>> Sonali Kolhatkar: Noam Chomsky helps us
answer the big question,
why does the United States seem driven to create an empire?
Welcome to the Henry A. Wallace National Security Forum.
I'm Sonali Kolhatkar.
Many Americans are not accustomed to the idea
that our country sits at the top of the global empire.
But with military bases in dozens of countries,
interventions in other country's political processes,
and all-out invasions, there's no other word
to describe our projectory.
But why are we so prone to empire building?
Joining me to answer that question is renowned author,
linguist, and political commentator,
Professor Noam Chomsky, welcome to the program!
>> Professor Noam Chomsky: Glad to be with you.
>> Sonali Kolhatkar: Where do you think the U.S.'s aspirations
for empire come from?
Is it the nature of any state to pursue military domination
or do you think there's something specific
to U.S. history that this country is particularly prone
to imperialism because of?
>> Professor Noam Chomsky: A good explanation of it was given
by John Lewis Gaddis, expansion is the path to security.
If you want to be secure, you have to control everything else.
The commitment empire goes back to the original colonization.
By the Second World War, the United States was in a position
of unprecedented power.
The end of the Second World War,
the U.S. literally had half the world's wealth.
The tacit assumption was we own the world.
You can see this very clearly in what happened as soon
as this system of power began to erode,
and that happened very quickly in 1949.
China became independent.
There's a name for that in American and political history.
It's called the Loss of China.
The phrase Loss of China expresses the tacit assumption
that basically we own China and if it moves
to independence, we've lost it.
And since we own most of the world in this sense,
we have to defend it, so we have
to have a thousand military bases, military forces,
almost as great as the rest of the world combined,
and it runs right through American history.
This fear of everything is pervasive,
goes back to the origins of the society.
It's relate to the empirical thrust of, as Gaddis put it,
attaining security through expansion.
And that's limitless essentially.
So that's the empirical thrusts, not unique to the United States,
it's developed in an extreme form here,
but that's because of extraordinary U.S. wealth
and power.
>> Sonali Kolhatkar: How intertwined is corporatism
and the drive for profit with our militaries?
And is it always the case that, that the drive for access
to resources tends to drive our militarism?
>> Professor Noam Chomsky: Well, if you look,
take a look through history again, in the 19th century,
the major commodity, the equivalent
of oil today was cotton.
Now that was the source of the Industrial Revolution.
Jacksonian presidents of the mid 19th century explained very
clearly that there, they wanted to conquer Texas
and a large part of Mexico, approximately half,
in order to try to gain a monopoly over cotton.
President Polk said, [inaudible] said
that that would bring England to our feet by gaining a monopoly
of the major commodity in the world, cotton.
Move on a few years, oil becomes the major commodity, and,
incidentally, it's not a matter of, primarily of access to oil.
During the whole period when the U.S. was the major producer
and didn't need access to the oil, its policies were the same.
The issue was control over oil, not access.
And there was a reason for that.
And when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003,
speaking of [inaudible], that if it works, it'll be very good
because controlling Iraqi oil and increasing our control
over Middle East oil will give us what he called critical
leverage over Europe and other industrial powers, and we'll be
in a position to hold the spigot.
I've just talked about two of the major commodities.
You look at others and it's, you get pretty much the same story.
>> Sonali Kolhatkar: Now you've written about mass media,
and how it is, you know, often used to manufacture consent
from the U.S. public for things like war
and strengthening U.S. empire,
but today we have a significantly changed media
landscape, at least it seems so, and I'm wondering if you feel
that we, as citizens, are still prone to the,
the kind of brainwashing that we once were?
>> Professor Noam Chomsky: People are deluged
with a single message.
We're defending ourselves.
So, take a look at the, the invasion of Iraq, let's say.
Barack Obama is considered a critic, but notice his grounds.
Not that aggression is wrong.
Not that destruction of a society by violence is wrong.
It's that it was a blunder, so that implies
that if the aggression and violence had succeeded,
expanding our control over the, the, one of the major resources,
the contemporary world, giving us critical leverage
over our rivals, than it wouldn't have been stupid,
it would have been fine.
That's called criticism, the worst criticism that can be made
within the mainstream of U.S. policy is it was a mistake.
These are the standard views of what are called statesmen,
people who are committed to defending
and expanding powerful interests, powerful, dominant,
domestic interests, and that leads to the thrust for empire,
and the justification of that thrust, as defensive.
Now going back to the population, it is submerged
in doctrinal pronouncements of this kind.
When enemies do it, we call it propaganda.
But when we do it, we call it education,
but it's not very different.
But an isolated individual, faced with this deluge
of propaganda, of doctrinal uniformity,
does have a difficult time extricating himself
or herself from it.
>> Sonali Kolhatkar: Finally Professor Chomsky,
many have predicted that the U.S. empire may be waning,
that we're in this sort of twilight of empire phase.
Do you have any sense that that might actually be true?
>> Professor Noam Chomsky: There has certainly been decline
from the high point of power, which was 1945.
But as I mentioned, that decline began right away.
1949, a large part of the empire was lost.
There was immediate concern that Southeast Asia might be lost,
that's the origins of the Vietnam War, there was concerns
over Latin America, the Middle East.
In the last decade, South America has become,
has gained substantial independence,
and by now they're very free from U.S. domination.
It's an enormous change.
That's the loss of South America, if you like it.
So sure, the process of decline goes on, continues,
waxes and wanes, it's not a steady process,
but there is a tendency for power to become more diffused,
but the United States is still overwhelming in many dimensions.
Crucially in the dimension of violence, the U.S. is far ahead
of anyone else in military bases, military technology,
far more advanced than anywhere,
and even simple military spending, as I said,
it's almost as much as the rest of the world combined.
So empire is a complex affair.
Yes, there's a decline, began in the 1940's, its continuing,
but has, by no means, abated.
>> Sonali Kolhatkar: Professor Chomsky,
thank you so much for joining us.
[Background Music] On the next episode
of the Henry A. Wallace National Security Forum,
we'll talk to activist and author, Roxanne Dunbar -Ortiz,
about how the U.S. uses its experience
of occupying indigenous people's lands in its efforts
to dominate other countries overseas.
>> Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: So the imperialist urge was there
from the beginning and it got institutionalized, it's the,
it's the core makeup of the U.S. Army today,
and in almost every situation.
[ Music ]