Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right • The writer’s new argument for left-wing foreign policy has earned a mainstream hearing.

For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been arguably the world’s most persistent, uncompromising, and intellectually respected critic of contemporary U.S. foreign policy, seeking to expose Washington’s costly and inhumane approach to the rest of the world, an approach he believes has harmed millions and is contrary to the United States’ professed values. As co-author Nathan J. Robinson writes in the preface, The Myth of American Idealism was written 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.” It accomplishes that task admirably.

The central target of the book is the claim that U.S. foreign policy is guided by the lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, etc. For those who subscribe to this view, the damage the United States has sometimes inflicted on other countries was the unintended and much regretted result of actions taken for noble purposes and with the best of intentions.

For Chomsky and Robinson, these claims are nonsense. Not only did the young American republic fulfill its Manifest Destiny by waging a genocidal campaign against the indigenous population, but it has since backed a bevy of brutal dictatorships, intervened to thwart democratic processes in many countries, and waged or backed wars that killed millions of people in Indochina, Latin America, and the Middle East, all while falsely claiming to be defending freedom, democracy, human rights, and other cherished ideals. U.S. officials are quick to condemn others when they violate international law, but they refuse to join the International Criminal Court, the Law of the Sea Treaty, and many other global conventions. Nor do they hesitate to violate the United Nations Charter themselves.

The record of hypocrisy recounted by Chomsky and Robinson is sobering and convincing. No open-minded reader could absorb this book and continue to believe the pious rationales that U.S. leaders invoke to justify their bare-knuckled actions.

The book is less persuasive when it tries to explain why U.S. officials act this way. Chomsky and Robinson argue that U.S. foreign policy is largely the servant of corporate interests—the military-industrial complex, energy companies, and “major corporations, banks, investment firms. The picture is more complicated than they suggest. For starters, when corporate profits and national security interests clash, the former often lose out. Also, other great powers have acted in much the same way, inventing their own elaborate moral justifications. This behavior preceded the emergence of modern corporate capitalism.

Why do Americans tolerate policies that are costly, often unsuccessful, and morally horrendous? Their answer, which is generally persuasive, is twofold. First, ordinary citizens lack the political mechanisms to shape policy. Second, government institutions work overtime to “manufacture consent” by classifying information, prosecuting leakers, lying to the public, and refusing to be held accountable. Having written about these phenomena myself, I found their portrait of how the foreign-policy establishment purveys and defends its world view to be broadly accurate.

Despite some reservations, The Myth of American Idealism is a valuable work that provides an able introduction to Chomsky’s thinking. Indeed, if I were asked whether a student would learn more about U.S. foreign policy by reading this book or by reading a collection of the essays that current and former U.S. officials occasionally write in journals such as Foreign Affairs or the Atlantic, Chomsky and Robinson would win hands down.

I wouldn’t have written that last sentence when I began my career 40 years ago. I’ve been paying attention, however, and my thinking has evolved as the evidence has piled up. It is regrettable but revealing that a perspective on U.S. foreign policy once confined to the margins of left-wing discourse in the United States is now more credible than the shopworn platitudes that many senior U.S. officials rely on to defend their actions.

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