>>REVIEWS
FAILED STATES
Noam Chomsky
Metropolitan Books, 311 pp.
OVERTHRO
Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 382 pp.
During the 1960s, critics of American foreign policy argued that the United States repeated the imperialist mistakes of fading European powers through action. Cynical historians looking back on the Nixon years of covert wars in Southeast Asia and Latin America spoke of the emergence of an imperial presidency in the 1970s. By the late 1980s, disaffected counterculture types were derisively calling the United States’ collection of Cold War client states an empire. In the wake of the unprecedented experience of globalization in the 1990s, and the American position of sole superpower, the term "empire" caught the collective imagination and stuck.
The American Empire Project has been fortunate, then, to engage Noam Chomsky to pen a followup to 2003’s Hegemony of Survival with Failed States, the series’ debut offering. Similar to previous Chomsky works, he reviews a lot of material covered in Hegemony of Survival, so first-time readers can wade into his analysis of American belligerence in Latin America, intransigence in regard to Israel-Palestine, and downright failure in Iraq. This time, Chomsky tracks American involvement in what are coming to be termed "failed states." As defined under the second Bush administration, a "failed state" is any country that experiences a democratic deficit, where the actions of the ruling government are divorced from the expressed wishes of its citizenry. Any country that continues to act in such a manner risks becoming illegitimate and a potential danger to American security.
In Failed States, Chomsky first explores the recent role that the United States has played in contributing to many foreign governments’ status as failed states, and builds an argument for considering the United States to be such a failed state itself. According to Chomsky, opinion polls and surveys have consistently shown that the majority of citizens in the United States disagree with many of the expressed aims of the second Bush administration. Perhaps the most disconcerting trend that Chomsky highlights is the misleading coverage of election campaign platforms, pointing to significant numbers of people who voted for George W. Bush under the assumption that Bush would promote Kyoto Accord-style environmentalism.
For those interested in a more straightforward history of American foreign involvement, former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer offers Overthrow, a history of American regime change operations from the fall of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii in the 1880s, through the Spanish-American War and consequent involvement in Latin America, Vietnam, Guam, Panama and Iraq. What Kinzer highlights here, in a relatively easy-flowing narrative, is not just the secretive nature of many of these actions, but the extent to which these actions were consistent with American popular opinion before the Vietnam War. After Vietnam, Kinzer’s chapters get shorter and focus less on the details of the operation, emphasizing the duplicitous reasons given as public explanation.
This is where Kinzer meets up with Chomsky, as Vietnam marks a turning point for both of them. While unstated in Failed States, Chomsky has elsewhere talked about the unpopularity of the war in Vietnam and its related spillover into the rest of Southeast Asia. Chomsky takes the point of divergence between the American people and their government, the first step taken down the road to becoming a failed state, while Kinzer’s depiction of military actions taken for "security of American citizens" – when oil resources or regional pre-eminence are the true aims – go a long way to supporting both arguments. Disconnected from the average citizen with political and military power stretched across the world, the United States is an empire in action if not in name. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.