We're often told that the United States is a force for good in the world and that, even when it makes mistakes, it operates out of noble intentions. But is this true? To answer such a question, we need to examine the historical record. The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, a new book co-written by Noam Chomsky and Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson, does just that. The conclusions drawn by the authors are troubling. Rather than spreading peace and democracy throughout the world, they show, the U.S. has often left a trail of bloodshed behind. And as we stare down the threats of climate change and nuclear war, the U.S. has played a large role in impeding international efforts to solve these problems. An article Robinson wrote further introducing the subject matter of the book can be found here.

Today, the editors of the magazine sit down with Robinson to talk about how the book came about and what he and his co-author hope to impart upon readers about the dangers of U.S. foreign policy—and the possibility of changing this policy through mass action.

Nathan J. Robinson 

I am joined today by my colleagues, Lily Sánchez and Alex Skopic. Today, actually, I'm going to be turning it over to the two of you. I am used to asking the questions, but today I'll be answering them. We're having this discussion to coincide with the release of a book project that I've been working on, and people who listen to or read Current Affairs might have heard me talk about it before. It’s finally coming out after three years: The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, co-authored with Professor Noam Chomsky. Let's talk about it.

Alex Skopic

I've read the book, and it turned out well. For people who are not familiar with Professor Chomsky's work or with this book in particular, what is the myth of American idealism, and how does it work?

Robinson

There's a consistent theme that runs through Professor Chomsky's work, which obviously has been a major inspiration to me. This book is in many ways an attempt to distill Chomsky's vision and critique of U.S. power. That major theme is that in U.S. political discourse, many of the criticisms of U.S. foreign policy share a certain premise. You can criticize U.S. foreign policy, but only within a certain spectrum. He points out that even critics of U.S. foreign policy argue that the United States makes mistakes, but it doesn't commit crimes. We have numerous examples of this in the book. Basically, when you talk about the Afghanistan War, it’s said, well, that didn't go well, but it was a well-intentioned war. In the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, he says it was a war begun by good men for noble reasons, but it was just a tragedy. In the case of the Iraq War: we meant well, we meant to bring democracy, and it's a shame it ended up a catastrophe. And Chomsky has always argued that a lot of U.S. policy does not consist of idealistic mistakes. In fact, oftentimes, the things that are horrifying about it are either intentional results of the policy, or at least are well understood to be likely consequences of the policy that are just ignored by policymakers.

I just want to give one wonderful example of Ezra Klein talking about Biden's policy towards Israel-Palestine. He said, "there is so much that we wanted to shape here. We wanted to avoid a regional war. We wanted to bring home the hostages. We wanted to create a political process for the Palestinians and the Israelis, to create some kind of durable peace, durable settlement, durable stability. We wanted to protect innocent Palestinians from the ferocity of Israel's response. We wanted to show that America could still influence and broker events in the Middle East. And on all of that, we have failed."

So it's a tragic failure, but a well-intentioned one. It's just a shame. Adam Johnson calls this the "stumbling empire" hypothesis: we're just trying so hard, but we stumble.

Skopic

So in other words, the myth is America's stated goals about spreading democracy and about being greeted as liberators, and all this sort of thing—that the stated goals are the actual goals.

Robinson 

Yes. One of the ways in which the book is introduced is by looking at how all of history's worst criminals had stories about how they were trying to do good. We look at the Japanese during World War Two, for instance, who said they just wanted to bring peace and expel colonial powers from Asia. They had a great story. They had a myth, and the myth was a myth of idealism, but in practice, they were power seeking. And one of the Chomskyan arguments is that much of the behavior by the U.S. state is power-seeking disguised as idealism.

Lily Sánchez 

First, I want to say congratulations to you and Noam Chomsky on this book. It's excellent. I think this must be for you a really special accomplishment on both a personal and professional level. I think everybody should read it. And even though Noam Chomsky can't be here with us today, we're certainly thankful for his lifetime of work and send well wishes to him and his family. 

As readers and listeners may know, the Current Affairs house style is to approach a skeptical reader, someone who doesn't already believe us. So what is your pitch to a skeptical reader to read this book, somebody who, in other words, genuinely believes that the United States does things out of noble ideals, that the United States is spreading democracy and is one of the greatest forces for good in the world? What is your pitch to that person?

Robinson 

Well, you're right, that's always been something we've tried to do at Current Affairs. And so with the Why You Should Be a Socialist book, that was pitched at people who weren't socialists about why you should be a socialist. I don't like leftist writing for leftists. And one of the things I was actually trying to help Professor Chomsky with was to think about, how do we reach readers who wouldn't naturally be inclined to pick up a book by Noam Chomsky? He tends to use—and still uses in this book—pretty strong rhetoric and language about how the United States is a leading terrorist state. My thinking is always that when people hear that, they are going to think you're crazy, even if you have arguments. So how do you make it so that they give you a fair hearing?

And so in helping him with this book, I thought that a major part of my role was to answer precisely that question: how are we going to actually draw people in? And so that's one of the reasons we don't begin with the United States. We begin with—the opening line is—“every ruling power tells itself stories to justify its rule.” And then we point to other powers where the reader would agree that that country was not acting idealistically but had told itself an idealistic story.

And then what we say is, okay, if that's true, then you can't tell from the idealistic story on its own whether it's true, because even if it weren't true, they'd still tell the story. So when we start to look at our own country, that means we have to test the story against the facts. We invite the reader then to go on a journey with us around the world through the entire post-war period to look at the facts and see how they measure up to the story, and then the skeptical reader can draw their own conclusions about whether they think that the facts that have been presented line up with their preexisting ideas.  

Skopic

There are common misconceptions about Chomsky's work. You got into a sort of public dispute with the blogger Noah Smith a little while ago about this idea that the United States is just uniquely malevolent or is the source of all the problems in the world. Smith said that Chomsky's work could be summed up as “America bad.” But what you seem to be saying in the book is, that's not what Chomsky is saying. Chomsky is essentially saying that America is a state like any other state, that it is not uniquely good. Is that more or less accurate?

Robinson 

That's accurate. As I've mentioned in response to Lily's question, my role in the production of this book was to try to help Chomsky package these ideas. And one of the things I really wanted to do in my contribution in terms of organizing these ideas was to make it really clear that the misconceptions about his views aren't true. Smith said, and he reflects a common position, that Chomsky's view is basically "America bad," as you said, and also that everything we do is bad, we are the source of all the problems in the world, and there aren't other independent bad agents and actors in the world. And the thing is, you could actually listen to Chomsky a lot of the time and get the impression that he believes that because he's mostly talking about terrible things the United States has done. And so you might come away and think, well, all you're talking about is bad things America has done, so clearly, your worldview is just that America is bad. And when you actually listen and read carefully, you realize it's not at all what he's saying.

The reason he spends so much time on the United States is not because it's the only actor in the world, but because it's his country, and he believes that it's our responsibility to criticize our own government more than a government that we don't have any control over. Also, he constantly criticizes other countries' crimes. And in fact, in the last Current Affairs interview I did with him, I asked him about this, and he said, specifically, we are no different from others. And he started talking about the British Empire and how bad it was and how much they thought they were bringing wonder and light to the world when they were committing heinous atrocities.

And the other point is that we're talking about the American state, rather than America, meaning the people of the United States. In the book, there's a little bit about corporate power, but it's mostly about the power of the state abroad. And to say that this is a criticism of America, as if this is going after our neighbors, our friends, the people who comprise the country, that's a misconception too. This is not an anti-American book. It's a critique of the way the power of the U.S. state has been wielded abroad.

So there are these misconceptions. But interestingly, because Chomsky thinks that he's going to be distorted and misrepresented no matter what, he generally doesn't put in much effort to clear this up unless someone asks about it specifically. I wanted to make sure that this book was really clear about those things because I think there are so many people like Noah Smith who—maybe acting in bad faith, maybe not—are completely wrong.

Sánchez 

You wrote an article in November 2023, "Why You Should Primarily Focus On Your Own Country's Crimes." You write that we're responsible for what is done in our name and what we can most affect. I would direct readers to check that out. It's a pretty short piece, but it explains more about why the focus is on U.S. foreign policy and the effects of foreign policy.

I want to ask you about the sources in the book. As we're always saying at Current Affairs, it's really important to read books, and it's really important to read books that have not just bibliographies but citations and good endnotes that source their facts.

Robinson 

What's [Current Affairs News Briefing co-writer] Stephen Prager's phrase? If it's not hyperlinked, it didn't happen.

Sánchez

Yes, exactly. I love that. I think that's a great philosophy to have. And so you've got about 100 pages of end notes, which is great. You have a lot of direct quotations, so there can be no doubt about where claims are coming from, about who said what. In the process of making this book, there were all these Chomsky books that came in and out of the Current Affairs office because you were reviewing all of Chomsky's past work. You'd be trying to track down some source that he mentioned in some end note of some page of some book that he wrote 20 years ago. So what I want to know is, what was the most interesting, strange, or notable source or fact that you came across in doing the research for this book?

Robinson 

Well, there are things that I found out in the course of producing this book with Chomsky that I didn't know about. There were some disturbing things. There were the horrible surprises, like the section on the U.S. support for the Indonesian massacres in 1965 and '66—it's just so horrific and such an under-discussed atrocity, and I didn't know much about it—and the level of our support for Saddam Hussein. So there were things like U.S. crimes that were discovered.

One of the most interesting sources, though, was in a book he wrote about Latin America in the '80s. It has a source that says that Lyndon Johnson once told the Greek Prime Minister, your parliament is a flea—there's some quote like, the United States is an elephant and your parliament is a flea, and if you don't watch it, essentially, you might not have a parliament anymore. Just this incredible mafia-like statement. And I thought, this is crazy, so I tracked it down. He got it from a book by Christopher Hitchens about Cyprus that's, I think, out of print. And then I looked at Hitchens' endnotes to try to find the original. The original was from a memoir by a guy named Philip Deane, I believe, from the '70s, who was told directly this account of the conversation by someone who was in the room. And the book is a memoir about his time in Korean prisons and the Greek government. He has this quote. So I had to track down the source of this crazy quote because I thought, where is this quote from? This cannot be real.

And the other one was another Lyndon Johnson quote, which was when he was asked by a reporter why we're in Vietnam, and he literally pulls out his penis and shows it to the reporter and says, this is why. And I actually had to email a historian, Christian Appy, who's one of the leading Vietnam War historians, about this quote specifically. And I asked, is this reliable? Did this happen? And he said, actually, yes, it comes from a fairly reliable source. It is well-documented in the Johnson literature. So there were these crazy things that I was checking, where I was trying to find out, is this true? Because Chomsky cites so many things in his endnotes, and he reads so much, and you're like, that can't be real! And then it is real.

Sánchez 

Yes, these little nuggets make appearances in your articles. In fact, I think just that point about Johnson [makes it into a] piece about the motivations of powerful men to do things, and how they justify [them].

Robinson 

There was another one that the editor at Penguin didn't even believe, which was from the New York Times. Again, I got this from an old thing that Chomsky had written. When the Iranian government was overthrown in 1953 and the Shah was installed, the New York Times ran an editorial saying that this is a lesson to other countries that go “berserk with fanatical nationalism”—basically, if you get too nationalistic, we'll do a coup. And the editor of Penguin said, this isn't a real New York Times quote. I had to go buy the original article. And I said, actually, it's literally here in the New York Times archive.

Sánchez

I'm glad you brought up this concept of nationalism because I wanted to ask you about this. This comes up repeatedly throughout the book. You mentioned that a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy is an intolerance for what you say are nationalistic regimes in other states, regimes that are responsive to popular demands to improve living conditions for the masses and countries that wish to benefit themselves from their own natural resources. That just seemed to come up repeatedly. And that was really concerning to me as a leftist because I feel like that's the core of the left project domestically, to improve the living conditions of people in our society, and also to benefit from our own wealth, our own resources, the wealth created by our own labor, as opposed to it all going to corporate profits. And so, we on the left talk about how foreign policy and domestic policy are not really isolated. Knowing what U.S. foreign policy is, and how we have reacted to these other nationalistic regimes, what does that say about our own efforts here to do those things domestically?

Robinson 

There are a bunch of quotes in the book from the Cold War era, from the '50s and '60s, where internally in the White House and the State Department, they're discussing the “Communist threat,” and they often talk quite candidly about how one of the problems is that there are these movements in these countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, that believe that—there's one quote, I can't remember exactly who it's from, one of the Kennedy administration officials or something—the beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country, and that's what they mean by Communism. That's the threat, that these countries will be taken over by people who have this wild belief. And indeed, they do see that as a wild belief, both domestically and in other countries. It's a wild belief in the United States that our resources should be used to benefit the domestic population as a whole.

And that belief is threatening wherever it pops up against what Chomsky would call concentrated power. That is to say, the United States is a democracy, and Saudi Arabia and Egypt are dictatorships, but both of them have concentrated power centers. They have leadership that is not particularly responsive to the demands of the people and does not believe in that principle that the country's wealth should be to each according to their need. And so you see that, in the Arab world, the dictators are threatened by the population, and one of the few reasons that the dictators in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for instance, are pro-Palestine is because they fear popular pressure, not because they're particularly compassionate towards Palestinians themselves. There's always this potential for the explosion of popular sentiment where people realize that they don't want to be governed by concentrated power, that they do want this principle to be applied, and sadly, U.S. leaders across decades—I think we document it pretty well—have always feared people, here or elsewhere.

Skopic 

Yes, and one of the themes that keeps coming up again and again in the book is what you call the punishment of "successful defiance," a country that does depart from the interests that powerful people in the U.S. would like it to follow, like corporate interests that want the natural resources for themselves, rather than the indigenous people. The U.S. policy is more about squashing that defiance and not allowing one country to serve as an example to other countries that the U.S. can be successfully defied. And one of the counterintuitive things that you bring up, which makes more sense when you think about it, is that the U.S. actually cares more about the defiance of its agenda and about nationalism in small, seemingly insignificant countries than it does in big ones. Could you explain more why that is?

Robinson 

Yes. If a small country can defy you, then it really shows you to be powerless, to be a paper tiger. So you've got to make sure a small country, like Panama—we talked about the invasion of Panama in the book, which is mostly forgotten. The invasion of Panama, which was blatantly illegal, occurred because the dictator of Panama was essentially brazenly defying the United States. He was harassing U.S. troops in the country and was ostentatiously thumbing his nose at George H.W. Bush. The idea is that we have to maintain our credibility, and U.S. presidents actually say this openly. And so if we have to invade Panama and depose its leader in order to do that, then that's what we have to do.

In the Iraq chapter, we talk about the Gulf War and the way that George H.W. Bush also forewent the possibilities for a diplomatic resolution of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, in part, because it was an opportunity to assert American dominance. He saw that we would fairly easily be able to push back Saddam Hussein, and George H.W. Bush at one point—this was the title of another Chomsky book—said, What We Say Goes. He said, we have to establish that what we say goes.

The phrase "successful defiance" is not our phrase. That phrase, again, I think, comes from some Cold War official talking about, I think, Cuba. The problem with Castro was not that he was allied to the Soviet Union so much as the fact that he was just off the coast of the United States. Castro came to power by overthrowing the U.S.-backed dictator and then immediately began doing things the United States government didn't like and didn't want, such as nationalizing U.S.-owned property in Cuba. And if he was able to do this just a short ways off the coast of the United States—some poor little island can just do whatever it wants—that really exposes the "most powerful country in the world" as being pretty toothless. People see the United States as being a dominant power, but if we can't even coerce the little next door island, then what are we?

Skopic 

You said there are all these State Department documents from the '50s, '60s, and '70s just openly saying that this is the goal, to preserve American prestige, as they call it. To prevent the creation of an example to other countries that they can imitate, and there's no mention in these documents of our supposedly cherished values, like democracy or human rights. Those are all examples from the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Do you think that's still the case today? Has anything changed?

Robinson 

I don't think so. I think that you would find, obviously, that a lot of the documents are not available yet. The great thing about going back to that period is that you can go on the State Department's website, the Office of the Historian, and read all the internal memos and conversations and everything everyone wrote to each other, and it's kind of amazing, actually. We have a whole page of the book devoted to reprinting a piece of a memo from 1958 about whether the United States should help Britain retain control of Kuwait by force, and we cite it to show how the reasoning process works, which is to say that the interests of the people of Kuwait just didn't even enter into the discussion. And I think you probably see that today.

We have chapters on some of the most important areas of conflict in the world today, such as China and Taiwan and Ukraine. And I think you would find that despite all the highfalutin public rhetoric about how much we just want to help the Taiwanese preserve their democracy, and how we want to help the Ukrainians preserve their democracy, that internally, a lot of the discussion is not about the interests of the people in those countries but is rather about the power position of the United States in what's called the Indo-Pacific or in Europe. These are the major considerations. It's about what this will mean for us and for U.S. interests and not for the interests of the people in the countries we're talking about.

Skopic 

Yes, and now that you mention Taiwan, that's actually one of the parts of the book that people might find the most controversial or contentious. The popular image right now, and in the media certainly, is that the situation between China and Taiwan is very simple: China is just the great big aggressor, Taiwan is the plucky little underdog, and the U.S. ought to support Taiwan. But you argue that it's a little more complicated than that, and Chomsky argues this, that U.S. policy towards Taiwan may actually be making a Chinese invasion more likely. Can you explain that?

Robinson 

Yes. So, first, there’s this wonderful, simple story about, as you say, how we love to stick up for the plucky little democracies (like in Vietnam, where it actually turned out that we were supporting a dictatorship) but without discussing any of the actual facts about how the situation arose. In Taiwan, there are a few kind of complicating facts. One of the complicating facts is the way that the dispute between China and Taiwan actually arose, which is to say that the losing party of the Chinese Civil War fled to Taiwan and claimed that it was the legitimate Chinese government in exile, and in fact claimed to have sovereignty over all mainland China. And I believe Taiwan still formally claims to be the legitimate ruler. I didn't talk about this much because it's quite obvious that the Republic of China is not going to displace the People's Republic of China. But the fact that this dispute arose this way meant that it's slightly more understandable that China sees this as part of their territory, because Taiwan also considers there to be one China. In fact, the One China policy is that both Taiwan and China recognize that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of China.

And so an analogous situation we could think of is if the losing party in our own Civil War retreated to a piece of the United States, retreated to Key West, and then claimed that Key West was the legitimate government in exile. It's quite understandable that, over time, these societies would diverge, and there'd be a sovereignty dispute. The mainland government would be trying to get back the territory that it felt it still legitimately controlled.

So it's a little bit of a complicated situation, and more so than just democracy versus autocracy. And the way that the United States, for many decades, kind of dealt with this was to try to avoid making moves that would cause China to feel more inclined to reintegrate Taiwan by force. And so that was the sort of delicate One China policy that we said we agreed to. We would only recognize Taiwan in limited ways. We kept up what was called strategic ambiguity about whether we would fight to defend Taiwan. And what has been done recently is make very strong assertions, essentially, that we would support Taiwanese independence in the fight against China, and making moves like shoring up alliances with neighboring countries and flooding military equipment in.

What's going on with China is not controversial. It's what is called in international relations the "security dilemma," where two countries make moves that each perceives as being a defensive move but that the other perceives as being an offensive move. So the United States starts shoring up and flooding weapons into Asia. Well, we interpret this as an effort to make sure that we're defending people against Chinese aggression. China interprets this as U.S. aggression. China therefore escalates in response, which is interpreted as proof of Chinese aggression.

The same thing would happen, say, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we discuss in the book. The Soviets put weapons in Cuba. Now, they could say that that was a purely defensive move. They were only putting weapons in Cuba like we're helping put weapons in Taiwan. They were only doing it to defend against U.S. aggression against Cuba, to defend against the possibility of a U.S. invasion. We interpreted this as a hostile act that we were willing to go to war over.

And so China is no different from the United States in this respect. So oftentimes, one of the things we plead with people to do is to try to understand U.S. foreign policy through the eyes of those who are on the other side of it.

Sánchez 

Another big theme of the book is that the Washington consensus on foreign policy is highly bipartisan, with both the Republicans the Democrats believing that the U.S. should dominate the world. We're in an election year; it's just a few weeks away. We have somebody like Joe Biden, who has been known for his empathy, or Kamala Harris, who has been known to kind of change her rhetoric a little bit to acknowledge Palestinian suffering. But is there really any meaningful difference between the parties in this area? Are they just completely interchangeable?

Robinson 

There is a rhetorical difference, as we know. In fact, we talk in the book about how U.S. foreign policy is talked about as if it takes wild swings from Kissingerian realism to Wilsonian idealism, whereas the policies are often the same. Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti. We talk about the Clinton administration's completely cynical bombing of Kosovo. We talk about the drone war under Obama. Now, there are differences in that I do think it is the case that someone like Donald Trump is even less concerned with the rights of, for example, Palestinians or civilians killed by drones. We saw that when Trump came into power, the transparency around the drone program was worsened even more so than under Obama, and the civilian casualties went up further. So you do see some differences between Democrats and Republicans, but you see more stability than difference.

I think the guarantee of endless U.S. weapons aid to Israel is consistent across all presidents. Now, Bill Clinton genuinely wanted the Palestinians to have a state, I think, but he wasn't willing to pressure Israel to give Palestinians anything like what they deserved and needed. There's a difference between that and President Trump, who just doesn't give a shit about Palestinians at all. So there are some differences in the policies, but between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, there is more similarity than difference in that both of them are essentially supportive of Israel's dispossession of Palestinians, or at least unwilling to pressure Israel to reverse course. So with Kamala Harris, I think you will see some differences between what she and Donald Trump would do around the world, but most of those differences would be greater professions of compassion for people.

The Democratic and Republican postures towards China, as we illustrate in the book, have been pretty similar, actually. And we cite them—even the New York Times saying, wow, there's been so much continuity. In the Biden administration, they preserved so much of the Trump administration's foreign policy, and they act surprised by that. Well, what we argue is that continuity is the norm.

Skopic 

Right. And you mentioned that it's the rhetoric of people in both parties, and the Democrats more so, that they profess this myth of American idealism. They say we care very much about humanitarian rights. We care about the Palestinians. We care about democracy. When politicians like Kamala Harris or Tim Walz or Joe Biden say things like that, do you think they believe it themselves? Do they think that's what they're doing, or do they know that they're saying that as a pretext for their real aims? And does it matter?

Robinson 

Well, I don't think we are able to know. I think that is unknowable, because I don't think you can really determine whether people are sincere. And I think that it doesn't matter terribly much, because what matters is the results of the policy. One of the reasons that we talk about how every committer of evil acts has a story about how it's actually for the good of the people, their own victims—with some exceptions—is that it doesn't matter. You can see, when you look at those cases, why it doesn't matter that much if they meant it.

So, does it matter to us if Vladimir Putin thinks he's fighting Nazis in Ukraine? The example Chomsky uses is, Does it matter if Mao didn't intend to starve all those people? I guess it matters that he thought that was an accident—genuinely an accident, and he was not trying to starve the people of his country. Maybe it distressed him when it happened, you could say, but the policy is still his fault, and he imposed a policy that had this predictable consequence, and we blame him for what happened as a result of it.

And I think that is the argument that Chomsky makes: how we should evaluate political actors is not by asking, did they mean well? Because maybe the Japanese did really believe that their dominance over Asia would be good for Asia. Maybe they believed that. Maybe Kamala Harris believes that she cares a lot about Palestinians, but the actual choices that she makes are things like refusing to meet with the families of victims in Gaza. So you evaluate her by what she does because you can't psychoanalyze and find out whether she's sincere about the professions of benign intent.

Sánchez 

One thing I wanted to ask you about is the emphasis in the book on existential threats, including nuclear war and climate. This is a part that I think a reader going into the book, especially a skeptical reader, might not see coming. Now, in Current Affairs, you've written quite a bit about the threat of nuclear war, and it's a threat that I think seems to be really either ignored or just downplayed or almost even encouraged by the media punditry class. There was this article you wrote in 2023 about this op-ed Mitt Romney had written about how we should expect and prepare for Russia to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and how we're going to respond to it. And you're like, wait, what? This is a thing we should be preparing for, not trying to stop? And this is really striking to me because the threat of nuclear war is something that's obviously been with us for more than half a century and yet is not taken really seriously in the media, I don't think. And you mentioned climate as well. There is some discussion about it, and then there's the way that it's distorted and downplayed. You've written a lot about how the New York Times and other media outlets don't even mention that fossil fuels are the cause of the problem, or they're sponsored by these corporate polluters. So there's a different thing going on with climate, but these are two terrible threats, and somehow we just kind of live with them. The nuclear thing, especially, is really fascinating to me. This book and your writing really got me thinking about how we just don't even seem to really be frightened by it, yet it's there. And so, my question for you is, what are your thoughts on how and why this awareness or this concern about nuclear weapons just doesn't exist? On page 213 of the book, you say mainstream debate about our nuclear policies is essentially zero.

Robinson 

Yes, not even brought up. Interestingly, in Britain, it is brought up because there's a standard question that's asked of candidates for prime minister, which is, would you be willing to press the nuclear button and start a nuclear war? And Jeremy Corbyn was lambasted because he wouldn't; he wasn't willing to commit to starting a nuclear war. Someone like Liz Truss, of course, responded: yes, I'd press that button—of course I'd press that button! Because if you wouldn't press the button, then you don't care about the national security or something. They have a really demented discussion of it over there.

It's almost better to not talk about it at all. But why don't we? It's still something that I don't think we resolve in the book and that I don't know the answer to. All we can document is that this is an incredibly real, serious threat to all life on Earth. We are, in part, the cause of this problem. In fact, we are probably the major part of the cause of this problem because, first, we invented the weapons. Second, we're the only country that's ever dropped them on anyone. We also spurned efforts to get rid of them entirely in the early days because we liked the power that they gave us to coerce other countries. We also have spurned efforts to get rid of, for example, all nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I just read this week that Iran has long been on board with a plan to get rid of all nuclear weapons, not just to abandon its own nuclear weapons program, but to have no nuclear weapons in the whole Middle East, and the United States refuses to endorse that for the obvious reason that Israel has secret nuclear weapons, and we don't want Israel to have to get rid of its nukes.

The U.S. policy, the U.S. strategy, has long accepted nuclear weapons as legitimate, unlike China—I can't remember if they adjusted this recently, but many countries have a “no first use” policy. They would not be the first country to use nuclear weapons. The United States does not have a “no first use” policy. So one reason that we probably don't talk about it is that if we talked about it honestly, we would have to confront the fact that our presidential administrations are in large part responsible for the fact that the whole world now lives under the sword of Damocles, under this horrifying threat on a truly unimaginable scale, so we argue that we should talk about it more.

Skopic

I think that brings us to another really important question that comes up in the last pages of the book. You call the book a “plea for mass action.” A lot of the book is about pointing out that U.S. foreign policy is not really as altruistic as it claims and that it poses this enormous threat to the world, both through nuclear crisis and through the fact that we are not cooperating with other countries on the climate crisis. Given that you know these decisions are being made by the foreign policy elite in both parties, and to ask a question that's been asked before: what is to be done? When you set up a plea for mass action, what can people practically do about this when their leaders are behaving this way?

Robinson 

Well, governments are afraid of their populations when they rise up because ultimately, governments can't survive if the population turns against them. They have soldiers, they have police, but ultimately, if you lose the consent of the governed, at some point, you're going to be toppled. And so popular uprisings do change things. It's very difficult.

For example, the Vietnam War protest movement contributed towards the end of the war, which was dragged out, but it contributed. But one of the things it did was it made it so that successive U.S. presidents were very reluctant to launch new wars. It lasted for about 20 years in what's called the Vietnam Syndrome, which was the reluctance to go to war that developed after the Vietnam debacle. That's what Chomsky argues was the reason that Ronald Reagan didn't actually invade Central America with U.S. troops, that the popular revulsion at Vietnam made that impossible. And we see now, actually, that the unpopularity of the Iraq War means that even the Republicans have had to posture as anti-war. It might, in fact, prevent us from getting into a war with Iran. It could still happen, but people like John Bolton are kind of partially discredited by the anti-war movement's efforts to expose the crimes of the Bush administration.

And so I think with the popular uprisings for Palestine, it's easy to be cynical about things like the Uncommitted Movement and Harris just making rhetorical commitments, but the Biden administration has done certain things. It's worked to some degree. There have been policy changes, like how the Biden administration did pressure Israel to not starve the population of Gaza, to let in some aid, and that happened in part because it was clear that people would be completely disgusted by it. Now, you could say they're still fully supportive, and yes, it's true, but things would be different in the absence of popular movements. So the more there are popular movements that exert real pressure on states—if the Palestine movement were five times as large as it is now, I actually do think you'd see a change in Biden administration policy. If it really became clear that the Democratic Party could not function because they were causing so much popular discontent and revulsion, I think you would probably see they would have to act differently.

I'd love to get both of your thoughts. You've interviewed me, and I've jabbered for a while, but I wonder, Lily and Alex, if you want to give thoughts that you had after reading this book.

Sánchez 

I highly recommend the book. One of the things I appreciate, and that I've said before, is how well-documented it is. For the skeptical reader who's really asking, what happened, what was going on behind the scenes, what were the motivations, and is this really true?, it's all documented. It's all there. And I think that's really important for the kind of argument that is being made. I think a lot of skeptical readers might bristle at it, but I think that it's an important read. And as you say at the end, even though it's very dark times and very dark material, I don't feel, as a reader, that the book made me feel bad or down. In fact, it is hopeful because you and Chomsky do emphasize at the end that ordinary people can get involved in movements to change things. And in fact, that's what we must do. So I think that the moral imperative to act comes across really strongly in the book, and I really appreciated it, and I recommend it to everybody. Buy one for your family members. And thank you for writing this, both of you.

Skopic 

I was going to say something similar, and I'm glad you mentioned that it does end on a hopeful note. A lot of the book is not necessarily what you'd call easy reading, especially when you're talking about things like the Indonesian massacres and the horrors in Gaza right now. A lot of it is bleak, but it does end on—and has throughout it, even—this note of hope. Because what it emphasizes is that the foreign policy elite, the power elite, that are responsible for this policy are very powerful in some ways—they exert a great deal of control over the world—but they are not invincible, and they are not even particularly competent, always. A lot of the time they're sort of buffoonish, like with President Johnson and his, ah, Johnson. And the myth of American idealism is to some extent fading. Even the existence of a book like this shows that not everyone believes it, and that people are beginning to see through it, so I think that is notable and worth carrying further.

Robinson 

Yes, and it's not anti-idealism. We're pro-idealism. We think you should be idealistic. It's about a particular myth about this country's foreign policy. We've already had a couple of reviews, and I forget which it was—LitHub or something—that said, Chomsky critiques the U.S. attempts to spread democracy around the world. No, we're not criticizing attempting to spread democracy. Our position on that is the Gandhi position on Western Civilization, that it would be a good idea and we should spread democracy. The problem is that it's a lie. The problem is that the ideals are a myth, that they should be real. We should believe in these things that we say we believe in.

Sánchez 

That's a good ending note.

Robinson 

Thank you both so much for reading it. It has been, as you mentioned, a highlight of my professional life as a writer so far. Because, obviously, I was radicalized by reading Chomsky. People might be curious about how the book came about. If people don't know, Chomsky has long been a subscriber to Current Affairs and emailed me when his magazine didn't show up. And I, like many people, struck up a correspondence with him. I've always wanted a good Chomsky book that I could give to anyone to introduce them to his work and his critique. The only books like that are a little out of date now—they're from the '90s. They're great, but I wanted something that was updated for the world of 2024, and so I approached him, and I asked, would you be willing to do this? I can do a lot of work on it, but I need you to collaborate with me on it so we can take all the stuff that you believe in and shape it, organize it, update it, and give it new sources. I'm very grateful he was willing to do that, and we spent about a year on it together. And then, unfortunately, he suffered a serious stroke, and that was towards the end of completing the manuscript. I was left to polish it up and sort out the remaining pile of notes myself, which I did afterward. And finally, it's approaching publication. So I hope everyone picks it up and gives it to your skeptical family members and turns them on to Noam Chomsky.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.