‘Hegemony or Survival’: The Everything Explainer

Samantha Power, New York Times Book Review, 4 January 2004

Reviewing Hegemony or Survival:

America’s Quest for Global Dominance

Noam Chomsky

New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 278 pp.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been heard to exclaim -- with
varying degrees of shame, bewilderment and indignation -- “Why do they
hate us?” The response tends to fall between two extremes. Bush
administration officials say, in essence, they hate us for who we are.
As President Bush has put it, “They hate progress, and freedom, and
choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians,
and Jews and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.” At the
opposite end stands the M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky. “Why do they hate
us?” Chomsky asks in “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global
Dominance.” “Because of you and your associates, Mr. Bush, and what you
have done.Revered and reviled, Noam Chomsky is a global phenomenon. Indeed, if
book sales are any standard to go by, he may be the most widely read
American voice on foreign policy on the planet today. With the United
States increasingly suspect around the world -- a recent Gallup poll
found that 55 percent of citizens in Britain thought the United States
“posed a threat to peace,” while a June BBC survey found that 60 percent
of Indonesians, 71 percent of Jordanians and even 25 percent of
Canadians viewed the United States as a greater threat than Al Qaeda --
the appetite for Chomsky’s polemics is only increasing. It is but one
testament to America’s diminished standing that his most recent book,
“9-11,” a slight collection of interviews (largely conducted via
e-mail), was published in 26 countries and translated into 23 languages,
finding its way onto best-seller lists in the United States, Canada,
Germany, India, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. And at home, as mainstream
dissent dissipated in the wake of 9/11, a new generation of disgruntled
critics has turned to Chomsky for guidance.

“Hegemony or Survival” is a raging and often meandering assault on
United States foreign policy and the elites who shape it. Drawing upon
case after historical case of violent meddling (Iran, Cuba, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, Kosovo, etc.), Chomsky argues that the Bush administration’s
war on terrorism builds upon a long tradition of foreign interventions
carried out in the name of “liberation” or “counterterror,” of special
interests run amok and of disdain for international institutions that
dare to challenge American hegemony. “It is only natural,” he writes,
“that state policy should seek to construct a world system open to U.S.
economic penetration and political control, tolerating no rivals or
threats.”

Chomsky finds the Bush administration new in only two ways: the
crassness of its motives is far more transparent, and it is now playing
for far higher stakes. “Over the years, tactics have been refined and
modified,” Chomsky writes, “progressively ratcheting up the means of
violence and driving our endangered species closer to the edge of
catastrophe.” Unless American statesmen stop ranking hegemony above
survival, he says, our 100,000-year-old experiment in human life may
well be doomed.

For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America,
the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those
categorized as oppressed receive scant mention. Because he deems
American foreign policy inherently violent and expansionist, he is
unconcerned with the motives behind particular policies, or the ethics
of particular individuals in government. And since he considers the
United States the leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American
air strikes in Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry
from World Trade Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office
workers who have just sat down with their morning coffee.

It is inconceivable, in Chomsky’s view, that American power could be
harnessed for good. Thus, the billions of dollars in foreign aid
earmarked each year for disaster relief, schools, famine prevention,
AIDS treatment, etc. -- and the interventions in Kosovo and East Timor
-- have to be explained away. The Kosovo and Timor operations’ prime
achievement, he writes, was to establish the norm of resort to force
without Security Council authorization. On this both the Kosovars and
the Timorese, whose welfare Chomsky has heroically championed over the
years, would strongly disagree.

“Survival or Hegemony” is not easy to read. Chomsky’s glib and caustic
tone is distracting. He relies heavily upon quotations, but rarely
identifies the speaker or writer. The endnotes supply more frustration.
Bill Clinton’s humanitarian rationale for the Kosovo war was ridiculed
“by leading military and political analysts” in Israel, we are told, but
the citation leads only to an earlier book by Chomsky himself. When he
agrees with a claim, Chomsky introduces it with the word
“uncontroversially” or credits it to “distinguished authorities.” Those
who don’t share his viewpoint don’t simply disagree; they are the
“prevailing intellectual culture” or the “educated classes.” This is a
thinker far too accustomed to preaching to an uncritical choir.

Often he meets official falsehoods with exaggerations of his own.
President Clinton, he says, “was flying Al Qaeda and Hezbollah
operatives to Bosnia to support the U.S. side in the ongoing wars.” And
“radical Islamists” have taken over in Kosovo, leading to a “Taliban
phenomenon.” These are far-fetched claims that he doesn’t adequately
back up.

But for all that is wrong with “Hegemony or Survival,” reading Chomsky
today is sobering and instructive for two reasons. First, his critiques
have come to influence and reflect mainstream opinion elsewhere in the
world; and second, the radicalism of the Bush administration has laid
bare many of the structural defects in American foreign policy, defects
that Chomsky has long assailed.

Much blood was shed in the last century by United States forces or
proxies in the name of righteous ends. Because every state justifies its
wars on the grounds of self-defense or altruism, Chomsky is correct that
any “profession of noble intent is predictable, and therefore carries no
information.” He is also right to object to the historical amnesia that
American statesmen bring to their dealings with other states. He seethes
at the hypocrisy of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell,
who invoked Saddam Hussein’s 1988 gassing attacks in order to help
justify the recent war, but who did not see fit to explain why the
Reagan administration (which they served as senior officials) doubled
its aid to Hussein’s regime after learning of the gassings.

Chomsky also denounces the dependence of foreign policy elites on
special interests. With African agriculture ravaged by American farm
subsidies, with Israeli settlements unchallenged by Washington’s elites
and with campaign contributors to both parties landing mammoth paybacks
in overseas contracts, it is certainly well past time to sound the
alarm.

And it is essential to demand, as Chomsky does, that a country with the
might of the United States stop being so selective in applying its
principles. We will not allow our sovereignty to be infringed by
international treaty commitments in the areas of human rights or even
arms control, but we demand that others should. We rebuff the complaints
of foreigners about the 650 people who remain holed up in Guantanamo
kennels, denied access to lawyers and family members, with not even
their names released. Yet we expect others to take heed of our protests
about due process. We have “official enemies” -- those whose police
abuses, arms shipments and electoral thefts we eagerly expose (Zimbabwe,
Burma, North Korea, Iran). But the sins of our allies in the war on
terror (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan) are
met with “intentional ignorance.” Although he is typically thin on
prescriptions, Chomsky offers “one simple way to reduce the threat of
terror: stop participating in it.”

Chomsky is wrong to think that individuals within the American
government are not thinking seriously about the costs of alliances with
repressive regimes; he is also wrong to suggest that it would be easy to
get the balance right between liberty and security, or democracy and
equality -- or to figure out what the hell to do about Pakistan. But he
is right to demand that officials in Washington devote themselves more
zealously to strengthening international institutions, curbing arms
flows and advancing human rights. “It is easy to dismiss the world as
‘irrelevant,’ or consumed by ‘paranoid anti-Americanism,’” he writes,
“but perhaps not wise.”

Samantha Power is the author of “ ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the
Age of Genocide,” winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction.

[Samantha Power is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human
Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University. From 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former
Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News and World Report and The
Economist. In 1996 she worked for the International Crisis Group (ICG)
as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia. She
is a frequent contributor to The New Republic and is the editor, with
Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to
Impact. A native of Ireland, she moved to the United States in 1979 at
the age of nine, and graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law
School. She lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.]