Noam Chomsky: Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance

Reviewed by NICKY HAGER

If you would like to read a highly intelligent, easy-to-read and up-to-date explanation of international power and politics, this is the perfect book. Noam Chomsky, renowned political writer and professor of linguistics, cuts through myth, propaganda and political amnesia in his first major new work in a decade.

The book heads straight into big issues that most commentators skirt around — in fact, the most important issues facing the world today. He argues convincingly that the United States is the biggest threat to world peace, conducting and sponsoring far more terrorism around the world than the official enemies. Compared with conventional commentaries, this could sound like an extreme position. It shouldn't after you read the numerous carefully researched examples. Chomsky's analysis of terrorism, for example, makes most commentaries look naive and one-sided.

The book documents 50 years of the US backing coups, launching invasions, installing compliant dictators (regime changes), sponsoring terror campaigns and conducting economic warfare, showing how the same basic policies have operated, whether under Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton or the Bushs. He recalls often-forgotten events and analyses the duplicity and propaganda used to hide or justify them.

Chomsky's great strength is even-handedness. Repeatedly he applies the crucial ethical test of universality: the necessity of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others.

He contrasts this with the familiar principle adopted by the powerful: that "we" are good — whoever we happen to be — and "they" are evil if they stand in our way, legitimising virtually any actions we take against them.

His damning critique of the 2001-02 Afghanistan War, in which thousands of innocent people died, is relevant to New Zealand. Our SAS, air force and military intelligence staff played a significant role in US military operations there, after the Government bought the arguments presented to justify the war.

Reading Chomsky cut through the justifications should make any reasonable person ashamed that New Zealand took part. Without his insights, we are left fearing relatively minor forces like al Qaeda while all around us the world is being shaped and battered by the real powers.

He notes how US leaders have shifted from talk of pre-emptive war — already a dubious concept — to preventive war. Attack, therefore, becomes defence, he writes. The UN is constantly undermined and even mass slaughter will either be quickly forgotten or reshaped into an act of self-defence or an act of benevolence that perhaps went astray.

He considers even bigger issues that we rarely see plainly discussed. Why does the US want global dominance? Why is the most heavily armed nation in history intervening repeatedly around the world? Moving beyond the comic-book version (world policeman, promoter of democracy and defender of the free world), Chomsky discusses the reality of the American empire. He quotes recent US Government documents such as the Nuclear Posture Review and National Security Strategy to explain what he calls the Imperial Grand Strategy.

New Zealand is one of the US' closest coalition partners, with military personnel embedded in US-led forces in six countries. Most of our military planning is devoted to this end. Likewise our diplomats still vehemently promote the US free trade agenda that is being opposed by most of the world's nations. Reading Chomsky detailing the US plans will make you wonder why on earth we're backing them.

There is much more: the evolution of anti-democratic ideas in the US, the role of responsible leaders and intellectuals in defending the status quo (willing subordination to the systems of power), the ways that public opinion is tricked and swayed and Chomsky's views (optimistic and pessimistic) about the future.

He argues that the increasingly extreme US policies literally threaten our survival on earth. Against this he notes a deepening appreciation of human rights in history and emerging global bonds of sympathy and solidarity between ordinary people around the world. He writes: "It is fair to say, I think, that the future of our endangered species may be determined in no small measure by how these popular forces evolve."

The book deserves to be compulsory reading for every thoughtful person interested in the future.

Allen and Unwin, $29.95

* Nicky Hager is the author of Seeds of Distrust.