The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World (Penguin Publishing Group) - Softcover

Chomsky, Noam; Robinson, Nathan J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593656342 ISBN 13: 9780593656341

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in . . . there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.” —The New Statesman

A sharp indictment of both American foreign policy and the national myths that support it, and an urgent warning of the threat that U.S. power poses to humanity’s future

The Myth of American Idealism offers a timely and comprehensive introduction to the incisive critiques of U.S. power that have made Noam Chomsky one of the most widely known public intellectuals of all time. Surveying the history of U.S. military and economic activity around the world, Chomsky and coauthor Nathan J. Robinson vividly trace the way the American pursuit of global domination has wrought havoc in country after country.

Chomsky and Robinson offer penetrating accounts of Washington’s relationship with the Global South, its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—all justified with noble stories about humanitarian missions and the benevolent intentions of American policymakers. The same myths that have led to repeated disastrous wars, they argue, are now imperiling humanity’s future. Examining nuclear proliferation and climate change, they show how U.S. policies are continuing to exacerbate global threats.

For well over half a century, Noam Chomsky has committed himself to exposing governing ideologies and criticizing his country’s unchecked power. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to a lifetime of thought and activism.

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Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lau­reate professor in the Agnes Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics, and he is equally renowned for his incisive writings on global affairs and U.S. foreign policy. The single most cited and published living author, winner of numer­ous international awards, Chomsky has written over one hundred books, including the bestselling political works Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World?.

Nathan J. Robinson is the cofounder and editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine. He is the author of Why You Should Be a Socialist and Responding to the Right, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. Robinson holds a JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in sociology and social policy from Harvard University.

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Introduction

Noble Goals and Mafia Logic

Every ruling power tells itself stories to justify its rule. Nobody is the villain in their own history. Professed good intentions and humane principles are a constant. Even Heinrich Himmler, in describing the extermination of the Jews, claimed that the Nazis only “carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people” and thereby “suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.” Hitler himself said that in occupying Czechoslovakia, he was only trying to “further the peace and social welfare of all” by eliminating ethnic conflicts and let­ting everyone live in harmony under civilized Germany’s benevolent tutelage. The worst of history’s criminals have often proclaimed them­selves to be among humankind’s greatest heroes.

Murderous imperial conquests are consistently characterized as civilizing missions, conducted out of concern for the interests of the indigenous population. During Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, even as Japanese forces were carrying out the Nanjing Massacre, Japa­nese leaders were claiming they were on a mission to create an “earthly paradise” for the people of China and to protect them from Chinese “bandits” (i.e., those resisting Japan’s invasion). Emperor Hirohito, in his 1945 surrender address, insisted that “we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self- preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.” As the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said noted, there is always a class of people ready to produce specious intellectual arguments in defense of domination: “Every sin­gle empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the oth­ers, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”

Virtually any act of mass murder or criminal aggression can be rationalized by appeals to high moral principle. Maximilien Robespierre justified the French Reign of Terror in 1794 by claiming that “ter­ror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Those in power generally present themselves as altruistic, disinterested, and generous. The late leftist journalist An­drew Kopkind pointed to “the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy.” It is hard to take actions one believes to be actively immoral, so people have to con­vince themselves that what they’re doing is right, that their violence is justified. When anyone wields power over someone else (whether a col­onist, a dictator, a bureaucrat, a spouse, or a boss), they need an ideol­ogy, and that ideology usually comes down to the belief that their domination is for the good of the dominated.

Leaders of the United States have always spoken loftily of the coun­try’s sacred principles. That story has been consistent since the found­ing. The U.S. is a “shining city on a hill,” an example to the world, an exceptional “indispensable nation” devoted to freedom and democ­racy.4 The president is the “leader of the free world.” The U.S. “is and will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” as Barack Obama put it. George W. Bush described the U.S. as “a nation with a mission— and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace.” The U.S. government is honorable. It is capable of mis­takes, but not crimes. A crime would require malicious intent, of which we have none. The U.S. is continually deceived by others. It can be foolish, naïve, and idealistic— but it is never wicked.

Crucially, the United States does not act on the basis of the per­ceived self- interest of dominant groups in society. Only other states do that. “One of the difficulties of explaining [American] policy,” Ambas­sador Charles Bohlen explained at Columbia University in 1969, is that “our policy is not rooted in any national material interest . . . as most foreign policies of other countries in the past have been.” In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that we are good—“we” being the government (on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one). “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and jus­tice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level. The “prevailing orthodoxy” was well summarized by the distinguished Oxford- Yale historian Michael How­ard: “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, its generosity, and its goodwill since World War II.”

The fact that the United States is an exceptional nation is regularly intoned, not just by virtually every political figure, but by prominent academics and public intellectuals as well. Samuel Huntington, profes­sor of government at Harvard, writing in the prestigious journal Inter­national Security, explained that unlike other countries, the “national identity” of the United States is “defined by a set of universal political and economic values,” namely “liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets.” The U.S. therefore has a solemn duty to main­tain its “international primacy” for the benefit of the world. In the lead­ing left- liberal intellectual journal, The New York Review of Books, the former chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace states as fact that “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 Americans have long believed that the [United States] amounts to a different kind of country.” While others push their national interest, the United States “tries to advance universal principles.”

Usually, no evidence for these propositions is given. None is needed, because they are considered true as a matter of definition. One might even take the position that in the special case of the United States, facts themselves are irrelevant. Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist inter­national relations theory, developed the standard view that the United States has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom not only at home, but also across the globe, because “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has be­come world- wide.” As a scrupulous scholar, he recognized that the his­torical record is radically inconsistent with this “transcendent purpose.” But he insisted that we should not be misled by this discrepancy. We should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened is merely the “abuse of reality.”
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593656342
• ISBN 13: 9780593656341
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 417
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland