The Myth of American Idealism
How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
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From one of the world’s most prominent thinkers comes an urgent warning of the threat that U.S. power poses to humanity’s future as well as a sharp indictment of both American foreign policy and the national myths that support it.
The Myth of American Idealism offers a timely and comprehensive introduction to the incisive critiques of U.S. power that have made Noam Chomsky a “global phenomenon,” 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 his co-author Nathan J. Robinson vividly trace the way the American pursuit of global domination has wrought havoc in country after country – without, ironically, making Americans any safer. And they explore how dominant elites in the United States have pushed self-serving myths about this country’s commitment to “spreading democracy,” while pursuing a reckless foreign policy that served the interest of few and endangered all too many.
Chomsky and Robinson range across the globe, offering 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 policy makers. The same kinds of myths that have led to repeated disastrous wars, they argue, are now driving us closer to wars with Russia and China that imperil 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 use of military power. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to the conclusions he has come to after a lifetime of thought and activism.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 15, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593914120
- File size: 350933 KB
- Duration: 12:11:06
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 19, 2024
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.
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