Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or survival: America's quest for global dominance

Résumé du document

In the book entitled "Hegemony or Survival", Noam Chomsky, professor at MIT and one of the most controversial intellectual activists, dissects the American foreign policy one more time. His theory is supported by a detailed analysis of history. According to him, the world political leaders are currently faced with a choice between global dominance and the survival of the planet. Indeed, the leaders are likely to resort to force to be hegemonic but nowadays they do have the means to resort to force and to destroy the human race.
Chomsky has decided to examine these leaders to guess which method they are likely to choose for this undertaking. As a matter of fact, those who are able to face this choice nowadays are part of the American administration, the superpower. Far from being reassuring, this book underlines the illogical and unfair American political actions of the past and current administrations. America has goals, and they prevail over the risks.

In Chomsky's perspective, the US has two goals: to "establish an imperial grand strategy" and to "institutionalize a radical restructuring of domestic society".

In 2002, the National Security Strategy admitted that the US had the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to its global hegemony. This kind of idea is not new and Chomsky explains several examples of that theory such as the case of Nicaragua. According to that strategy, the American hegemony aims at being permanent. But the belligerence tends to go further and further in the form of the carrying out of preemptive war against "an imagined threat".

Extraits

[...] The second goal concerns the domestic society. Whereas the US can resort to force abroad, it has to use more subtle tools to achieve its ends in a democracy. Chomsky reminds us the theory of the population as a “great beast” which mustn't stray from its proper confines and explains that the government uses means of control of opinion and attitudes thanks to propaganda campaigns. During the Reagan years, wages stagnated while working hours were increasing so that the only means to maintain a political power was to divert mass discontent into nationalism and to inspire fear. [...]

[...] The US doesn't want violence to be banned because it wants to use it, but it also makes it available for other. If WMD are the only tool to deter the US, one might fear a proliferation of WMD. Moreover, intellectuals think that the war in Iraq has increased Al Qaeda recruitment. The more unfair is the power, the more hate it creates. The unilateral power of the US might radicalize the opponents and ends up in the self-destruction of the planet. [...]

[...] In the first chapter, Chomsky explains that if the US is a superpower, world public opinion is the second superpower on Earth. Indeed, many polls showed that the US was more and more seen as a threat by the world public opinion and they mistrust the political leadership. Furthermore, popular protest doesn't hesitate to rise, even before the war is launched, whereas world public opinion needed time to emerge in the sixties. If the two challengers above are not efficient enough, then we could peer into the abyss because the survival would be seriously threatened. [...]

[...] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or survival: America's quest for global dominance Noam Chomsky, professor at MIT and one of the most controversial intellectual activists, dissects one more time the American foreign policy. His theory is supported by a detailed analyze of history. According to him, the leaders are facing the choice between a global dominance and the survival of the planet. Indeed, the leaders are likely to resort to force to be hegemonic but nowadays they do have means to resort to force and to destroy the human race. [...]

[...] According to that strategy, the American hegemony aims at being permanent. But the belligerence tends to go further and further since the carrying out of preemptive war against imagined threat”. Those tools are meant to lead the Imperial Grand Strategy of the US, the new norm that American administrations try to establish. As Powell said: US reserves the sovereign right to take military actions when and how it chooses”. To justify their belligerence, the US often praises a Wilsonian idealism of altruism and quest of stability and righteousness. [...]