In fact, the US stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) US control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo – as happened to Cuba. Barsky, Robert, The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007) There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically important ones. The challenges today: east Asia One element of the program is a highway through some of the world’s tallest mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which will protect oil shipments from potential US interference.

How serious these offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was never entertained. Or perhaps the US was just intent on “trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose”. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice”, to adopt CIA lingo.

Who Rules the World?

Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand Nato to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest Nato summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in Nato. The wording was unambiguous: “Nato welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in Nato. We agreed today that these countries will become members of Nato.” However, Chomsky closes his deliberations with the powerful alternative question to the opening one - i.e. "What principles and values rule the world?' The assault was awful enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” imposed its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.

The fundamental question of international relations, then, is whether the US should “accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of influence in their neighborhoods”. Rachman thinks it should, for reasons of “diffusion of economic power around the world – combined with simple common sense”.

The Transatlantic Studies Association 2023 Annual Conference Panel Review: Transatlantic Memorialisation and Heritage

Some analysts believe that the new bank might turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power. There are also some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to Nato. The challenges today: eastern Europe Beginning with the “American lake”, some eyebrows might be raised over the report in mid-December 2015 that “an American B-52 bomber on a routine mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said, exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing”. The west sees Nato enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent western voices. George Kennan warned early on that Nato enlargement is a “tragic mistake”, and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions”.

Horrifying. Whether you're inclined to believe the author's (Noam Chomsky) analysis or the views of those he opposes, I doubt anyone can read unmoved this rollcall of suffering. So much violence, so many deaths. It does demand an North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind. There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive choice was large-scale violence – not with the goal of overthrowing the Taliban (that came later) but to make clear US contempt for tentative Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden. In Who Rules the World?, Chomsky’s target audience and methods differ somewhat from traditional academic treatments of US foreign policy. His analyses are concise but brief vignettes on a relatively broad range of issues relating to American power, including the Israel-Palestine conflict, the threat of nuclear war and relations with Iran. Nonetheless, a handful of common themes thread the essays together, providing answers to the question posed by the title of the book.By 1967, when the antiwar movement was becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction … [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”. So this was my first Chomsky, and I think I am a fan. He is pretty glib and glum, but justifiably. One gets the impression that there is no world in which Chomsky can be satisfied, but that should not take away from his dressing down of many valid targets of derision and ridicule.

In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s.

Conference Review: Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) Annual Conference, June 21st-23rd 2023, Northumbria University.

The world’s leading intellectual offers a probing examination of the nature of U.S. policies post-9/11, and the perils of valuing power above democracy and human rights. With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us—and to discern what they are leaving out. . . . Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening." —BusinessWeek