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>> Professor Noam Chomsky: From the outset of the War,
Second World War in 1939, Washington anticipated that it,
that the War would end with the United States in a position
of overwhelming power.
High level state department officials
and non-governmental foreign policy specialists met regularly
through the, the wartime years.
They laid out plans for the post-War world.
They delineated what they called the Grand Area
that the U.S. was to dominate.
The, the Grand Area was to include
at least the Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East,
and the British Empire, which the U.S. was planning to take
over including the U.S. Middle East Energy Resources.
The British Foreign Office was aware of this.
If you look at their documents, not very happy about it,
but [laughter] said we're going to have to recognise
that we're going to be a junior partner as they called it
in the evolving world, world order.
The, but that was in the early years of the, of the War.
As Russian forces started to grind down the Nazi armies
after Stalingrad, the conception of the Grand Area was enlarged
to include as much of Eurasia as possible,
including certainly the industrial
and commercial centre, the heartland of Western Europe.
Now within the Grand Area, and now quoting,
"Within the Grand Area, the U.S. was
to maintain unquestioned power with military
and economic supremacy while ensuring the limitation
of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere
with its global designs."
That's a live policy right now, come back to crucial instances.
One should bear in mind how venerable the doctrine is,
and how appropriate to the nature of the world
that was, in fact, emerging.
You have to remember that when the Second World War ended,
the U.S. literally had half the world's wealth,
position of power and security that was totally unparalleled.
Nothing like it in history, and that was understood.
It's quite clear from the documentary record,
I'm quoting now that President Roosevelt was aiming
at United States hegemony in the post-World War,
that's quoting the British diplomatic historians Geoffrey
Warner, quote an accurate assessment.
And more significant,
the careful worked-on plans were implemented
in very much the terms in which they were outlined during
the War.
They were implemented shortly after.
Well, it was always recognised from the beginning
that Europe might choose to follow an independent path.
NATO was partially intended to counter this threat,
and rather strikingly, as soon as the official pretext
for NATO, you know, protecting Europe from the Russian hoards,
as soon as that dissolved in 1989,
reflectively, NATO was expanded.
If anyone had believed the propaganda,
it should have disappeared.
Instead, it expanded.
One of the interesting things that happened in 1989 as a lot
of clouds lifted, you could sort
of see policies less concealed by ideology.
So NATO's expanded to the east.
Now that was in violation of verbal pledges to Gorbachev,
which he was naive enough to believe.
He was pretty irritated by it, but nothing he could do,
and it's since been expanded beyond.
Now it's a U.S.-run global intervention force,
and it has an official task.
The official task is controlling the crucial infrastructure
of the global energy system.
That's quite an expansive role,
and that's what NATO is now committed to.
The Grand Area doctrine limits the sovereignty
of others explicitly,
but it grants the United States the unrestricted rights.
That's what it means to be a global hegemony,
and that was made very clear and explicit at once.
For example, in 1946, when the U.S. agreed
to a world court jurisdiction, but with a condition.
The condition was that the United States would not be
subject to any international treaties,
meaning the U.N. charter, charter of the Organisation
of American States, later the Genocide Convention and so on.
That, this, this has come up before the Court repeatedly,
and the Court has accepted and as it was required to do,
the reservation that none
of these treaties apply to the United States.
The principles also clearly license military intervention
at will, and that conclusion has been clearly,
not only implemented continuously
but also pretty clearly articulated.
One tends to think of the right-winged administrations,
but that's misleading.
One of the most expansive forms
of the doctrine was under Clinton.
In fact, Bill Clinton, the Clinton administration declared,
quote that the United States has the right
to use military force unilaterally
to ensure uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies,
and strategic resources,
and must maintain military forces forward deployed
in Europe and Asia in order to shape people's opinions about us
and to shape events that will affect our livelihood
and our security.
That's actually much more expansive than the,
the much maligned George W. Bush doctrine that came later.
The Clinton doctrine doesn't even require the pretext
that the Bush doctrine insisted on,
but it was presented politely.
So, therefore, it didn't [laughter] arouse much interest.
Actually, the antagonism towards Bush was almost entirely styled,
not sub, substance is pretty standard.
The, I think that's one of the reasons Obama was so welcomed
in Europe, the style change.
Not the substance, but the [laughter].
The same principles governed the invasion of Iraq.
That became clearer as U.S. failure to impose its,
its will became clearer.
As that proceeded, the actual goals
of the invasion couldn't be concealed any longer behind the
pretty rhetoric about, you know, democracy
and all sorts of nice things.
In November 2007, the White House issued what it called a
Declaration of Principles concerning Iraq,
two main points.
The one was that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely
in Iraq.
The military bases right to carry out combat operations,
and, secondly, that Iraq must privilege U.S. investors.
Two months later, in January 2008,
President Bush informed Congress that he would reject legislation
that might limit the permanent stationing of U.S. armed forces
in Iraq or U.S. control
of the oil resources of Iraq, I'm quoting.
These are demands, incidentally, that the United States had
to abandon shortly after, in the face of Iraqi resistance,
as it had been forced to back off step
by step all the way through.
That's a major triumph of non-violent resistance,
but the U.S. and Britain have no trouble
at all killing insurgents.
They're very good at killing people, but they couldn't deal
with the mass non-violent resistance the hundreds
of thousands of people demonstrating and protesting.
So they had to back off,
and finally the basic demands were abandoned.
Articulated pretty clearly as they were being abandoned.
That's a major defeat as Jonathan Steele
and other serious analysts have recognised.
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