Recently, at a hostel in Cochabamba, Bolivia, I launched into a tirade about the lack of any significant social services or safety net in my home country of the United States, services that countless other countries offer in abundance. My interlocutor, a German woman, made a pointed comment: “I see what you mean, but other countries don’t pay for the world’s freedom the way the U.S. does.” Thus began an hour-long discussion touching on Ukraine, NATO, Gaza, and Operation Condor that culminated inconclusively.
I wish I could have given her a copy of Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson’s The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, just released from Penguin Press. In around three hundred pages (plus a hundred more of meticulous citations and other endnotes), the renowned scholar and activist joins forces with the editor of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs. The two challenge what they perceive as a myth: the idealistic and noble aims and effects of United States foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Aimed most directly at a North American audience, The Myth of American Idealism strives to dispel what they view as the eponymous mythology: that the United States is devoted to promoting democracy and human rights. The authors argue that such a truism is inconsistent with the facts of American foreign policy. Instead, they assert that “the United States has typically acted with almost complete disregard for moral principle and the rule of law, except insofar as complying with principle and law that serves the interests of American elites.” Against a prevailing dogma that attributes such harm to misguided mistakes, they challenge both the relevance and the very existence of such supposed benevolence by cataloging the tangible harm that the United States has wreaked upon much of the world since assuming functional global hegemony after the Second World War.
At the onset, Chomsky and Robinson head off the potential criticism of their position as being simply anti-American, a common attack against Chomsky throughout his long career. Instead, they simply posit that their “core claim 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.”
Critics that say Chomsky is especially interested in the United States manage to see the point while missing it entirely. Yes, their focus is on the crimes of the United States, particularly given their own positionality as American citizens and subjects, but such focus does not inherently discount the actions of other states and leaders. Instead, it simply applies standards to our own country that North American popular discourse is comfortable applying to other countries while downplaying or ignoring the United States’ crimes. “No ruling powers have ever thought of themselves as evil,” Chomsky and Robinson write. “They believe they are good, and that it is their opponents who are evil. We must make sure we are not falling into the trap of believing we are on the right side simply because we have been told so.”
Part I, ironically titled “The Record: Idealism in Action,” takes a tour through a litany of American-led or otherwise condoned atrocities since the end of the Second World War. In the first chapter, Chomsky and Robinson discuss the United States’ role in numerous regime changes, atrocities, and other interventions throughout Indonesia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The authors do not only highlight the bare human cost of many U.S. policies, such as the tens of thousands murdered or disappeared by the U.S.-backed Latin American governments. They also draw attention to the disconnection between stated U.S. ideals and the country’s actions, which display a pattern of disregard for human rights concerns in their support of right-wing Latin American dictatorships friendly to North American geopolitical and economic interests.
The rest of Part I is a history of other U.S.-led crimes, including the genocidal war on Southeast Asia in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; and America’s historic and ongoing political and financial support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Well-written and thoroughly researched, these chapters are fairly standard territory for Chomsky, who has spoken and written prolifically on the issues. Readers looking for fresh perspectives on these issues may be disappointed, but such retreading speaks more to Chomsky’s decades-long consistency than any sort of intellectual simplicity or laziness. Whatever these chapters may lack in novelty, they make up for in synthetic clarity, offering an excellent primer for the novice from an anti-imperialist perspective. Though the book was completed before the events of October 7, 2023, Robinson analyzes Hamas’ attack and Israel’s retaliation in an addendum using Chomsky’s broader analysis as a framework.
Perhaps more noteworthy are the chapters on United States relations with both Russia and China, two great powers that are often pitched to the North American public as our evil enemies. They neither deny nor excuse those countries’ indisputable and heinous crimes, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s repression of its Uyghur population, but they do draw attention to the United States’s similarly indefensible actions within the same spheres. The authors highlight NATO’s post-Cold War expansion as a potential trigger for Russia’s military adventurism, and they reframe the debate on China’s alleged military aggression within the context of the United State’s own decades-long efforts to reign over the Pacific. These chapters are noteworthy in that they offer perspectives sorely lacking from most mainstream discussions surrounding Great Power conflict, perhaps even more so than popular awareness of the Middle East, Latin America, or Southeast Asia. In Chomsky and Robinson’s view, Western jostling with Russia and China seems less like a battle between good and evil and more like a global staging of the board game Risk—one where the stakes, further exacerbated by the twin threats of climate change and nuclear war, are much, much higher.
The book’s second part, “Understanding the Power System,” briefly examines the domestic origins of the United States’ foreign policy and the ways elite opinion makers help propagandize the public, either by misrepresenting American adventurism or, perhaps even more commonly, not discussing it at all. As with much of the book, most of this section is standard for Chomsky, re-communicating long-conveyed ideas like the ways the American press “manufactures consent” among the governed. Again, this is less a critique than a simple acknowledgment. What the book may lack in pure originality, it makes up for in clarity and conciseness. The Myth of American Idealism is an ideal update of classic Chomsky for 2024.
The authors conclude that the current foreign and domestic policy of the United States is an unqualified danger to the present and future wellbeing—and even survival—of human society and civilization. If we are to stand any chance of a livable, sustainable future, the slowly decaying American empire must give way not to another bloodthirsty or power-hungry hegemony, but to a multipolar world wherein nations eschew conflict for cooperation and coexistence, and where power is distributed along more democratic and egalitarian lines.
Such a conclusion is difficult to swallow, if only because the implications for our current order are so bleak. Reading the book, I often wondered whether the state of the world was quite as dire as Chomsky and Robinson make it out to be. Perhaps the United States is not quite so bad as they suggest, and perhaps our doom to a climate or nuclear apocalypse is less likely than it may sometimes appear—though I suspect such wondering is merely my own wishful thinking. What is certain is that the “myth of American idealism” heavily outweighs the kind of thorough and interrogative debunking that Chomsky and Robinson proffer. Even if they are overshooting, and I’m not sure that they are, overstatement is much preferable to understatement when the stakes are this high.
Chomsky and Robinson do not expect a panacea: only well-informed and organized popular movements demanding justice and peace, they contend, stand a chance. “Fortunately,” they write, “such courage is not lacking. The history of the world is not just a bleak compendium of atrocities, but also the story of resistance by those who refused to accept cruelty and oppression as natural, normal, or inevitable.”
The final pages of the book are a paean to the history of individuals and mass movements that have sought to combat injustice and fight for a more humane world, painting them as a source of hope to inspire continued action. This overview could perhaps be a little more robust, given both the richness of the topic and the urgency of our present crises, but even these few pages shore up the book’s ending on a note of clear-eyed and hard-won hope.
Given Professor Chomsky’s current state of health—the ninety-five year-old activist is currently recovering from a stroke—The Myth of American Idealism may be his final release. If his collaboration with Robinson is indeed a kind of activist swan song, the warning they offer about the danger of US imperialism could not be more dire, and their clarion call to action could not be more clear.
Peter Taylor is a North American writer, teacher, and translator. He is a first-year doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
