An Exercise in Unseriousness
Review: The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World by Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson
As it has turned out, a good amount of ink in this Substack has been spent on critiquing the words and writings of Noam Chomsky. The first post was entirely dedicated to him, and he has been referenced in several others. Admittedly it gets tiring to read about the same theme. However, a main idea of this Substack is that what I call the ‘Chomsky Left’ has for a long time now been a reactionary and status quo force. The reason for that is that it relies on an absurdly simplistic and wrongheaded analysis that inevitably leads to political and moral dead ends. In other words, the road from the Chomsky Left to The Gray Zone is a short one.
This book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, written with Current Affairs magazine founder Nathan Robinson (Robinson completed the book after Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023 that reports say has left Chomsky disabled and unable to speak), is meant to be something of a summation of Chomsky’s work. Indeed, summation is probably the right word.
The core contention of the book, as written by the authors is:
‘actually modest: the United States is not uniquely evil. It is no worse than many other ruling powers have been. It is just especially powerful, and it is captivated by a dangerous, false mythology…it is more consequential if a powerful country from a moral standard than if a weak one does.’
That last point is not necessarily a given. The mass graves found in places throughout the world from Syria to Liberia to Bosnia show that weaker powers can be quite destructive. However, if that’s the idea, to some extent the book can be labeled a success. Though it is interesting to ponder who exactly the target audience is for this modest theme. Donald Trump is about to start his second term as president, and he has had a lock on the GOP for three straight elections. Recent times have also seen, among other things, the COVID pandemic, the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, wokeness, anti-wokeness, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. As I write, wildfires are burning through Los Angeles. Perhaps what ails U.S. society isn’t exactly an excess of idealism. States having interests wouldn’t exactly be news to functional adults.
The final chapter in the book is titled ‘How Mythologies are Manufactured.’ It is a nod to Chomsky and Edward Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent, published back in 1988. This is book is a famous critique of the media peddling the government’s line (magnifying the crimes of official enemies, under-reporting the crimes of allies) due to corporate ownership, insider access, culture, etc. The thing is that the examples provided in this chapter read like it was also written decades ago. CBS, CNN, the New York Times, even very old Dan Rather gets cited. We just lived through an election season where one of the biggest talking points was Kamela Harris, in contrast to Trump, refusing to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Recently, it was reported that CNN is taking in its lowest ratings ever, down 46 percent in the month since the election to 401,000 primetime viewers. There are about 335 million people in the U.S.
According to the Pew Research Center, 39 percent of American adults under 30 report that they regularly get their news from TikTok. Even if one was convinced that The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal were jammed with government propaganda, what should one think about Tucker Carlson’s show or Consortium News? The collective audience of the internet from webpages to podcasts, dwarfs the readership of the New York Times. The internet isn’t even mentioned in the chapter. It has long been obvious that so-called ‘alternative’ sources can be a lot worse regarding misinformation and propaganda. The inability to grasp this fact proved consistently to be one of Chomsky’s greatest shortcomings.
The book is at its strongest going through the gruesome U.S. Cold War policies. Even here though it could have done the victims greater justice. The CIA sponsored coups in Chile and Guatemala each got barely two pages of attention. The Vietnam War got a chapter, the end of which saw quick references to Laos and Cambodia. Of course, predictively, Chomsky’s own, shall we say, complicated history with the Khmer Rouge isn’t mentioned (for a good critique of Chomsky’s analysis of Cambodia, see here).
However, if Chomsky, along with the likes of Edward Herman, and many others had simply called it a day when the Berlin Wall came down their legacies would be somewhat brighter. Because it was right after that when things really started to go off the rails for them. Unfortunately, they took much of the Left with them.
Indeed, as the book went on, I couldn’t help but recall a funny anecdote from Kevin Williamson’s book The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics about monkeys that live in New Delhi. Williamson writes:
If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos…you know what monkeys- these particular monkeys are like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don’t do a hell of a lot else, unless there’s McDonald’s. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling…Twitter basically.
This image also describes much of this book.
Actually, before going on from here, it is worth noting one subject that isn’t covered at all in the book: Bosnia, namely the NATO intervention in 1995. For a book that tries to touch on everything that is a telling omission. Given everything in the book, it is frankly impossible that was a mere oversight, particularly since the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 does get a few pages. Bosnia, of course, also wasn’t one of Chomsky’s better moments (See also this surreally grotesque exchange Chomsky had with George Monbiot on the topic, and here is a letter from journalist Ed Villiamy, who covered Bosnia on the ground, to Amnesty International regarding Chomsky’s views).
Is it too worth noting that also missing are some other places where events happened during the same period as those dealt with in much of the book? For instance, places like Rwanda, Liberia, Darfur, Sudan, Sierra Leone. Africa has never really been given much room in the Chomsky-ian Left’s mind. Likely the worst conflict since World War II started in Central Africa in August 1998. Known as Africa’s World War, by the time the war ended in 2003 over 5 million people were dead. The Chomsky-ian Left would have had a hard time describing the basic dynamics of the war or even the countries involved. Certainly, all this may be well beyond the scope of a single book, even one as scattered as this, but it shows that the world is far more complicated, even in terms U.S./NATO/Western foreign policy (or lack of policy), than what is presented here. Is it really worth celebrating that nothing was done about the genocides in Rwanda or Darfur? Something at least close to genocide is now happening again in Sudan and much of the Left is again silent.
Now, take for example the following couple of paragraphs. It may seem frivolous to just pull random paragraphs out of a book, but one could really do this on just about every page. The first one covers the 1991 Gulf War, the first major post-Cold War conflict (though the Soviet Union wasn’t officially dissolved until December of that year). The conflict got only about four pages in the book, and half of one them was filled with this:
Bush Sr. repeatedly compared Hussein to Hitler and justified the lack of interest in diplomacy with the usual “Munich” comparisons. Hussein made multiple proposals that would involve withdrawal from Kuwait (all the while pointing out that the United States itself recently invaded Panama). All were ignored by the U.S., including one proposing that “all cases of occupation” in the region “be resolved simultaneously,” meaning that Israel should be held to the same standard in as Iraq. Although the Arab League had passed a resolution warning against outside intervention in the conflict, Bush was set on teaching Hussein a lesson through the use of force, to show, that, in Bush’s words, “What we say goes.” An Italian Catholic weekly, Il Sabato, concluded that Bush deserved the “Nobel War Prize” for his insistence on force over negotiation. In February 1990, The Times of India described Bush’s dismissals of Iraq’s withdrawal proposals as a “horrible mistake” that showed the West sought a world order “where the powerful nations agree among themselves to a share of Arab spoils.” We had seen, it said, “the seamiest sides of Western Civilization: its unrestricted appetite for dominance, its morbid fascination for hi-tech military might, its insensitivity to ‘alien’ cultures, its appalling jingoism.”
For a quick background, the Iraqi Army invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. Of course, Iraq’s ruler at the time was Saddam Hussein. The book describes that action with a single sentence: ‘Hussein made a critical error, however. Having acted with impunity thus far, Hussein crossed a U.S. red line by invading Kuwait.’ As can be expected by now, the people actually in Kuwait don’t get a single mention even in passing.
Now take this bit by bit. Hussein made multiple offers of withdrawal, including something about “all cases of occupation” in the Middle East being decided “simultaneously.” That’s an obvious blackmail using the Kuwaiti people as collateral. Hussein didn’t invade Kuwait to put pressure on Israel and giving the Iraqi dictatorship leverage over Israel/Palestine would have handed Hussein every incentive to disrupt any peace process (the Iraqi government was at one point funding suicide bombers of Islamic Jihad and Hamas). Insane that the authors even give that line an ounce of credibility. The Arab League passing a resolution against foreign interference in the matter? It is true that a resolution was passed on August 3rd, a day after the invasion. However, months later, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, and Qatar (all members of the Arab League, though certainly not the noblest bunch of allies) contributed directly to the effort to remove the Iraqi Army from Kuwait (about 40 countries contributed). The Iraqi military spent the whole conflict firing primitive, unguided Scud missiles into Israel openly hoping to provoke an Israeli counterattack and expanded regional war in an open effort to splinter that coalition. Then there’s a random line from an op-ed in a Catholic weekly based in Italy, followed by a random line from an op-ed in the Times of India. Do you get the monkey reference?
A thoughtful anti-war critique is certainly possible and always valuable, even necessary, but it would at least have to mention all this and recognize the following facts: there’s no evidence the people of Kuwait wanted to be part of Iraq; the war didn’t start a week after the invasion, but five months later negating the wacky idea that floated around that the whole affair was some kind of planned trap all along. There also the idea that Hussein was given mixed signals about the invasion by the U.S. ambassador leading the Iraqi government to think there would be no consequences (this nefarious U.S. ambassador angle would come up again in Bosnia). Even if the Iraqi government thought that it was obvious from the first nanosecond of the invasion this was untrue; the Iraqi government was given a deadline to withdraw months in advance by the UN Security Council; upon eventually beginning to withdraw, it was the Iraqi military that scorched Kuwait’s oil fields, creating an environmental catastrophe. As for that line about “Arab spoils”, has there been a single syllable uttered anywhere about Kuwaiti oil, which was nationalized in 1975, in the past 35 years?
Chomsky and Robinson are critical of George Bush for encouraging Iraqis to revolt against Hussein then leaving Hussein to crush the revolt. Quite right. However, it is also quite fair to think Chomsky would have opposed any intervention anyway given this book (and Chomsky’s other books) ignores the fact that an intervention did indeed come. No-fly-zones were imposed in both the north and south of Iraq. The northern no-fly-zone enabled the closest thing we’ve seen to a Kurdish state. The only reference to this in the book is the sentence ‘Throughout the 1990s Iraq was kept in check with a mix of sanctions and bombing.’
Staying on energy, here is the second paragraph, which opened the seventh chapter of the book:
Instead, NATO’s mission changed. It became a U.S.-run intervention force with a worldwide mandate to secure the West’s strategic interests. Part of its mission was to maintain control of the international energy system. NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer instructed a NATO meeting in June 2007 that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. NATO therefore laid claim to worldwide jurisdiction.
First, is it obvious where this chapter was going? Yup, straight to the ‘provoked’ invasion of Ukraine (the title of the chapter is ‘NATO and Russia after the Cold War’). But perhaps this ‘maintain control of the international energy system’ needed to be flushed out a bit? One always finds tons of these throwaway lines in Chomsky’s books and interviews. In fact, Chomsky’s books and interviews are basically made of statements like this. These lines are meant to convey so much and yet say so little. It is as if they are tenets of some kind of religion that need no explanation since everyone who comes across them is already in the know. But it is in actually adding all these lines up that the total picture amounts to nothing.
What is this even supposed to mean? That energy, in the forms of oil, natural gas, coal, and solar panels, are being stolen by NATO countries from, what, non-NATO countries? It is true that all NATO countries import oil to some extent (coal is used less these days in the U.S., Europe, and Canada), but oil is sold on the international market, mainly through futures contracts. A few NATO countries, the U.S., Canada, Norway, are big energy producers (Norway, in particular, is now Europe’s larger supplier of fossil fuels) but try to find any record of other NATO countries getting any energy discount from them. 14 of the 20 largest oil and gas companies globally are nationalized, state controlled companies accounting for 80 percent of oil reserves and 60 percent of natural gas. And when oil and gas are imported, what goes back the other way? Money. For instance, in 2022 all told the profits from the five leading Western-based oil majors added up to $200 billion (Shell reported $44 billion, ExxonMobile $55.7 billion). Profit for Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia’s national oil company) on its own? $161 billion. Most of that came from exporting oil eastward to Asia- Aramco’s biggest customers were China, Japan, India, and South Korea.
Meanwhile Europe, where most NATO countries are located, spent the past two decades getting many of its economies hooked on energy from Russia- at its peak this lovely arrangement was supplying 40 percent of Europe’s imported natural gas. As for renewables, it is common knowledge that at this point Chinese companies dominate solar panel production. Nuclear? Russia has about 44 percent of the world’s uranium processing. U.S. uranium production declined from a peak in 1980 of 43.7 million pounds to an all-time low of 0.17 million pounds in 2019.
The point is NATO isn’t ‘maintaining control’ over any ‘international energy system’ (as if there is such a thing). Why bang on about this so hard? Well, take a quick aside in the present moment. Here was Tariq Ali, another major Left figure, writing in the New Left Review, calling the fall of Syria’s dictator Bashir Assad ‘a huge defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab World.’ From there Ali laments ‘Like Iraq and Libya, where the U.S. has a lock on the oil, Syria will now become a shared American-Turkish colony.’
Chomsky also harped on this oil theme regarding Libya (it is right here). Again, this is nonsense on stilts. When sanctions were lifted on Libya in 2003, Gaddafi’s dictatorship, through Libya’s National Oil Company (NOC), contracted with a whole gamut of Western oil companies. But Shell and ExxonMobile pulled out in 2012 and 2013. The only American company left is the much smaller ConocoPhillips, which along with the European company TotalEnergies has a joint venture with NOC for Libya’s Waha fields (NOC has a majority share in the endeavor). These fields produce around 280,000 barrels per day- barely a fifth of Libya’s total production. The Italian oil company Eni is a much bigger player in the country both historically and presently. Recently, the Spanish oil company Repsol announced it would return to the country. As for Iraq, its national oil company is busy contracting with Chinese companies (China buys nearly half of Iraq’s oil exports). In neither country does the U.S. government have any ‘lock’ on oil.
The main problem with imagining that we still live in the late 19th century is the distorted picture that emerges. After all, what are the body counts of a bunch of tin-pot dictators if they can be seen as ‘resisting’ the true global evil that is hell bent on keeping its iron grip on the entire planet’s energy.
For Chomsky/Robinson, this kind of thing extends further. As stated earlier, after ‘overlooking’ Bosnia, the book does touch on Kosovo (incidentally, in the same ‘NATO and Russia after the Cold War’ chapter that culminates in the invasion of Ukraine). As to be expected by now, the plight of Kosovo Albanians gets nary the slightest mention, only a couple of pages arguing that the NATO intervention caused their killing and displacement. They write as if there was no problem in Kosovo at all until the intervention came then, hey what do you expect- of course the Serb paramilitaries went to work. There was the standard one sentence that featured the word ‘diplomacy’, overlooking that there was years worth of it.
As for Slobodan Milosevic, the only reference he gets is: ‘Milosevic had proved difficult to control and therefore needed to be kept in line…Madeleine Albright said that Milosevic “was jerking us around.” Nobody jerks the Godfather around.’
That’s it. Milosevic would go on to be indicted on a slew of charges by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (unfortunately he died before the trial was concluded). Prior to that Milosevic was overthrown by large protests in Serbia after he blatantly tried to rig an election he lost.
The interesting thing here is that the book doesn’t even cover the main thrust of what Chomsky was saying at the time. This is another omission that seems too obvious to be accidental. What did Chomsky actually mean by Milosevic being ‘difficult to control’? In numerous interviews, Chomsky claimed it was really all about the advance of globalization. He argued:
It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated.
This Milosevic as some sort of throwback socialist bit mirrors the views of Chomsky’s longtime collaborator Edward Herman, Michael Parenti and others. It is the reason that to this day both Herman and Parenti (and others) are listed on the webpage of something called the Slobodan Milosevic International Committee. And it’s yet more nonsense. In reality, Milosevic was a nationalist who actually privatized many industries (for a thorough analysis of this bunk see this piece by historian Marco Attila Hoare, author of numerous books on the Balkans).
In this case, Chomsky did claim to have unearthed a smoking gun of sorts in the form a single sentence in the preface of a book by John Norris, who was Director of Communications for then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. The book is titled Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo. It was Talbott that provided the preface that contained the sentence Chomsky cited. According to Chomsky, all one had to do was ‘Take a look on John Norris's book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians.’ Let’s just say Chomsky absurdly misrepresented what was written. In the interest of space and time, the link to see on this is here (the link also contains a response by Norris and Talbott).
But for all his efforts Chomsky, along with Ramsey Clark, was awarded the Order of Sretenje by Serbian president Tomislav Nikolic in 2015 (Harold Pinter got it a year earlier).
Chomsky’s public career is likely over at this point. Unfortunately, his influence appears to still be far from exhausted. In a well-written piece for The New Arab from earlier this year, after false reports of Chomsky’s death circulated the internet, Sam Hamad explains ‘Noam Chomsky is still alive, but I began mourning him years ago.’ Hamad had another of those bizarre exchanges with Chomsky, this one over Syria, yet another place that where Chomsky didn’t exactly shine, showing virtually no interest or certainly no support the Syrian revolution or for the victims of Assad (Chomsky even claimed that Russia’s brutal intervention on behalf of Assad wasn’t imperialism because it was ‘supporting a government’). As this book shows, the Left as a whole should have been mourning Chomsky years ago. His continuing influence has not only led the Left down the road to numerous betrayals of its own principles, not to mention many people in need of internationalism and solidarity, but also further into nonseriousness and political irrelevancy.