Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: Noam Chomsky's Co-Writer Nathan Robinson on America in the World

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PREMIUM: Noam Chomsky's Co-Writer Nathan Robinson on America in the World · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and I can't quite tell this
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week which is the more dangerous of the following two opposite ideas.
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Either that American foreign policy is a force for good in the world, or that America
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is on balance a global tyrant that does more harm than good.
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It depends where you're sitting, where you're standing, how proximate you are to American
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bombs, how proximate you are to American populism.
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Something's obviously happened on the American right in recent years with the rise of Donald
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Trump and the make America great again, isolationist movement.
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It remains to be seen in the next Trump administration, whether or not they actually are as
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isolationist as Donald Trump seem to indicate his rallies or whether they pursue a traditionally
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conservative line of American foreign policy, but one man who has been consistent for decades
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in his searing critique of American global power is Nome Chomsky.
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Now, Nome isn't doing interviews, he's in his 90s these days, but he has written a book
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with an enthusiastic and articulate young socialist writer named Nathan Robinson, who is today
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his guest.
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The author of the Nome Chomsky, Nathan Robinson book, The Myth of American Idealism, how
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US foreign policy endangers the world, the book presents a litany of cases for why America
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doesn't just blunder, but is a force for tremendous bloodshed and calamity all over the globe.
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And I was really less interested in plumbing each of those examples, because I think Vietnam
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and the Iraq war sort of speak for themselves.
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And more interested in Nathan's ideas about socialism, about Bernie Sanders form of populism
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versus Donald Trump's form of populism, about whether or not what America and the West is
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doing in Ukraine and supporting Ukraine and stand out to Vladimir Putin is inconsistent.
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With the ideas that he articulates in the book or somehow consistent with it, what a world,
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what a rules-based world order looks like, what media care for all could look like in
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the United States.
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Look, this is a wide-ranging, albeit fairly brief conversation, with an interesting socialist
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thinker.
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Nathan founded the Progressive Magazine Current Affairs, which is currently the editor-in-chief,
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and he's the author of Why You Could Be a Socialist.
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Please enjoy Nathan Robinson.
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How are you feeling?
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Have you been doing a lot of press?
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Yes, you know, now we're talking, well, I'm good.
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I always feel amazing.
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Yeah.
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I'm a good-feeling guy.
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I'm a good-feeling guy.
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I'm a good-feeling guy.
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How are you feeling about a second?
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I've got a constant positive good.
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Oh, right.
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Trump is brilliant.
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A second Trump turn.
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I mean, you can tell if they're wherever you want.
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We got to think about that so much.
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We're setting that aside for the moment.
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That's a problem for tomorrow, two months from now, three months from now.
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Yes.
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Well, at least it won't be a problem for January 6th, you know, because he'll be happy.
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No, January 20th, whatever.
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January 20th something.
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Well, that's the thing.
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All of the election fraud.
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Yeah.
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There's no fraud anymore.
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All of a sudden, now we don't have to deal with any of that stuff.
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Totally clean.
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It's a totally clean election.
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Totally clean.
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Nothing better than the American electoral system.
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Oh, my God.
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It's spotless.
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It's a turn of the time.
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What happened, Nathan?
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What happened?
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Yeah.
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Well, I mean, I think that a lot of people could see what was happening, happening in
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real time.
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We read an article a month before, called, is Kamala blowing it.
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Nearly called it Kamala is blowing it, but we thought, oh, we don't know.
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Maybe she's not.
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Isn't there a rule in journalism that any time a headline asks a question, the answer
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is yes.
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Well, yeah, so she was.
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She did.
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She blew it.
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And I think the, I mean, a lot of people have sort of converged around the diagnosis that
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the Democrats are not inspiring people that they have failed to offer ordinary people solutions
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to their problems, that they have sort of hectored them and told them, actually, you're
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doing great.
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And if you don't think you are and, oh, look at the other guy, look how terrible he is,
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which is true.
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He's pretty terrible, but it turns out that that approach doesn't end word salad.
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People don't like the, let the meat word salad approach.
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And so they want to inspire you by word salad.
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Well, I mean that if you asked Kamala Harris a question, oftentimes it was unclear what
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in simple English grammar, the meaning, the content of the answer was, I mean, she had
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some infamous answer.
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You could go back and look at some of the answers and try and figure out, you know, what
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is she saying?
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Well, you know, usually which is asked about Israel, she would say things like, well, of course,
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we very strongly believe in the tragedy of the situation, which is deeply sad.
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And you're like, well, okay, but what is United States policy going to be?
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And people can kind of tell when you're being evasive and she is an evasive person, didn't
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inspire anyone very much.
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Yeah.
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I mean, it's a hard question whether or not evasion is preferable to bullshit, you know,
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because like those were sort of the choices.
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You either had like small target evasiveness or big picture bullshit.
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And I guess people like confident bullshit, more than equivocation.
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People do.
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I mean, but if you look at what Trump does, I mean, it's bullshit, but he says Trump has
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always like been very, very clear and direct in certain ways with people where he says,
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you know, you're suffering, it's their fault, I'm going to end it.
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It's a very, very clear message in a certain way.
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I mean, he says, you know, I'm going to put, we're going to fight China.
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I'm going to put tariffs on China where there's an invasion coming over the border.
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They're not stopping the invasion.
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I'm going to stop the invasion.
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We're going to keep the immigrants out.
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Your everything is going to be cheap.
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America is going to be great again.
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I mean, that's his message.
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It's very, very simple and it can be quite compelling to people.
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Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?
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So there is at least a clear coherence set of what I would probably say are still bullshit
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policies because the connection between imposing tariffs on China and improving the lives of
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working class Americans in Appalachia is tenuous at best, but yeah, I take your point.
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But he makes promises, right?
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I mean, I think he's actually going to be quite unpopular because the promise is that
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he makes, he doesn't fulfill, right?
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Ultimately, he follows a strategy of just telling people, don't worry.
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He's going to be amazing for me and everything will just all of your problems are going
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to be solved.
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I'm going to go in there.
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I'm going to stop the war in Ukraine in a day.
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I'm going to bring about world peace.
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I'm going to end Israel, Palestine, I'll end it.
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And now he's been elected.
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So now he has to do those things or people will notice that the thing is he's promised
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he will do for them are not being done.
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Right.
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Some of those things are reasonably easy to do if you betray your principles, like ending
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the Ukraine war in a day is easy if you betray Ukraine, it's hard to end the war in Ukraine
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and also maintain an international system of deterrence towards aggressive actors.
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Which brings us, I guess, let's start talking about your world view then as well, because
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I think one thing that's interesting about this moment on the right is that, just jump
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in with your thoughts here, but it's clear that the neo-conservative era is over in America
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at least for now and that the sort of pro-democracy, I don't know, George H. W. Bush, Brent Scocraft,
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Colin Powell, David from vision of robust America, standing astride the world stage and
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bringing democracy to its peoples, combined with low taxes at home and an evisceration
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of the welfare state, that is not a, that is not what the Republican Party is selling
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anymore.
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And in some ways, the Republican Party has swung to be more left-wing, more populist,
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that doesn't talk about cutting Medicare, doesn't talk about cutting social security, doesn't
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talk about aggressive foreign interventions.
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What do you make of that shift?
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I mean, I do think that, I mean, you're certainly correct that there is a massive, massive
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shift in Republican rhetoric, in that Republicans, you know, it kind of shocked me to hear Republicans
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say the Iraq war was a disaster, you know, to Republicans didn't say it.
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And then said it, and his name was Donald Trump, and then he was so popular that all the
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other Republicans just jumped on board.
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Yeah, that's right.
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But to hear someone like JD Vance, you know, talking about the disaster of America, I mean,
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to sounding kind of like Noam Chomsky sometimes, it has been very, very strange.
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The question of whether the distinction is substantive, rather than rhetorical, is an
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interesting one, because a lot of the people, I mean, Trump has just announced that he's
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going to, he's appointed the Fox News host, peace, Hegseth, his defense secretary, whether
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these people are, in fact, going to be less confrontational abroad.
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I mean, I, I, I mean, I do agree there's a, like, on, you mentioned Ukraine, like there's
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clearly a huge difference between the stance that, for example, the neoconservatives in
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the Wall Street Journal maintain on, on Ukraine where they say, you know, we have a, we have
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a job to, to help Ukraine beat back Russia.
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And someone like Trump, who says, well, how much are they paying us to do it?
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And, and if the answer is nothing, then why are we, why are we helping anyone?
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Um, at the same time, you know, some of the neoconservative rhetoric about spreading
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democracy, um, was always, um, a little bit fallacious.
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I mean, I think one of the things that we try and expose, and I think successfully
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exposed in the, in the, in the book is that the Iraq war, uh, spreading democracy was
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an ex post facto justification for that, uh, after the stated justifications, uh, fell
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apart.
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And the United States did not really have an even the neoconservatives in the Bush administration
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didn't really have a sincere interest in the opinions of Iraqis about what ought to
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happen to their country.
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They didn't really consult with Iraqis.
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They didn't try and build a, a strong vibrant Iraqi democracy.
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Um, well, they did consult with Iraqis who, I mean, that's a little unkind because
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there was such a broad coalition of people who were behind the Iraq war.
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The, the Christopher Hitchens as we're saying before the Iraq war that this was, that
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one of the key principles was a humanitarian and democratic one that, uh, you know, yes,
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they didn't consult a lot with the Iraqis because the Iraqis were under the thumb of a brutal
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authoritarian.
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But they wanted to create space in which the Iraqis could select their system of governance.
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It's just they did absolutely nothing whatsoever to create the institutions that would
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facilitate that.
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But that strikes me as a strategic era rather than necessarily a moral one.
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Well, um, I mean, we document the history of the coalition provisional authority, which
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even as they were being told repeatedly, like don't do these things, nobody in Iraq wants you
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to do these things, um, good, you know, persisted in policies that drove the country into a
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disastrous civil war, um, whether it's a well intentioned mistake or whether it's just
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a deliberate ignorance of the opinions of the people that, uh, you're, you're governing,
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uh, I don't think you can get to the bottom of people's psychology.
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Um, but I think that, uh, one thing that is argued by Professor Chomsky consistently, uh, is that
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interested the United, the sincere interest, even if the, uh, supposed democracy spreaders in
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actually building, uh, institutions abroad that authentically represent the interests of the
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people in the countries, um, that we are imposing them on has been, uh, limited, especially when
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it conflicts with, uh, perceived US strategic interests.
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Yes.
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So if you could do interventionism fully, like let's, let's, let's describe, let's not
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describe to malice what can appropriately be described by it, we were explained by incompetence
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and let's assume that, uh, a theoretical neocon actually is concerned with creating a democracy
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in the country that they're about in the authoritarian dictatorship that they're about to invade.
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It strikes me that that still wouldn't be sufficient for you and Chomsky to support American
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interventionism.
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Quar American interventionism, right?
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Even if you, even if even if it was like, okay, well, here's a trillion dollars from
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Marshall plan and we're going to build all the institutions that still would not be warranted.
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I mean, you know, you, it would really depend on the case and the plan, but I think the record
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of attempts to do this would caution that, uh, it's probably not going to work out in the way
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that it's promised to work out. And, uh, so I mean, you know, Afghanistan being a really
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clear example of this, uh, where, you know, essentially the government we built was deeply,
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deeply unpopular. Um, and obviously the ending of that story was tragic.
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I mean, I suppose it, yes, it's a case by case basis, isn't it? Because Germany after World
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War II, Japan after World War II, Grenada, East Timor, these are success, there are success stories
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where like there are pre-existing, uh, countries that have, I suppose the, the capacity to embed
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green, you know, see, to seed green shoots in where it could, where it can work and where they
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can be shepherded towards something better, but perhaps the Central Asian tribal Republic coming
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out of decades of subjugation and war is not necessarily the right, the best candidate.
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Yeah. And there's clearly a lot of dishonesty as well in the presentation of what we're actually
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doing. I mean, one of the things, you know, one of the reasons that we review the Vietnam case
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in such detail is because that's a case where, uh, the same rhetoric is used about what we're trying
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to preserve the democratic institutions for people, the people of Vietnam, whereas what's actually
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happening on the ground is the defense of a dictatorial government, uh, because we fear that the
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results of elections would put communist in power. Um, so, you know, you have to, you have to be careful
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because, uh, as, as we point out, no matter what a government is doing, uh, it always claims that
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it's, uh, it believes in the spread of freedom and prosperity and the wonders of our system to
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other countries. I mean, isn't there also a risk that we're always fighting the last war and
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trying to not make the last mistake? Because as you say, that was the, that was the error in Vietnam
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that they were not actually giving, uh, enough credit to the aspirations of the Vietnamese people
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because the Vietnamese might vote the wrong way and vote in communists. And then you fast forward
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a few decades and to come up to the post 9-11 period and, uh, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned
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Israel and Gaza. I mean, one of the contributing factors to the shits storm that's happening right
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now is the fact that when, uh, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, the Bush administration was so
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starry-eyed about, uh, spreading democracy throughout the Middle East that they insisted on elections
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in Gaza when a lot of people were saying, like, there isn't, there isn't enough, uh,
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of an institution of civil society in Gaza yet to force them to choose between a corrupt
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moribund Palestinian liberation organization and a jihadist death cult in the form of Hamas,
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you really should have, you should, you need to shepherd them in some more nuanced way towards
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democracy rather than just dumping it on them. And Condi Rice and George W Bush were quite
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keen on just holding elections and they had that happen and, uh, what do you know, they voted for
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Hamas and the rest is history. It's like, it's like there, it's like we swing between idealism
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and pragmatism, uh, in ways that prevent us from making this the last mistake we make,
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we made, but encourage us to make new ones. Yeah, I mean, I, I do think that, uh, you should have
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sincere commitments and, uh, and uphold them consistently. Um, I do think that you, you shouldn't,
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if you're, you know, if you're, if you're going to insist on an election, you'll have to accept
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the outcome of that election rather than, uh, once it's, uh, once it's occurred, oh, uh, shoot,
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we shouldn't have, uh, we didn't, we only believed in democracy because we thought we were going
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to get the outcome that we wanted, which I think has been, unfortunately, a consistent pattern
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across the history of US foreign policy. Yeah, yeah. And yes, exactly. And then the bad
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outcome in Gaza, uh, I think led to America's acceptance of, uh, a counter revolution in Egypt
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during the Arab Spring when the voters voted the wrong way and they didn't want to make the same
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mistake with the Muslim Brotherhood being in charge of Egypt. So they allowed, uh,
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to military to retake control. But this is all getting a little bit in the weeds. What,
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what should America's international position be? Well, I mean, one of the things that I,
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I think is, is a theme across the, uh, the book, um, is the idea that we, we have to actually be
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very sincerely committed to obeying the principles that we lay down so that we don't
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become the laughing stock of the world. So, you know, the Iraq war was a war that was illegal.
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Um, the Bush administration, uh, did not have, you know, that, that, that was a criminal war.
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It was a more and more serious criminal wars of the 21st century.
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Now, I'll verify that for American listeners who may not quite understand that because of
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sometimes when I say this to Americans, they say, no, no, no, Congress voted for it. Yeah.
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Right. Yeah. Right. This is the whole of the United Nations Congress. We're all bound by the
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United Nations Charter, the use of force in international affairs is, uh, restricted to, uh,
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force that is explicitly approved by the UN Security Council and can accept in very narrow
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cases of self-defense. And even then, you're only allowed to defend yourself until the
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Security Council decides on a course of action. Um, so essentially, we should live by the rules
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that we now want to enforce on people like Vladimir Putin. I like, I think it's correct that we
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want to see Vladimir Putin hold in front of the international criminal court. Um, but what we have
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to understand is that a lot of the rest of the world would like to see, uh, George W. Bush and
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Dick Taney and Donald Rumsfeld hold in front of the international criminal court to account for
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what they saw as a blatant US violation of the rules that we lay down for others. Um, and I think
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that's fair. We have to understand why other countries might be upset at our perceived violations
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of rules that we, over the course of the entire post-war history of the United States, are
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perceived violations of rules that we want, you know, we want to govern international affairs. We
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don't want, um, aggressive warfare to be conceivable in our time. Um, and so we really have to lead by
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example. And too often we have not led by example in a way that suggests that the principles
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themselves are just a rhetorical cover that are used by powers seeking countries to, uh, justify
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their behavior. Well, what, what of the argument that the security council's composition and the,
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the structure of the UN was set in Aspik at the end of the web world war two largely as an accident
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of who happened to be in which alliances that won and, uh, that it's no longer tenable for
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international justice held hostage by the veto of China and Russia.
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Well, it's, it's a, it's a fair argument. Um, the problem is, again, you have to be willing to
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apply it consistently, right? I mean, if we, a lot of times the argument we made the other way,
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which is to say that, so why should the United States have unilateral veto power? I mean,
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we saw in over the course of the, uh, Israel, uh, Gaza. To hear the rest of this conversation,
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