(upbeat music) - Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor chief of Current Affairs magazine. I am joined today by my colleagues, Lily Sanchez, hello Lily. - Hey everyone. - And Alex Scopek, hello Alex. - Hello there. - I think it's your first time on the Current Affairs podcast, isn't it, Alex? - It is, yes. - Welcome, welcome. If people haven't read Alex's brilliant articles in Current Affairs, there are lots of them on many, many different topics. I'm meant to have you want to ask about your articles before about the Stalin or dollar stores or graffiti. But today actually, I'm gonna be trying to get over to the two of you because I am used to asking the questions. 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 from, who listened to a read Current Affairs might have heard me talk about before finally coming out after three years. It's the myth of American idealism, how U.S. foreign policy endages the world, though authored with President Chomsky. So let's talk about it. - Alex and Christine, maybe you want to say stuff. You've read it now, right? - Yeah, as I've read the whole thing and it's turned out well, I think. But so the first thing I want to ask about it is, for people who maybe are not familiar with President Chomsky's work or with this book in particular, the title, "The Myth of American Idealism." What is the myth of American idealism? And how does it work? - Yeah, so a consistent theme that runs through President Chomsky's work, which obviously has been a major inspiration to me. And this book is in many ways an attempt to distill his vision and his critique of U.S. power. A major theme of that has always been that in U.S. political discourse, many of the criticisms of U.S. policies, U.S. foreign policy. Even the criticisms kind of share a certain premise. So you can criticize U.S. foreign policy, but only within a certain spectrum. And he points out that even critics of U.S. foreign policy argue that the United States makes mistakes, it doesn't commit crimes. We have lots of examples of this in the book, but basically it's like when you talk about the Afghanistan war, you go, "Well, that didn't go well," but it was a well-intentioned war. The Vietnam War was talked about in the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, he says it was a war begun by good men for noble reasons, but it was just a tragedy, the Iraq War. We meant well, we went meant to bring democracy, it's a shame, it ended up a catastrophe. And Chomsky has always argued that in fact a lot of U.S. policy is not idealistic mistakes. In fact, oftentimes the things that are horrifying about it are either intentional results of the policy or at least well understood likely consequences of the policy that are just ignored by policy makers. And I just wanna give one wonderful example that was just in the paper, which is Ezra Klein talking about Biden's policy towards Israel Palestine. And I think this was just today or the day before. And he said, "There is so much 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 of 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. "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, we're trying so hard, "but we stumble anyway." - So in other words, the myth is that 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 actuals. - Yeah, 'cause when you look at the intro to the book, one of the ways in which it's introduced is 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 II, for instance, who said they just wanted to bring peace to Asia and expel colonial powers from Asia, and 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 Chomsky arguments is that much behavior by the US state is power-seeking disguised as idealism. - Okay, so while we're on that note on the title, I have a question for you. First, I wanna say though, just congratulations to you and Noam Chomsky on this book. It's excellent, and just to congratulate you both, I think this must be for you, right? Like a really special accomplishment on both personal and professional level. So I just wanted to say that, and I think everybody should read it. And even though Noam Chomsky can't be here with us today, we're certainly thankful for all of his lifetime of work, and sent him well wishes to him and his family. So my question is this. So your title is the myth of American idealism, how US foreign policy endangers the world. And as readers and listeners will know, the current affairs house style is to approach a skeptical reader. So 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, and that the United States is spreading democracy, and that we are a force for good in the world, and that we're one of the greatest forces for good in the world. What is your pitch to that person? - Well, you're right. That's always been something we've tried to do at current affairs. And so with the socialism book, the why you should be a socialist book, that was pitched to people who weren't socialists. It was 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 in this 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, still in this book, pretty strong rhetoric and language about how the United States is a leading terrorist state he would describe it. And my thinking is always, well, 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 don't? Or 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 its own stories to justify its rule. And then we point out other powers where the reader would agree that that country was not acting idealistically but told itself an idealistic story. And then what we say is, well, 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 wasn'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. And we sort of invite the reader then to go on a journey with us around the world through the Empire Post-War period to look at the facts and see how the facts measure up to the story. And then the reader, the skeptical reader, can draw their own conclusions about whether they think that the facts that have been presented line up with their pre-existing ideas. Whether it works, I don't know. - So to sort of go off that one of the common sort of misconceptions about Chomsky's work and you go into a sort of public dispute with the blogger Lewis Smith a little while ago about this. But one of the common misconceptions about Chomsky's work is that his point is that America or 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 is that in the book and now is that that is not what Chomsky is saying. That Chomsky is essentially saying just that America is a state like any other state that it is not uniquely good. Is that more or less accurate? - That's accurate. As I mentioned, one of the things that I'm trying to do in response to Lewis Christian, I point out that part of my role in the production of this book was to try and help Chomsky package these ideas. 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 that, and he reflects a composition, that Chomsky's view is basically America bad, as you said, and also that the United States is, everything we do is bad and also that we are the source of all the problems in the world, that we cause all the problems. 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 that impression, the impression that he believes it, because he's mostly talking about terrible things the United States has done. And so you might come away and go, well, all you're talking about is bad things America has done. Clearly, your worldview is just that America is bad. And when you actually listen carefully and read carefully, you realize that's not at all what he's saying, that it is in fact, first off, 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 the government that we don't have any control over. And also he constantly criticizes other countries' crimes. And in fact, when I asked him in the last current affairs interview I did about this, he said, we are no different. He says specifically, we're no different from others, and he started talking about the British Empire and how bad the British Empire 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. I mean, pretty much everything in the book. I mean, there's a little bit about corporate power, but it's mostly 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 power, the way the power of the US state has been wielded abroad. So there are these misconceptions, but Chomsky himself, interestingly, because he thinks that he's going to be distorted and misrepresented no matter what, kind of doesn't generally put in much effort to clear this up unless one asks about it specifically. But I wanted to make sure that this book was really clear about those things, 'cause I think there are so many people like Noah Smith who, you know, maybe acting in bed, faith, maybe not, but they are completely wrong. - Right, and just to point out, you know, we can direct readers to this article that you wrote in November of 2023, which is called "Why You Should Barely Focus On Your Own Countries Crimes," and why? It's because we're responsible for what is done in our name and what we can most affect you, right? And so, you know, I would direct readers to that to check that out. It's a pretty short piece, but it explains exactly a little bit more about why the focus is on US foreign policy and the effects of foreign policy, right? So that's a good one to check out. So I want to ask you about the sources, right? Because as we're always saying, it current affairs, right? It's really important to read books that have, not just bibliographies, but citations and good endnotes, you know, that source their facts. - What's Stephen's phrase? If it's not hyperlinked, it didn't happen. Stephen, you know, it's like-- - Oh, exactly. - On his briefing with Alex. - Stephen Prager, yes, exactly. I love that. I think that's a great philosophy to have. And so you've got, you know, something about 100 pages of endnotes, which is great. You have a lot of direct quotations. So there can be no doubt about where this is coming from and about who said what, which I think is great. So, you know, in the process of making this book, there were all these Chomsky books that kind of came in and out of the office because you were reviewing, you know, all this past work, right? And so, you know, you'd be trying to track down some source that he mentions on some end note of some page or some book that he wrote 20 years ago. So what I want to know is like, what was the most interesting, strange, notable like source or fact that you came across in doing like the research for this book? - Yeah. I mean, there are things that I found out in the course of producing this with Chomsky that I didn't know about. I mean, they were kind of disturbing things, right? So there's the horrible surprises, which is the section on the US 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 US crimes that had discovered. One of the most interesting like just sources though was, there's a book that you wrote about Latin America in the 80s. And it has a source that says that Lyndon Johnson once told the Greek prime minister, your parliament is a flea. And 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 like this incredible like mafia like statement. And I was like, this is crazy. So I tracked it down and it's originally there's, he got it from a book by Christopher Hitchens about Cyprus that's I think out of print. And then I looked at Hitchens's end note to try and find the original. The original is in a memoir by a guy named Philip Dean, I believe from the 70s who was told directly of this account of the conversation by someone who was in the room. And the book is a memoir about his time in like Korean prisons and the Greek government. But he has that and he has this quote. So I had to track down this source of this crazy quote because I was like, where is this quote from? This cannot be real. And the other one was another Lyndon Johnson quote, which was the one about when he's 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 Oppie of the Vietnam War who's one of the leading Vietnam War historians about this quote specifically. And I said, is this reliable? And he says, actually, yes, it comes from a fairly reliable source. It is well documented in the Johnson literature. But so there were these crazy things that I was checking where I was like trying to find, is this true? Because Chomsky cites so many things in his end notes and he reads so much and you're like, that can't be real. And then it is real. Yeah, these little nuggets make appearances in your articles. In fact, I think that just that point about Johnson-- I speak that in one of your pieces about the motivations of powerful men to do things, how they justify things. So yeah. Oh, there was another one that the editor at Penguin didn't even believe, which was that the New York Times said, we quote-- and again, I got this from an old thing that Chomsky had written that the New York Times, when the Iranian government was overthrown in 1953 and the Shah was installed, that the New York Times read an editorial saying that this is a lesson to other countries that go berserk with fanatical nationalism. Basically, if you get to a nationalist, we'll do a coup. And the editor of Penguin said, this isn't a real New York Times quote. And I have to go by the original article and go, no, actually, it's literally here in the New York Times archive. Yeah, on that note, 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. So you mentioned that a core tenet of US foreign policy is an intolerance for what you say are nationalistic regimes in other states. And these are 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. And so 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 really domestically, right? To improve the living conditions of people in our society and also to benefit from our own wealth, from our own resources, the wealth created by our own labor, as opposed to just it all going to corporate profits. And so we on the left kind of talk about how foreign policy and domestic policy are not really isolated. And so I just want to know what your thoughts are. Knowing what the US foreign policy is and how we have reacted to these other nationalistic regimes, what does that say about basically our own efforts here to do those things domestically, movements to do those things here? Yeah, so there's 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 and 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. They like believe that 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 is 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 to what Chomsky would call concentrated power. That is to say, like the United States is a democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the dictatorship. But both of them have concentrated power centers. That is to say, they have leadership that is not particularly responsive to the demands of the people and that there's not belief in that principle that the country's wealth should be according to their need. And so you see that in the Arab world, the dictators are threatened by the population. And one of the only reasons that the dictators in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for instance, are like pro-Palestine is because they fear popular pressure, not because they 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, US leaders across decades, I think we documented pretty well, have always feared people, the people here or elsewhere. And one of the themes that keeps coming up again and again in the book is that what you call the punishment of successful defiance, that why country does depart from the interests that powerful people in the US would like it to follow, corporate interests, interests that want the natural resources for themselves, rather than the indigenous people, that the US policy is more about squashing that defiance and not allowing an example to other countries that the US can be successfully defined. And one of the counterintuitive things that you bring up, which makes more sense when you think about it, is that the US actually cares more about the defiance of its agenda and about the nationalism in small, seemingly insignificant countries than that does in big one. So do you explain a little more why that is? Yeah, well, because 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 talk about the invasion of Panama in the book, which he's mostly forgotten. But the invasion of Panama, which was blatantly illegal, occurred because the dictator of Panama was essentially brazenly defying the United States. He was harassing US troops in the country. He was like ostentatiously thumbing his nose at George H.W. Bush. And the idea, you know, US presidents actually say this openly is that we have to maintain our credibility. And so if we have to evade Panama and depose its leader in order to do that, then that's what we have to do. We talk a lot about in the Iraq chapter, we talk about the Gulf War and the way that also George H.W. Bush 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. I mean, he saw that we would fairly easily be able to push back Saddam Hussein. And I think George H.W. Bush at one point, 'cause this was the title of another Chomsky book said, "What we say goes." He said, "We have to establish that what we say goes." This concept of 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, basically defying. I mean, he overthrew, Castro came to power by overthrowing the US-backed dictator and then immediately began doing things the United States government didn't like and didn't want such as nationalizing US-owned property in Cuba. And if he was able to do this, just a short ways off of the coast of the United States, some poor little island is able to just do whatever it wants. That really exposes the quote unquote, most powerful country in the world as being pretty toothless. I mean, 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? - You said there are all these state department documents from the '50s and '60s and '70s, just openly saying that this is the goal to preserve American prestige, as they call it, to prevent there being an example to other countries that they can imitate. And there's no mention in these documents of what are supposedly our cherished values, like democracy or human rights. Those are all examples from the '50s, '60s, '70s. Do you think that's still the case today? Has anything changed? - I don't think so. I think that you would find, obviously, a lot of the documents are not available yet. I mean, 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 you could read all of 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, but just not, they just didn't even enter the set of things that needed to be discussed. 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 the 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 it's called the Indo-Pacific or in Europe, that these are the major considerations. What will this mean for us and for US interests, not for the interests of the people in the countries we're talking about? - Yeah, and now that you mentioned Taiwan, that's actually one of the, I think, one of the parts of the book that people might find the most sort of controversial or contentious, because the popular image right now 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 US ought to support Taiwan, but you argue it's a little more complicated than that, and Chomsky argues this, and that US policy towards Taiwan may actually be making a Chinese invasion more likely. Could you just explain that a little bit? - Yeah, I mean, first, this wonderful, simple story about how we are, as you say, we love to stick up for the plucky little democracies, whether it's in Vietnam, where it actually turned out we were supporting dictatorship, but without discussing any of the actual facts about how the situation arose. So 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 of mainland China, but I believe still formally claims. I believe Taiwan still formally claims to be the legitimate ruler over all of, I didn't talk about this much because it's so obviously, 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 sees there as being 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 to think of an analogous situation, we'd have to think of like if the losing party in our own civil war, retreated to a piece of the United States, retreated to like Key West, and then claimed that Key West was the legitimate government in exile. It's quite understandable that like, over tying these societies would diverge and there'd be a sovereignty dispute and the mainland government would be trying to get back the territory that it felt it's 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 and 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 very strong assertions essentially that we would support Taiwanese independence in the fight against China, making moves like shoring up alliances with neighboring countries, flooding military equipment in. And this is in fact, what's going on with China is, first off not controversial, it's in fact what is called in international relations, the security dilemma where two countries make moves that each perceives as being a defensive move whereas the other perceives it as being an offensive move. So the United States starts shoring up, it starts flooding weapons into Asia. Well, we didn't interpret this as we're just trying to make sure that we're defending people against Chinese aggression. China interprets this as US aggression. China therefore escalates in response, which is interpreted as proof of Chinese aggression. I mean, the same thing would happen say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we discussed 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 US aggression, against Cuba, to defend against the possibility of a US invasion of Cuba. 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, like one of the things we plead with people to do is to try and understand US foreign policy through the eyes of those who are on the other side of it. - You're listening to Current Affairs. Current Affairs is a nonprofit left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners with no corporate backers or advertising. We depend on your subscriptions and donations. If you're enjoying this program and you're not a monthly subscriber already, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/currentaffairs. 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Now back to the program. - So 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. And so we're in election year. It's a few weeks away, right, is the election. And, you know, 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 maybe acknowledge Palestinian suffering. But is there really any meaningful difference between the parties in this area? They just, you know, completely interchangeable. - There is a rhetorical difference. As we know, in fact, we talk in the book about how U.S. foreign policy has talked about us if it takes wild swings from Kissingerian realism to Wilsonian idealism, whereas the policies are often the same, like Woodrow Wilson invading Haiti, right? So even the idealists, 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 that it was 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 mean, 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 wasn't willing to pressure Israel to give Palestinians anything like what they deserved and needed, but 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, at least unwilling to pressure Israel to reverse course. So with Kamala Harris, I mean, 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 professions, greater professions of compassion for people rather than, I mean, the Democratic and Republican postures towards China, as we illustrate in the book, have been pretty similar actually. And we cite them in 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. You know, what's heavy? What we argue is that continuity is the norm. - Yeah, you mentioned that it's the rhetoric of people, you know, in both parties, the Democrats more so that they, you know, they actually profess this myth of American idealism. They say, oh, we care very much about humanitarian rights. We care about the Palestinians. We care about democracy. You know, when politicians like Kamala Harris or Tim Walz or Joe Biden say things like that, do you think they believe it themselves? Like, do they think that's what they're doing? Or do they know that they are saying that as a pretext for their real aims? And does it matter? - Well, that's the point is that I don't think we are able to know. I think that is unknowable because they don't think you can really check 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 of their own victims is with some exceptions. You can see when you look at those cases why it doesn't matter that much if they meant it, right? So does it matter to us if Vladimir Putin thinks he's fighting Nazis in Ukraine? Does it matter, the example Chomsky uses this, does it matter if Mao didn't intend to starve all those people? It's like, yeah, guess it matters that he's like, that was an accident. It was genuinely an accident. He was not trying to starve the people of his country. Maybe it distressed him when it happened, but you could say, but the policy is still your fault. And you imposed a policy that had this predictable consequence and we blame you for what happened as a result of it. And I think that is the argument that Chomsky makes that we should, that's how we should evaluate political actors is not, 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. So 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 and Gaza. So you evaluate her by what she does, not whether, because you can't measure, you know, you can't psychoanalyze and find out whether she's sincere about the professions of benign intent. So one thing I want to ask you is about the emphasis in the book on existential threats, including nuclear war and climate. And this is a part that I think a reader going into it, especially a skeptical reader, maybe not 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, you know, we should prepare for Russia to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and how we're going to respond to it. And you're like, wait, what? Like, this is a thing we should be preparing for, not trying to stop, like, what? And this just really strikes me because I just do think that 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. Like, climate, there is some discussion about it. And then there's, you know, the way that it's distorted, downplayed, you've written a lot about how the New York Times and other media outlets, they don't even mention the fossil fuels or the cause, they don't even mention that they're sponsored by these corporate polluters and all this stuff, right? So there's a different thing going on with that. But these are two terrible threats. And somehow, we just kind of live with them, especially the nuclear thing, is like really fascinating to me. But this book, and you're 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 what I want to ask my question for you is like, what are your thoughts on how and why this awareness or this concern about nuclear weapons just doesn't exist? Like, you say on page 213 in the book, you say mainstream debate about our nuclear policies is essentially zero. Yeah, it's not even brought up. Interestingly, in Britain, it is brought up because there's a standard question that's asked for 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 wasn't willing to commit to starting a nuclear war. Someone like Liz Truss, of course, was like, yeah, I pressed that button. Of course, I'd press that button. But even because if you wouldn't press the button, then you don't care about the national security or something. I mean, they have a really demented discussion of it over there. It's almost better to not talk about it at all. But why we don't? 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 off, we invented the things. Second off, 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. Iran-- I just wrote about this this week-- 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. US policy, US strategy has long accepted nuclear weapons as legitimate. Unlike China, I can't remember they adjusted this recently, but a lot of countries have a no-first-use policy. They would not be the first country to use nuclear weapons in 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 art responsible for the fact that the whole world now lives under the sort of damocles and this horrifying threat on a truly unimaginable scale. So we argue that we should talk about it more. I think that brings us to another really important question that comes up in the last pages of the book, which is that early on that you call the book a plea for mass action. You say that. So a lot of the book is pointing out that US 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. So the question then is given that these decisions are being made by this foreign policy elite in both parties to ask a question that's been asked before, what is to be done? When you say a plea for mass action, what can people practically do about this when their leaders are behaving this way? Well, governments are afraid of their populations when they rise up, because ultimately governments can't survive if the population turns against them. I mean, 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. But for example, the Vietnam War protest movement, it 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 US presidents were very, very reluctant to launch new wars for, you know, about 20 years, it lasted what's called the Vietnam Syndrome, which was the reluctance to go to war that developed after the Vietnam debacle. And so that's one of the... Chosge argues that that's the reason that Ronald Reagan didn't actually invade Central America with US troops was because 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. And it might, in fact, prevent us from getting into a war with Iran that could have, I mean, 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, like, I mean, I think the popular uprisings for Palestine, they're not making... It's easy to be cynical and say that things like the uncommitted movement, like, okay, well, Harris is just making rhetorical commitments. But the Biden administration has done certain things. It's worked to some degree. I mean, there have been policy changes. Like, 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, it's nothing. You could say, you know, they're still fully supportive. And yeah, 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 state, if the Palestine movement was five times as large as it is now, I actually do think you'd see perhaps a change in Biden administration policy. I mean, 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. They would have to act differently. Why don't we end? I'd love to get both of your thoughts interviewed me and I've jabbered for a while. But we all get y'all on the podcast. I wonder if much, Lily, Alex, maybe you want to give thoughts that you had after reading this book. - Yeah, I highly recommend the book. I think one of the things I appreciate that I've said, you know, before already is how well documented it is for the skeptical reader who's really what happened and what was going on behind the scenes and 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 this kind of, you know, for this kind of argument that is being made, right? 'Cause I think a lot of skeptical readers are gonna might bristle at it. But I think that it's an important read and I think that it's also, it's not, you know, as you say at the end, like, even though it's like very dark times and it's very dark material, I don't feel like as a reader that the book made me feel bad or down. In fact, it is hopeful because you do emphasize, you know, you and Chomsky do emphasize at the end the fact 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'd recommend it to everybody and buy one for your family members. And just thank you for writing this to both of you. - Yeah, and I was going to say something similar. And I'm glad you mentioned that this sort of does end on a hopeful note because, you know, a lot of the, like the book is not necessarily what you'd call it, easy reading, you know, especially when you're talking about things like the Indonesian massacres, you know, the horrors in Gaza right now. But, you know, a lot of it is bleak. But it does end and throughout even has this note of hope because, you know, what it would emphasize is that the foreign policy elite, the power elite that are responsible for this policy, they're very powerful in some ways, you know, they exert a great deal of control over the world. But, you know, they are not, they are not invincible and they are not even particularly competent always. A lot of the times they're sort of buffoonish, like with, you know, President Johnson and his Johnson. And that's the myth of American idealism is, to some extent, fading. Even the existence of a book like this, you know, shows that not everyone believes it and that people are beginning to see through. So I think that is notable and, you know, worth carrying for, yeah. 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. But there's nothing, in fact, one of the reviews, we've already had a couple of reviews that forget which was at Lit Halberts, they said, you know, Chomsky critiques the US attempts to spread democracy around the world. And it's like, no, we're not criticizing attempting to spread democracy. Our position on that is the Gandhi position on Western civilization. Like it would be a good idea. We shouldn't 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. - That's a good ending note. - Yeah, thanks both for reading it so much. I mean, it has been, as you mentioned, it's been kind of the highlight of my professional life as a writer so far because, you know, obviously I was radicalized by reading Chomsky. And just to say, I just wanna say, 'cause people might be curious about how the book came about, which is 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. And the only books like that are kind of 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 said, "Can I put your people willing to do this?" And I could do a lot of work on it, but I need to collaborate with me on it so we can take all the stuff that you believe and shape it and organize it and update it and give it new sources. And I'm very grateful that 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. And then I would have left to kind of polish it up and sort out the remaining pile of notes myself, which I did afterwards. And then finally, it's approaching publication. So anyway, I hope everyone picks it up and give it to your skeptical family members and turn them on to Noam Chomsky. So Lily Sanchez, Alex Scopin, thank you so much for joining me on "Curd Affairs" today. - Thanks, bye everyone. - Yeah, thank you. (upbeat music) - The "Curd Affairs" podcast is a product of "Curd Affairs" magazine. If you are not subscribed to "Curd Affairs" magazine, visit currentaffairs.org/subscribe today and get our glorious print edition. The "Curd Affairs" podcast is released regularly every week on patreon.com/currentaffairs. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
