The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World

Safeguarding democracy, the long-standing stated aim of American foreign policy, is actually cover for America’s desire to control other countries’ resources, according to this blistering polemic. Philosopher Chomsky (On Cuba) and Current Affairs editor Robinson (Responding to the Right) argue that Americans’ perception of their country as one based on principles, rather than merely the interests of its citizens, allows U.S. leaders to position the “national interest” as outweighing the rights of people abroad. Tracing this line of thinking across American foreign interventions since WWII (most of which were anti-democratic, the authors argue), they aim to show how the bald-faced imperialism of the early 20th century was papered over by this new logic of “the national interest,” which used the supposed challenges to democracy posed by communism, and later “terrorism,” as an excuse for resource-motivated adventurism. At times, Chomsky and Robinson’s perception of all forms of governance as fundamentally insincere can come off as reductive, like when they assert that the 20th-century “ruling ideologies” of the U.S. and the Soviet Union “were largely false” and that, instead, both countries were dominated by a self-interested elite. However, the authors’ top-versus-bottom analysis becomes strikingly perceptive in a final chapter analyzing how today a global elite benefits from world-killing fossil fuels. This offers rich food for thought. (Oct.)