Deterring Democracy Noam Chomsky Copyright © 1991, 1992 Go to the Content Overview (brief) Go to the Table of Contents (detailed) In this highly praised and widely debated book, Noam Chomsky, America's leading dissident intellectual, offers a revelatory portrait of the American empire and the danger it poses for democracy, both at home and abroad. Chomsky details the major shift in global politics that has left the United States unchallenged as the preeminent military power even as its economic might has declined drastically in the face of competition from Germany and Japan. Deterring Democracy points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this new imbalance, and reveals a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests -- from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Panama to the Middle East. The new world order (in which the New World gives the orders) has arrived. Audacious in argument and ambitious in scope, Deterring Democracy is an essential guide to democratic prospects in the perilous 1990s. "Deterring Democracy is a volatile, serious contribution to the debate over America's role as the globe's sole remaining superpower." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Chomsky is the Left's answer to William F. Buckley." -- Los Angeles Times "A compendious and thought-provoking work..." --The New Statesman "Noam Chomsky...is a major scholarly resource. Not to have read [him]...is to court genuine ignorance." --The Nation Archive | ZNet Deterring Democracy Noam Chomsky Copyright © 1991, 1992 Content Overview Note: Each chapter is divided into segments of about eight paragraphs each. Contents Introduction ONE Cold War: Fact and Fancy TWO The Home Front THREE The Global System FOUR Problems of Population Control FIVE The Post-Cold War Era SIX Nefarious Aggression SEVEN The Victors EIGHT The Agenda of the Doves: 1988 NINE The Mortal Sin of Self-Defense TEN The Decline of the Democratic Ideal ELEVEN Democracy in the Industrial Societies TWELVE Force and Opinion Afterword Cover | Archive | ZNet Deterring Democracy Noam Chomsky Copyright © 1991, 1992 Table of Contents Note: Each chapter is divided into [segments] of about eight paragraphs each. Overview Introduction [1|2|3] SEVEN The Victors 1. The Fruits of Victory: ONE Cold War: Fact and Fancy Central America [1|2|3|4] 1. The Cold War as 2. The Fruits of Victory: Latin Ideological Construct America [5|6|7] [1|2|3|4] 3. The Fruits of Victory: the 2. The Cold War as Historical Caribbean [8] Process [5|6|7|8] 4. The Fruits of Victory: Asia 3. Before and After [9|10] [9] 4. Bolsheviks and Moderates 5. The Fruits of Victory: Africa [11|12|13] [10] 5. The Foundations of Policy 6. The "Unrelenting [14|15|16|17|18] Nightmare" [11] 6. The Next Stage [19|20] 7. Comparisons and their Pitfalls [12|13|14] TWO The Home Front 1. The "Unimportant People" EIGHT The Agenda of the Doves: [1|2] 1988 2. Political Successes [3|4|5] 1. The Common Interests: 1980 [1] 3. The Achievements of Economic Management 2. The Common Interests: [6|7] 1988 [2] 4. Restoring the Faith [7] 3. The Freedom to Act 5. Public Vices [7] Responsibly [3|4|5] 4. Containment without Rollback [6|7] THREE The Global System 5. Laying Down the Law [8] 1. Separation Anxieties [1] 6. Foreign Agents [9|10] 2. The Changing Tasks [2] 7. Yearning for Democracy [11] 3. Containing "Gorby Fever" [3] 4. The Community of Nations NINE The Mortal Sin of Self- [3] Defense 5. The Silver Lining [4] 1. The Skunk at the Garden 6. The Soviet Threat [5] Party [1|2|3] 2. The Guests so Sorely Troubled [4|5] FOUR Problems of Population 3. From Illusion to Reality Control [6] 4. The 1990 Elections [7] 1. "The Unsettling Specter of Peace" [1|2] 2. The Drug War [3|4] TEN The Decline of the 3. The Contours of the Crisis Democratic Ideal [5] 1. The Winner: George Bush 4. The Narcotraffickers [6|7] [1|2] 5. Social Policy and the Drug 2. United in Joy [3|4] Crisis [8] 3. The Case for the Doves 6. The Usual Victims [5|6] [9|10|11] 4. "Rallying to Chamorro" 7. The Best-laid Plans... [11] [7|8|9|10] 5. Within Nicaragua [11] 6. Looking Ahead [12|13] FIVE The Post-Cold War Era [1|2] 1. Creeping Colonialism [2] 2. Bush's "New Thinking" ELEVEN Democracy in the Industrial [3|4] Societies 3. Operation Just Cause: the 1. The Preference for Pretexts [5|6|7|8] Democracy [1] 4. Operation Just Cause: the 2. The General Outlines [2] Reasons [9|10] 3. The "Great Workshops": Japan [3] . Good Intentions Gone 4. The "Great Workshops": Awry [11|12|13|14] Germany [4] 5. The War Goes On [15] 5. The Smaller Workshops [5|6] 6. Some Broader Effects [7] SIX Nefarious Aggression [1] 1. Our Traditional Values [2|3] TWELVE Force and Opinion 2. Framing the Issues [4|5] 1. The Harsher Side [1|2] 3. Paths away from Disaster 2. The Bewildered Herd and [6] its Shepherds [3|4|5|6|7|8] 4. Steady on Course [7|8] 3. Short of Force [9|10] 5. The UN Learns to Behave 4. The Pragmatic Criterion [9|10] [11|12|13] 6. Moderates and Nationalists 5. The Range of Means [11] [14|15|16|17|18] 7. The Diplomatic Track 6. The Untamed Rabble [11|12|13|14] [19|20] 8. Safeguarding our Needs [14] Afterword 1. The "Gulf War" in Retrospect [1|2|3] 2. Deterring Iraqi Democracy [4] 3. "The Best of All Worlds" [5|6] 4. Marching Forward [7|8] 5. The US versus the Peace Process [9] 6. The Evolution of US Policy [10|11] 7. Bush-Baker Diplomacy [12] 8. Israel's Policy Spectrum [13] 9. The Prospects [14] Cover | Archive | ZNet Deterring Democracy Copyright © 1991, 1992 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press. Next segment | Contents | Overview | Archive | ZNet ...the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations, there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and were not ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations. WINSTON CHURCHILL INTRODUCTION History does not come neatly packaged into distinct periods, but by imposing such a structure upon it, we can sometimes gain clarity without doing too much violence to the facts. One such period was initiated with the Second World War, a new phase in world affairs in which "the United States was the hegemonic power in a system of world order" (Samuel Huntington). This phase was visibly drawing to a close in the 1970s, as the state capitalist world moved towards a tripolar structure with economic power centered in the United States, Japan, and the German-based European Community. As for the Soviet Union, the military build-up initiated after Soviet weakness was dramatically revealed during the Cuban missile crisis was beginning to level off, and Moscow's capacity to influence and coerce, always far inferior to that of the hegemonic power, was continuing to decline from its late 1950s peak. Furthermore, internal pressures were mounting as the economy stagnated, unable to enter a new phase of "post-industrial" modernization, and broader sectors of the population demonstrated their unwillingness to submit to totalitarian constraints. Plainly, Europe and Japan posed a greater potential threat to U.S. dominance than the fading Soviet Union. These developments were reasonably clear by the late 1970s, but a different conception was needed as a rationale for the policies then being implemented to maintain U.S. global dominance and to provide a needed shot in the arm to high technology industry: the picture of a fearsome Soviet Union marching from strength to strength and posing an awesome challenge to Western Civilization. These illusions lacked credibility at the time, and became completely unsustainable through the next decade. Meanwhile the observations of the preceding paragraph have become virtual truisms.1 This pattern has been standard through the postwar era -- and, in fact, it illustrates far more general regularities of statecraft and the ideological structures that accompany it. As if by reflex, state managers plead "security" to justify their programs. The plea rarely survives scrutiny. We regularly find that security threats are contrived -- and once contrived for other purposes, sometimes believed -- to induce a reluctant public to accept overseas adventures or costly intervention in the domestic economy. The factors that have typically driven policy in the postwar period are the need to impose or maintain a global system that will serve state power and the closely-linked interests of the masters of the private economy, and to ensure its viability by means of public subsidy and a state-guaranteed market. The highly ramified Pentagon system has been the major instrument for achieving these goals at home and abroad, always on the pretext of defense against the Soviet menace. To a significant extent, the threat of the Soviet Union and other enemies has risen or declined as these ends require.2 Strategic theory and the policy sciences are supple instruments, rarely at a loss to provide the required argument and analysis to buttress the conclusion of the moment. We can, then, identify a period from World War II, continuing into the 1970s, in which the U.S. dominated much of the world, confronting a rival superpower of considerably more limited reach.