Dire Threats

Apoorva Tadepalli reviews Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky’s “The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.”

By Apoorva TadepalliNovember 15, 2024

• Politics

• Nonfiction

LAST DECEMBER, a New York Times front page went viral on X (formerly Twitter). Every story on the front page was a story about presidents and board members of Ivy League universities whose campuses were in turmoil over debates about antisemitism. That same week had seen strikes in the Gazan neighborhoods of Rafah and Khan Younis, and assassinations of medics all over Gaza; less than a week before, images had widely circulated of the mass detention of hundreds of men and boys, stripped naked and tortured. None of those stories had made it to any front page.

For the last 12 months, I have had the distinct feeling that I am losing my grip on reality. This is often the case when I listen to the government officials who brief journalists about the war in Gaza, with their maddening tendency to talk without saying anything; it’s often the case when I read American columnists both-sides-ing the situation with remarks like this:

I totally understand the distress coursing through these two communities. Arab and Muslim Americans with friends and family in Gaza or Lebanon or the West Bank worry every day about loved ones being killed or wounded with U.S.-made weapons that were transferred to Israel. Jewish Americans have had to worry every day about their kids being exposed to left-wing anti-Zionism on U.S. college campuses.

Foreign policy is usually described as impenetrably complicated, hinging on endless exigent circumstances—but it’s still worth asking why the nation state must be treated like an entity more morally defensible or legitimate than the individual, and why standards of right and wrong should not be applied or at least considered in foreign policy decisions. Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky’s new book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, asks this question repeatedly. Through exhaustive research into the way Americans—government officials, soldiers, journalists—have discussed American foreign policy over the years, Robinson and Chomsky tell a sweeping story of American aggression and amorality in language that is simple, even innocent.

Robinson and Chomsky began collaborating on this project in 2022, after years of friendship, conversations, and interviews; Robinson writes in the preface that their objective was to “draw insights from across [Chomsky’s] body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.” He organized Chomsky’s writings, interviews, debates, and correspondences into chapters that Chomsky then refined, and they worked together to “edit them into a clear statement of his position, adding elaboration and further evidence.” The book, which covers wars, missions, and operations conducted by the US across the world over the last 80 years, makes for a dry and often depressing read, but also an incredibly valuable teaching tool for teenagers and young adults as they become politically engaged.

Much of The Myth takes aim at the media, and this gives the writing an inside baseball dullness—but Chomsky has always argued that conducting US foreign policy requires waging a war of information domestically (an argument that was radical at the time and has now thankfully become more mainstream). The book is aimed at an American audience, Robinson writes, because “when American actions abroad are exposed to the judgment of public opinion, they often prove deeply unpopular.” Most of the time, however, “a sophisticated propaganda system must keep the public in the dark.”

Through long essays on US interventions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East—and elaborate power plays with China and Russia—Robinson has compiled a foundational document that would make for good introductory education for a public more resistant to this propaganda. “[W]e are not writing about issues of purely intellectual interest, but of urgent and dire threats,” he writes in the introduction. “This book is not only an attempt to set the record straight. It’s a plea for mass action by someone approaching the end of his own lifetime of activism.”

We’re taught from a young age to believe that our soldiers and elected officials act in our best interests, and that any immoral act of theirs is a necessary evil. But US history is full of pointless campaigns—flexes and petty threats against weaker nations, punishments for attempts at sovereignty—and hypocrisy: bribing mobs to overthrow a prime minister who attempted to nationalize his country’s oil in order to teach an “object lesson” to other “underdeveloped countries with rich resources”; promoting “murder, arson, bombings, and creating a general atmosphere of fear” in British Guyana in order to “humiliate those who raise their heads” even though the colony had no economic influence over the United States; destroying Panama and creating what ambulance drivers called “Little Hiroshima” simply because the leader “thumbed his nose at the United States”; massacring tens of thousands of peasants and anti-fascists who had fought the Nazis in order to prevent socialist governments from forming in Europe; recruiting and giving safe haven to former Gestapo officers who could be used as “valuable assets” in the struggle against the Soviet Union; raining bombs down on a country of 7.5 million people during a war for “no military reason” other than the fact that “we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do.”

This is not power wielded responsibly and solely for preventative purposes. This is power for power’s sake. Chomsky’s gift has always been to reduce geopolitical actions to their most basic relationships of reciprocity and equality; this book is a holistic argument that the United States perpetually operates from a position of domination, violence, and tyranny with other countries. Whether the official story is that we have to protect business interests, maintain national security, uphold the standard of living for Americans, or prevent the spread of communism, the underlying motivation for any violence inflicted on innocent people by American policies is, as James Reston wrote in The New York Times in 1966, to ensure that power is never “in the hands of men fiercely hostile to the United States.”

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Robinson is a monotonous writer, and this book is, like the story of US aggressions and interventions, at once horrific and tedious. The list of assassinations, cover-ups, violations, and lies is endless. But the book is less interesting to read from cover to cover as it is to keep as an introductory document, something to refer back to long after a first read—crammed with details from archival research, and full of the central questions that young people should be asking, ideally, when they read or think about the news: “How would we judge a given act if it were performed by a rival power rather than ourselves?” “[D]o the rules only apply to our competitors?” “Why is there so little correlation between the public’s preferences and actual policy?” “How can they treat another human like this? How can they be so cruel?” “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

“​​The world is full of suffering, distress, violence, and catastrophes,” Robinson writes. “Each person must decide: Does something concern you, or doesn’t it?”

The simplicity of this question is refreshing. To choose to live in the world that Chomsky and Robinson have always described means being concerned with everything, even if we can’t do anything. It means feeling like what is happening to people on the other side of the world is still happening in our world, and not someone else’s. It means, as the psychologist Alison Gopnik said of children, being “bad at not paying attention.”

This past January, Mohammed el-Kurd, The Nation’s Palestine correspondent, argued that ideological debates in the US are detached from reality and the “material present.” But the present forces more “pressing questions”:

What are the mental and muscular consequences of being forced to transform a taxi into a hearse? What becomes of the nurse whose shift is interrupted by the arrival of her husband’s corpse on a stretcher? […] What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be?

These are the questions that attempt, however impossibly, to place ourselves in the same world as the war, to argue, as James Baldwin did, that “every bombed village is my hometown.” This is not the framing that policymakers and mainstream media are concerned with.

That these might be overly simplistic or naive questions and statements doesn’t change the fact that it should concern us, and the next generation, that children in Laos are taught in school how to identify different bombs so that they don’t pick up one of the thousands of unexploded ones still littered across their land; that the practice of selling organs in Afghanistan has become so widespread since the United States froze the country’s assets that one settlement in Herat has become known as the “one-kidney village”; that Iraq is raising a “generation of orphans” who regularly step over unclaimed bodies on their way to school; that hundreds of thousands of Pakistani children have been deprived of healthcare because the CIA used people posing as healthcare workers in their mission to kill one terrorist; that parents in Gaza are searching unsuccessfully for psychiatrists to treat their children, who wake up in their beds with night terrors, believing themselves to be trapped under rubble; that if you went to one funeral a day for every child killed in Gaza, you would be attending funerals daily for over 30 years. These facts cannot always be our primary concern as we go about our lives and do our jobs and take care of our friends and family—but they should never be irrelevant.

Children have been especially important in directing public outrage over the assault on Gaza. The average age in Gaza is among the youngest in the world (which means, in a sense, that Gazans exceed the world average in the desire to live). A Times article about the death of eight-month-old Layla Ghandour from a tear gas attack in 2018 referred to “the rules of grief in Gaza, where private pain is often paraded for political causes.” But this seems like a cynical response to the very human impulse to feel that children should be protected and don’t belong in wars justified by more “sophisticated” reasoning; children, and images of them, are used in climate change debates, gun control debates, and genocide debates because children are disproportionately affected by these things. They contribute nothing to the problem and bear the brunt of the consequences. Describing the catastrophe of war through the experiences of children, and demanding that it’s wrong to kill children—whether or not it’s legal—is not about disingenuously trying to pull at heartstrings instead of appealing to people’s rationale, or trying to appear on the “right” side of history; it’s a rare example of an uncomplicated situation.

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It takes a kind of simplicity, even purity, to refuse to see the nuance in certain situations, to see a bully and call it a bully. Robinson boils down US policy to the “Mafia Doctrine”: “The Godfather’s word is law. Those who defy the Godfather will be punished. The Godfather may be generous from time to time, but he does not tolerate disagreement.” These descriptions of Washington, DC, or the CIA as a schoolyard bully are deliberately unsophisticated, a direct defiance of the prevailing insistence that matters of foreign policy are somehow always far too complicated for normal Americans to wrap their minds around. Children and teenagers know what bullies look like; they know when something is unfair or when someone is being a hypocrite. And Robinson is not concerned with seeming childish. (One of his more moving lines: “Snowden performed a public service. He ought to have received a promotion.”)

In the early 2000s, Ramachandra Guha, a writer and historian, called Arundhati Roy “crazy.” Roy has spent most of her writing career taking aim at every possible deserving target: mining companies, big dams, the media, multinational corporations, the War on Terror, nuclear testing, nationalism, casteism, Hinduism, colonialism, the White House. Guha, like many others, has found her tiresome and hysterical (a few years ago, one Indian journalist called Roy “the author who cried genocide”). When Frontline interviewed her about Guha’s barbs, Roy retorted: ​“[H]e’s right, I am hysterical. I am screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he [is] going Shhhh … you’ll wake the neighbours!”

Robinson is not an original reporter like Roy is, but he shares her defiance of don’t-wake-the-neighbors polite liberalism, and hysteria is a completely sane way to respond to the stream of endless horrors we are witnessing, digesting, and processing every day—children, aid workers, and peacekeepers are deliberately aimed at and shot in the heart and head; refugee camps, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods are bombed; and the US continues to violate international law by supplying arms to Israel without demanding, with any teeth, that aid be allowed into Gaza and injured patients be allowed to evacuate. With each new horror every five minutes, the previous one quickly becomes somehow less horrifying.

But to nod off to the drone of this endless stream of horrific details, reports, and images is still better than to nod off to the drone of official statements from the White House, which have been full of fluff and given the American public no real information. The Myth of American Idealism argues that it is far better to be hysterical than to not know enough to be anything at all.

“[W]e’re assuming the policy options are actually known to the public,” the authors write:

But frequently, the public is simply kept in the dark about what the government is doing and is therefore incapable of having any opinion at all. In cases like the ravaging of East Timor, the bombings of Cambodia and Laos, or the drone assassinations around the world, the public had no idea what was done in its name. The policies are not subject to public discussion, let alone put to a vote.

The book, like much of Chomsky’s own writing, is unpalatable in its misery, but Robinson states straight out what Chomsky has always advocated: It does not have to be this way.

Chomsky’s and Robinson’s writings have always emphasized that information is a valuable end in itself, and how we are allowed to learn about wars is just as important as the wars themselves. “[B]eneath what can look like a pessimistic framework is a deep love of humanity, a hatred of violence, and a firm belief that things can be different than they are today,” Robinson writes of Chomsky’s work, and the same applies to The Myth of American Idealism. There is still much to be hopeful about—and a rich tradition of social justice movements across the world to learn from—if we can resist the propaganda and “thought control” supporting the worldview of oppression to which we belong. “Many in the United States have taken to the streets, and risked their lives and livelihoods, to oppose the acts of their government,” they write, “when they have been permitted to learn about them, that is.”