising would be so unpopular with many Leftists who claim to like such events), squint through all the noise and it was all ultimately the U.S. government’s fault and the Russian government was simply reacting to the provocation by protecting its interests, which according to Chomsky are a port and naval base. Apparently, states invading their neighbors to protect a naval base (or even having such a naval base) isn’t worthy of further comment. Neither is there a syllable about Russia breaking the Budapest Memorandum that was signed by Russia and others in 1994 which enshrined Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, nor a peep about the plight of the Crimean Tartars.
It is difficult to imagine Chomsky display such ‘realism’ if the U.S. had done such a thing. No doubt anyone keeping score here has ad nauseam come across this attempt at ‘gotcha’: ‘Well, if Canada or Mexico had joined a Chinese- or Russian-led alliance the U.S. would blow them away.’ True enough perhaps but would anyone, Chomsky included, now spouting this line have an ounce of sympathy for the U.S. government in such a context? Would there be actual recognition of the Monroe Doctrine? And should it be overlooked that Ukraine was not even close to joining NATO at the time of the invasion anyway? Even now, after NATO’s latest summit, Ukraine is still without a timetable for membership.
Chomsky though has been banging that sort of drum for a long time. Way back in 1999 he put forward a similar bizarre scenario in his book The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo: ‘We need scarcely tarry on how the U.S. would respond to attacks by a guerrilla force with foreign bases and supplies seeking, say, independence for Puerto Rico.’ Again, true as far as it goes, but would any part of the Left have sympathy for the U.S. government’s position in that conflict, particularly if the then president of the U.S. had a direct history of ethnic cleansing like Slobodan Milosevic did? Not to mention Chomsky appeared to take a somewhat understanding view of Serbian aggression in Kosovo calling it a “response” and “reaction” to attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army “Designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response.” Would he describe comparable actions by Palestinians in such terms?
Even if one were to give all this credence as a genuine anti-war position, there seems to be a darker layer to Chomsky’s worldview. After all, what should one make of the point Chomsky put forward on the SaltCube Analytics podcast where he praised the Congress of Vienna (1815) for reincorporating a defeated France back into what Chomsky calls the ‘concert of Europe’ (apparently in contrast to the Treaty of Versailles which failed do so for defeated Germany). It is true that the Treaty of Vienna has been credited for Europe being relatively peaceful for the century between Napoleon’s final defeat and World War I. Yet this was in the midst of counter-revolution and restoration in France, the rise of the Holy Alliance, Poland being again carved up. Strange for a radical to get close to any of that. Yet Chomsky has been religiously citing conservatives like George Kennan, Chas Freeman (who among other things defends the Tiananmen Square massacre), and John Mearsheimer. Heck even Henry Kissinger has been getting plugs. May as well throw in Prince von Metternich. Actually, according to Chomsky there is one western ‘statesman of stature’ who has a serious plan for the conflict in Ukraine: ‘his name is Donald J. Trump.’
As for the likes of Putin himself, Chomsky declared to Current Affairs last year that giving Putin an ‘escape hatch’ in Ukraine, which would mean, at the very least, giving Putin more than he started with, is necessary because “You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying ‘I don’t like hurricanes’ or ‘I don’t recognize hurricanes.’ That’s the alternative to the destruction of Ukraine and nuclear war. You can make heroic statements, if you’d like, about not liking hurricanes, or not liking the solution. But that’s not doing anyone any good.”
This same version of Putin as a force of nature seeps into Chomsky’s analysis of Syria as well. In a podcast debate with Bill Fletcher Jr. Chomsky said of the gruesome Russian intervention in Syria in 2015:
“The United States, France, Germany were supporting opposition forces which by 2013, 2014 were mostly jihadi forces which were fighting against the recognized government of Syria, the government that has a seat in the United Nations and is internationally recognized. They were trying to overthrow it, that’s a Russian ally. The CIA was providing advanced weapons to the opposition forces, advanced anti-tank weapons, which did stop the Assad armies. Quite predictably. It didn’t take a genius to predict it. I predicted it. Others did. The Russians reacted. Russia came into the war, really for the first time, to attack the CIA’s anti-tank weapons. Then they went on to support Assad’s brutal, vicious effort to reconquer Syria, horrible atrocities, and so on. Technically it’s not criminal, certainly not illegal, but it’s criminal in the moral sense not in the legal sense. That’s what happened in Syria.”
Like his take on Crimea, Chomsky is off on his facts. By 2013 the U.S. was not focused on fighting Assad; its focus was on ISIS. Those anti-tank weapons couldn’t defend rebel held areas against the Syria and Russian air bombardment and the U.S. prevented even allies from supplying surface-to-air missiles for air defense. At that time Chomsky had falsely smeared the rebellion against Assad claiming to an audience in Cambridge ‘If reporters go into the rebel-held areas and don’t do what they’re told you’ll get your head cut off.’ Actually, there were several journalists reporting from rebel-held areas. He also several times publicly floated the gross and batty idea that the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta and Douma were false-flag operations conducted by the rebels.
But here again is the Kremlin as a sort of natural force, simply reacting to alleged U.S. policy as mercury reacts to oxygen. A few years prior to this debate with Fletcher Jr. Chomsky actually voiced regarding the Russian intervention in Syria, ‘I don’t think they should but it’s not imperialism…because supporting a government is not imperialism.’ He said the same thing about Iran’s role in the Syrian conflict in an interview published in DAWN in January 2022: ‘In Syria, Iran is supporting the official government, the government recognized by the United Nations…You can hardly accuse Iran of illegal or criminal behavior by supporting the recognized government.’ By this surreal logic the American war on Vietnam wouldn’t be considered illegal. Not to mention the ‘recognized government’ here is a family dynasty that has violently ruled Syria for over 50 years turning the country into its own personal fiefdom-to say the least a strange choice of government for Chomsky to apply the sanctity of sovereignty.
Chomsky also argued in the same interview that Iran was ‘acting like any other state’ in ‘seeking to expand its influence in the region and its doing it mainly in Shia or near-Shia areas’. This strange point about ‘Shia areas’ certainly didn’t apply to Syria and prompted Syrian leftist Yassin al-Haj Saleh to write:
‘It is also quite curious that Chomsky mentions in a rather bland, offhand way that when Iran extends its influence in the region as if this is somehow a neutral fact without destructive social and political implications. We leftists and nationalists in the region call this sectarianism, and it has been a singularly important source of civil strife and genocidal massacres in many countries’
But in the face of all that what is one to make of what Chomsky said on Democracy Now! in September 2013? After Assad crossed the Obama Administration’s ‘red line’ by using chemical weapons and the Obama Administration backed down from taking action and instead made a deal with the Kremlin that was supposed to remove the Assad government’s chemical weapons inventory, Chomsky said of Obama:
‘This gives him a way out: He can maintain the threat of force, which incidentally is a crime under international law. We should bear in mind that the core principle of the United Nations charter bars the threat or use of force. So this is all criminal to begin with…’
One country gruesomely intervening on the side of a dictatorship to destroy a revolution, including the widespread use of chemical weapons and large-scale bombing of civilians, is not criminal but another even hinting at using force to derail the carnage is criminal? By now the dynamic here should be obvious. Also, would one ever hear Chomsky insist on such petty distinctions between the moral and the legal if said crime was committed by the American government? Why even bother with such a distinction in this case? And is a dictator’s seat at the UN really worth that much?
But there you have it: dictatorships are recognized governments with real interests, imperialism is a simple fact of life, at least when practiced by governments that are not the U.S. government (and these other governments are just inevitably reacting naturally to U.S. policy anyway), resistance is not only futile but destructive, the world is apparently made of nation-states where the main goal of politics is to maintain ‘stability’ between them, and responsible statesmen are the glue to it all. It is certainly an old, and ostensibly defendable, worldview. Reactionaries have been blowing this horn for centuries. However, they now have the most famous American radical in their chorus. Dialectical indeed.