A Critical Examination of State Power, Media Manipulation, and the Ideological Underpinnings of American Foreign Policy
Lecture One: Intellectuals and the State
LOCATE: This opening lecture establishes the framework for the entire series by examining the relationship between intellectuals, state power, and the manufacturing of ideological consensus in democratic societies.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by addressing what he calls the “responsible intellectual” — a term he uses ironically to describe those intellectuals who align themselves with state power and serve as apologists for its actions. He contrasts this with the traditional role of intellectuals as truth-seekers and critics of authority. The central argument is that in modern capitalist democracies, intellectuals have largely abandoned their critical function and instead become what he terms “secular priests” — legitimizing state violence and economic exploitation through sophisticated justifications.
The book opens with a direct examination of the Vietnam War as a case study. Chomsky presents the war not as a tragic mistake or a well-intentioned error, as mainstream historians often frame it, but as a rational expression of American imperial strategy. He quotes from internal government documents, including the Pentagon Papers, to show that U.S. planners were fully aware that the war was unwinnable in military terms, yet continued it for geopolitical reasons — specifically, to demonstrate that the United States would punish any challenge to the global capitalist order.
“The Vietnam War was not a mistake. It was a rational act of state policy, designed to show that the United States would employ its power to prevent any model of independent development that might challenge the global capitalist system.”
Chomsky then turns to the mechanisms by which intellectuals justify such violence. He identifies several rhetorical strategies: “the defense of freedom” (framing imperial interventions as liberating), “the spread of democracy” (claiming that U.S.-backed dictatorships are transitional), and “national security” (invoking existential threats to justify any action). These are not cynical lies, Chomsky argues, but reflections of a deeply embedded ideological system that intellectuals themselves have internalized.
The lecture then examines the economic dimension of state power. Chomsky draws on the work of economist Gabriel Kolko to argue that the American state has historically functioned as a “welfare state for the rich” — socializing costs and risks while privatizing profits. He traces this pattern from the early railroad subsidies through the massive defense contracts of the Cold War era. The state, in Chomsky’s analysis, is not a neutral arbiter of competing interests but an instrument of class power, designed to maintain and expand the dominance of elite economic groups.
CLARIFY: Chomsky’s opening move is deliberately provocative. He is not simply critiquing foreign policy but challenging the very self-conception of intellectuals as independent truth-tellers. By framing intellectuals as ideological functionaries of state power, he sets up the central tension of the book: how democratic societies produce consent for policies that benefit a tiny elite while harming the majority. The Vietnam example is not incidental — it serves as the paradigmatic case of how ideology works, because the disconnect between the actual motives (geopolitical control) and the stated motives (defending freedom) is so stark.
Lecture Two: The Domestic Roots of Foreign Policy
LOCATE: This lecture moves from the international to the domestic sphere, arguing that American foreign policy cannot be understood apart from the internal economic and political structures of the United States.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by challenging the conventional view that foreign policy is primarily a response to external threats. Instead, he argues that foreign policy is largely a reflection of domestic power structures — specifically, the concentration of wealth and the corresponding concentration of political influence. He introduces the concept of the “national security state” as a system that uses the rhetoric of external danger to justify internal controls and to redirect public resources toward elite interests.
The lecture traces the evolution of American foreign policy from the Monroe Doctrine through the Cold War. Chomsky argues that the pattern has been remarkably consistent: the United States has opposed any form of independent nationalism or economic development that is not integrated into the global capitalist system. He cites numerous examples, from the overthrow of Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) to the destabilization of Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), as instances where democratically elected leaders were removed because they threatened U.S. corporate interests.
A key passage examines the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. Chomsky presents this not as an act of altruism but as a calculated strategy to rebuild European capitalism on terms favorable to American corporations. The plan’s conditions required European nations to open their economies to American investment, to break up left-wing labor movements, and to integrate their defense systems under NATO — which Chomsky describes as a mechanism for ensuring that Europe remained within the American sphere of influence.
“The Marshall Plan was not a gift. It was an investment in maintaining a global order in which American corporations could operate freely and profitably.”
Chomsky then examines the Cold War ideology itself. He argues that the Soviet Union served as a useful “threat” that could be invoked to justify any intervention, no matter how brutal. The actual Soviet military threat to Western Europe was minimal, Chomsky claims, but the perception of threat was carefully cultivated to maintain public support for massive military spending and for interventions in the Third World. He quotes from internal U.S. planning documents, including NSC-68, which explicitly state that the Soviet threat must be “dramatized” to persuade the American public to accept the required sacrifices.
The lecture concludes with an analysis of how this system affects American democracy at home. Chomsky argues that the military-industrial complex — a term he borrows from Eisenhower — has created a permanent war economy that distorts domestic priorities. Massive resources are funneled into weapons systems that serve no genuine defensive purpose, while social programs are starved of funding. This is not an accident, Chomsky insists, but a deliberate strategy to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a small elite.
CLARIFY: This lecture performs the crucial function of connecting the international and domestic dimensions of power. Chomsky’s argument is that the same elite that controls the economy also controls foreign policy, and that both are organized to maintain and expand their dominance. The domestic consequences — militarized society, eroded democracy, neglected social needs — are not unfortunate side effects but integral features of the system. The Cold War, in this reading, was as much about controlling the American population as it was about containing the Soviet Union.
Lecture Three: The Limits of Dissent
LOCATE: This third lecture examines how the ideological system constrains acceptable dissent, creating boundaries beyond which criticism is marginalized or suppressed.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by distinguishing between “responsible dissent” and “genuine dissent.” Responsible dissent operates within the framework of assumptions shared by the elite — it criticizes policies but not the fundamental structures of power. Genuine dissent, by contrast, challenges those structures themselves. The media and intellectual culture, Chomsky argues, systematically filter out genuine dissent while rewarding responsible dissent that actually reinforces elite control by creating the appearance of open debate.
The lecture develops this argument through an examination of the “propaganda model” of media operations, which Chomsky introduced with Edward Herman in *Manufacturing Consent*. The model identifies five filters that shape what becomes news: ownership (media are large corporations with elite interests), advertising (media depend on corporate advertisers), sourcing (media rely on official government and corporate sources), flak (organized attacks on journalists who deviate from the mainstream), and anti-communism (or, after the Cold War, anti-terrorism as a unifying ideology).
“The major media are not neutral arbiters of truth. They are corporations selling a product — audiences — to other corporations. Their function is to produce a picture of the world that serves the interests of the powerful.”
Chomsky then applies this model to several case studies. He examines media coverage of the Vietnam War alongside coverage of the Cambodian genocide. In both cases, he argues, the media accepted the official U.S. government framing — the Vietnam War was a noble cause betrayed by the media (the “stab in the back” myth), while the Cambodian genocide was blamed entirely on the Khmer Rouge, ignoring the massive U.S. bombing campaign that created the conditions for the genocide.
The lecture also examines the treatment of political dissidents in American history. Chomsky traces how figures like Eugene V. Debs (imprisoned for opposing World War I), the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World, systematically crushed by state violence), and Martin Luther King Jr. (placed under intensive FBI surveillance after he began criticizing capitalism and the Vietnam War) were all suppressed when their dissent moved beyond acceptable boundaries. The mechanism of suppression is often informal — marginalization, ridicule, loss of employment — rather than overt censorship, but it is equally effective.
Chomsky concludes this lecture by discussing the role of intellectuals in the Third World who face much harsher suppression. He compares the treatment of dissidents in the United States with that in U.S.-backed dictatorships, arguing that the difference is one of degree, not kind. In both cases, the goal is the same: to limit the range of acceptable opinion to those positions that do not threaten the fundamental distribution of power and wealth.
CLARIFY: This lecture is essential to the book’s overall argument because it explains why, despite the formal existence of democratic institutions, genuine challenges to elite power rarely gain traction. The propaganda model provides a structural explanation for why certain ideas are heard and others are silenced. Chomsky is not claiming that dissent never exists, but that it is systematically channeled into forms that do not threaten the system. This creates the paradox of “democracy” without real popular control — a theme that runs through the entire book.
Lecture Four: The Manufacture of Consent
LOCATE: We are now in the fourth lecture of the book, where Chomsky deepens the theoretical framework introduced in the previous lecture by examining how the manufacture of consent operates through the mass media as a systematic filtering process that serves elite interests.
PRESENT: Chomsky opens this lecture by returning to Walter Lippmann’s concept of “the manufacture of consent” — a phrase Lippmann used approvingly to describe the necessary function of a professional class that would manage public perceptions for the benefit of social order. Chomsky notes that Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, was remarkably frank about the anti-democratic implications of this project. Lippmann argued that the general public, which he called “the bewildered herd,” was incapable of understanding complex political issues and needed to be guided by a class of experts who would manufacture consent for policies that served the common good. Chomsky draws out the stark contrast between this elitist vision and any genuine conception of democracy. The manufacture of consent is not about responding to popular will but about managing and limiting it. Chomsky then presents the core of the lecture: a detailed examination of the propaganda model that explains how the media function as a system of “thought control” in societies that lack the overt censorship of authoritarian states.
The propaganda model identifies five filters through which news must pass before reaching the public. The first filter is the ownership and profit orientation of major media corporations. Chomsky explains that most major media outlets are owned by large conglomerates with substantial financial interests in the existing economic system. These corporations seek to maximize profit, which means they must attract advertisers and maintain a favorable business climate. The second filter is advertising itself, which Chomsky describes as a “license to do business” for media outlets. Without advertising revenue, most media cannot survive. This creates a fundamental dependency that shapes content: media must produce audiences that are attractive to advertisers, meaning that programming must avoid serious challenges to consumer culture and corporate power. The third filter is sourcing: the media rely heavily on official government and corporate sources for news. Chomsky notes that major news organizations maintain bureaus in Washington and other centers of power, and journalists develop close relationships with official sources. This creates an institutional bias toward accepting official frames and narratives. The fourth filter is flak — the organized pressure campaigns against media outlets or journalists who deviate from acceptable positions. Chomsky documents how corporate-funded think tanks and foundations monitor media content and generate negative responses to reporting that challenges elite interests. The fifth filter is “the anti-communist control mechanism” or, in its modern form, the “war on terror” — a unifying enemy that can be used to discipline dissent and justify state violence.
CLARIFY: Chomsky is not arguing that journalists are consciously following orders or that the media operate through explicit censorship. Rather, he is describing how structural factors produce a limited range of acceptable opinion without any formal directive. Journalists who internalize these constraints genuinely believe they are practicing objective journalism, but the very definition of objectivity is shaped by the filters. A frame that takes for granted the legitimacy of corporate capitalism and the benevolence of American power will naturally treat challenges from the left as extreme while treating challenges from the right as within the mainstream. This is why, as Chomsky notes, there is often vigorous debate within the media between the center-left and center-right — both of which accept the fundamental premises of the system — while radical alternatives are excluded entirely. The propaganda model explains how democratic societies manufacture consent without coercion, producing populations that believe they are exercising free choice while accepting a narrow range of permissible options.
Chomsky then applies the propaganda model to several case studies, showing how it operates in practice. He examines coverage of elections, noting that media focus on personality, strategy, and polling rather than substantive policy differences. This “horse race” coverage keeps the public focused on superficial spectacle rather than the actual distribution of power. He examines coverage of foreign policy, showing how media adopt the official framing of military intervention as humanitarian even when independent evidence suggests otherwise. The case of the Nicaraguan Contras is presented as a particularly clear example: despite overwhelming evidence that the Contras were guilty of systematic human rights abuses, including terrorism against civilians, the media repeatedly presented them as “freedom fighters” because they were fighting a government the U.S. opposed. Chomsky contrasts this with coverage of the Salvadoran government, which was also guilty of massive human rights abuses but was treated as a legitimate ally because it was fighting leftist insurgents. The differential treatment cannot be explained by the facts on the ground — it can only be explained by the propaganda model’s account of how media serve elite interests.
“The manufactured consent that emerges in a well-functioning propaganda system is sometimes called ‘the public diplomacy,’ but it is really nothing more than the organized efforts of the powerful to control the beliefs and attitudes of the population, to ‘engineer consent’ as the term was used by Walter Lippmann and other progressive thinkers.”
CLARIFY: The key insight Chomsky develops in this lecture is that the manufacture of consent is not a marginal or occasional phenomenon but a systematic feature of how power operates in democratic societies. The propaganda model does not claim that every news story is false or that the media never report on government failures. Rather, it claims that the overall framework within which reporting occurs is shaped by elite interests. The media can criticize the government for failing to achieve its stated goals — as in the Vietnam War, where they eventually turned against the war because it was perceived as unwinnable — but they will not question the legitimacy of the goals themselves. This creates a system where the public is informed but never truly educated, well-informed within a narrow range but ignorant of alternatives. Chomsky argues that this is more effective than overt propaganda because it gives people the feeling that they are making up their own minds, even as the range of choices has been predetermined.
Lecture Five: The Responsibility of Intellectuals
LOCATE: In the fifth lecture, Chomsky turns from describing the propaganda system to examining the role of intellectuals within it, arguing that they bear a special responsibility to speak truth about power and to refuse participation in the manufacture of consent.
PRESENT: Chomsky opens by returning to the themes of the first lecture, where he examined the historical role of intellectuals as servants of power. Here he develops the normative implications of that analysis. Intellectuals, he argues, are those with access to information and the training to evaluate it. They are the people who write the news articles, produce the academic studies, design the policy proposals, and teach the next generation. Because they occupy positions of relative privilege and access, they have a correspondingly greater responsibility to use their position for truth-telling rather than apologetics. Chomsky is particularly critical of what he calls the “New Mandarins” — the technocratic intellectuals who emerged after World War II and who saw their role as managing the American empire through expertise rather than engaging in moral or political critique. These intellectuals, he argues, provided the intellectual justification for the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and the broader project of global domination under the guise of “containing communism.”
Chomsky presents a detailed case study of how intellectuals in the United States responded to the Vietnam War. He contrasts the early silence or support of most academic intellectuals with the resistance of a small minority who opposed the war on moral grounds. The majority, he argues, framed the war as a tragic mistake — a failure of strategy or implementation — rather than as a crime. Even when they came to oppose the war, they did so within a framework that accepted the legitimacy of American power and the fundamental benevolence of American intentions. This is what Chomsky calls “the good face of power” : the view that the United States, despite occasional errors, is basically a force for good in the world. The intellectual’s role in this framework is to offer technical advice about how to achieve American goals more efficiently, not to question the goals themselves. Chomsky argues that this is a profound betrayal of the intellectual’s true responsibility, which is to speak the truth regardless of whether it serves the interests of power.
“Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information, and from freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us.”
CLARIFY: The responsibility Chomsky describes is not simply the abstract duty to be honest, but the concrete obligation to use one’s position to challenge the dominant narratives that serve power. He is describing what might be called an ethics of intellectual practice: the refusal to accept official frames, the willingness to examine evidence regardless of where it leads, and the courage to speak uncomfortable truths. Chomsky’s point is that most intellectuals fail this test because they are integrated into the institutions that benefit from the existing order — universities, foundations, media organizations, think tanks — and they internalize the values of those institutions. The intellectual who wishes to be responsible must be willing to become marginal, to speak from outside the centers of power, and to accept that their work will be dismissed, ignored, or attacked.
Chomsky then develops a distinction between two different models of intellectual responsibility. The first is the “technical” model, where the intellectual offers expertise to the powerful without questioning the moral or political framework within which that expertise is deployed. This is the model of the think tank scholar who advises the Pentagon on counterinsurgency or the economist who designs tax policy without asking whether the overall distribution of wealth is just. The second is the “critical” model, where the intellectual insists on examining the framework itself — questioning the legitimacy of the goals being pursued and the moral status of the means being used. Chomsky makes clear that only the critical model deserves to be called responsible. He sets a very high standard: it is not enough to critique means while accepting ends, or to offer minor reforms within a fundamentally unjust system. The responsible intellectual must be willing to call things by their true names — to call war crimes war crimes, imperialism imperialism, and propaganda propaganda.
CLARIFY: This lecture is crucial to the book’s overall project because it connects the structural analysis of the previous lectures to a call for action. Chomsky is not simply describing how power works; he is arguing that those who understand how it works have an obligation to resist it. The intellectual who remains silent, who “goes along” with the system, who accepts the limited range of acceptable opinion that the propaganda model describes, is complicit. Chomsky’s moral framework is demanding: he holds intellectuals to a higher standard precisely because they have greater access to information and greater freedom than ordinary citizens. The “responsibility of intellectuals” is not an abstract philosophical concept but a practical injunction to use one’s position to challenge the lies and distortions that serve power, and to do so publicly and consistently.
Lecture Six: The Lessons of Vietnam
LOCATE: In the sixth lecture, Chomsky examines the Vietnam War as a case study that reveals the fundamental patterns of American imperial conduct, arguing that the war was not a tragic mistake but a rational expression of elite interests that had to be hidden from the American public.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by rejecting the conventional narrative of the Vietnam War, which presents it as a well-intentioned effort that went wrong due to poor planning, bad tactics, or the failure of political will. Instead, he argues that the war was a carefully calculated attempt to suppress a nationalist movement that threatened American economic and strategic interests in Southeast Asia. The war was not a mistake; it was a crime — and it was understood as such by the planners from the very beginning. Chomsky presents extensive documentary evidence from internal government memoranda and Pentagon planning documents to show that American officials knew their actions were illegal and immoral but proceeded anyway. He quotes from the Pentagon Papers and other declassified documents to show that the U.S. government knowingly bombed civilians, destroyed villages, and used chemical weapons (Agent Orange) in ways that violated international law. The killing of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians was not an accident; it was the predictable result of deliberate policy choices.
Chomsky then examines the rationale that American officials gave for the war. They argued that the U.S. was defending “freedom” and “democracy” against communist aggression. But as Chomsky shows, the documents reveal that the actual concern was different. U.S. officials repeatedly stated that they were not fighting to defend South Vietnamese democracy — which did not exist — but to demonstrate American credibility and to maintain the global system of control. The “domino theory” — the idea that if Vietnam fell to communism, all of Southeast Asia would follow — was not based on any real analysis of local conditions but on the need to justify intervention to the American public. Chomsky argues that the real domino that concerned U.S. planners was not the spread of communism in Asia but the spread of successful nationalist revolution that might inspire similar movements elsewhere. The war was about sending a message: that resistance to American power would be met with overwhelming force.
“The war in Vietnam was not a tragic mistake. It was a crime — a war of aggression against a largely defenseless rural society, a war that was fought with incredible savagery against the civilian population, a war that was understood to be a crime by those who planned and executed it.”
CLARIFY: Chomsky’s analysis of Vietnam serves several functions within the book. First, it provides a concrete case study that demonstrates the propaganda model in action: the media and intellectuals largely accepted the official justification for the war until it became untenable, and even then they framed it as a mistake rather than a crime. Second, it shows the depth of elite willingness to commit atrocities in pursuit of strategic goals. Third, it provides a historical foundation for understanding subsequent American interventions. The pattern established in Vietnam — massive violence justified by abstract principles like “freedom” or “democracy,” hidden from the public through systematic deception, opposed only by marginal voices — would be repeated in Central America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Chomsky is arguing that Vietnam was not an anomaly but a template.
Chomsky then examines the role of the American anti-war movement. He argues that the movement, despite its internal divisions and limitations, played a crucial role in eventually forcing the U.S. to withdraw. The anti-war movement, he notes, was consistently described by the government and media as a fringe of radicals and traitors. But in fact, it represented a deep and growing popular rejection of the war. Chomsky argues that the anti-war movement’s success was limited — it stopped the bombing and forced withdrawal, but it did not prevent the destruction of Vietnam or the subsequent wars in Laos and Cambodia. However, it demonstrated that organized popular opposition could constrain the exercise of imperial power. The lesson is that resistance matters, even when it does not fully succeed. The anti-war movement also revealed the limits of the propaganda system: when enough people refuse to accept the official story, the system can be forced to adjust.
CLARIFY: The Vietnam War is central to Chomsky’s entire political project. It was the war that radicalized him, that provided the evidence for his critique of American power, and that continues to inform his analysis of subsequent conflicts. In this lecture, he is not just recounting history but drawing lessons for the present. He warns that the same patterns of official deception and media compliance will recur if citizens do not remain vigilant and willing to resist. The “lessons of Vietnam” that conservative intellectuals and policymakers claim to have learned — don’t get involved in long, costly wars — are not the real lessons. The real lessons are about the willingness of elites to commit crimes in pursuit of power, the complicity of the media and intellectuals in covering them up, and the necessity of organized resistance to stop them.
Lecture Seven: The Path to the Gulf Crisis
We are in the seventh lecture of the series, where Chomsky turns his attention from the historical case studies of Vietnam and Central America to the immediate crisis that was unfolding at the time of the writing: the Gulf War and the U.S. confrontation with Iraq.
Chomsky opens this lecture by framing the Gulf crisis not as a sudden, isolated event, but as a predictable consequence of long-standing U.S. policy in the Middle East. He argues that the standard narrative — that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, was an unprecedented act of aggression that required an immediate international response — is deeply misleading. The real story, he contends, begins much earlier, with the U.S. decision to support Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, providing Saddam Hussein with weapons, intelligence, and economic aid, even as he used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians. Chomsky notes that “the U.S. and its allies were quite content to see Iraq’s military power grow” during the 1980s, because Iraq was seen as a useful counterbalance to revolutionary Iran. The U.S. government was fully aware of Saddam’s atrocities, including the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, but chose not to intervene or even publicly condemn them. This was, in Chomsky’s view, a calculated policy of building up a regional enforcer, and it directly contributed to the conditions that made the invasion of Kuwait possible.
“The United States and its allies were quite content to see Iraq’s military power grow, and they provided it with the means to do so, despite its well-known record of atrocities.”
The lecture then dissects the diplomatic record leading up to the invasion. Chomsky points out that on July 25, 1990, just a week before the invasion, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein that the United States had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” This statement, Chomsky argues, was widely interpreted by Saddam as a green light for military action. While Glaspie later claimed that she had also warned Saddam not to use force, the written record shows that her message was ambiguous at best. Chomsky presents this as evidence that the Bush administration either miscalculated Saddam’s intentions or — more cynically — deliberately allowed the invasion to proceed in order to create a pretext for a major military intervention in the region. He notes that the U.S. had been seeking a justification for a permanent military presence in the Gulf since the 1979 Carter Doctrine, which declared that the U.S. would use military force to protect its access to Gulf oil. The invasion of Kuwait provided exactly that justification. The U.S. could now present itself as the defender of international law and Saudi security, while in reality pursuing its own strategic interests: control over the world’s largest oil reserves and the establishment of a regional military foothold.
Lecture Eight: The Gulf Crisis and International Order
In this lecture, Chomsky continues his analysis of the Gulf War, shifting his focus to the broader question of “international order.” He argues that the U.S. response to Iraq’s aggression was not a principled defense of international law, but a selective enforcement of it. Chomsky presents a comparative analysis: while the U.S. led a massive military coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait, it simultaneously ignored or even supported other violations of international law that served its interests. The most striking example is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, which had been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, yet received unwavering U.S. support. Chomsky also points to the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989, which killed thousands of civilians and was condemned by the United Nations as a violation of international law. Despite this, the U.S. suffered no sanctions, no trade embargoes, and no military coalition formed to reverse its actions. The point is not to justify Iraq’s invasion, Chomsky insists, but to expose the hypocrisy of the “new world order” that President George H.W. Bush proclaimed. That order, Chomsky argues, was not a system of universal rules, but a system in which the U.S. and its allies held a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
The lecture then examines the actual conduct of the war itself. Chomsky notes that the U.S. military campaign, code-named Operation Desert Storm, was not a precise, surgical operation as portrayed in the media. It was a massive bombing campaign that deliberately targeted Iraq’s civilian infrastructure: power plants, water treatment facilities, roads, bridges, and telecommunications. Chomsky quotes from a United Nations report that described the post-war condition of Iraq as “pre-industrial” and warned that the destruction of water and sanitation systems would lead to a public health catastrophe. He argues that these attacks were not “collateral damage” but were central to the military strategy, which aimed to cripple Iraqi society and force a rapid surrender. The U.S. also used depleted uranium munitions and cluster bombs, weapons with long-term environmental and health consequences that continue to cause harm years later. Chomsky presents this as a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks on civilian infrastructure essential for survival. Yet, he notes, these actions were barely reported in the mainstream media, which instead focused on the “miracle” of low coalition casualties and the supposed “smart bombs” that hit their targets with precision.
“The war was not a surgical strike against military targets, but a systematic attack on the civilian infrastructure of Iraq, designed to impose maximum punishment on the society.”
Chomsky then turns to the aftermath of the war, focusing on the U.S. decision to stand by while Saddam Hussein crushed the Shi’ite and Kurdish uprisings that the U.S. had encouraged. In the final days of the war, President Bush called on the Iraqi people to “take matters into their own hands” and overthrow Saddam. When they did, the U.S. did nothing to support them. In fact, Chomsky argues, the U.S. actively prevented the rebels from using captured Iraqi weapons and allowed Saddam’s helicopter gunships to fly — helicopters that had been exempted from the no-fly zone — in order to suppress the uprisings. The reason, Chomsky contends, was that the U.S. feared the collapse of Iraq as a state, which could lead to Iranian influence in the Shi’ite south and instability in Turkey over the Kurdish north. A weakened Saddam was preferable to a chaotic breakdown of the Iraqi state. This decision, Chomsky argues, reveals the true calculus of U.S. policy: it was not about democracy, human rights, or international law, but about maintaining a stable, controllable regional order. The suffering of the Iraqi people was secondary to that goal.
Lecture Nine: The New World Order
LOCATE: In this lecture, Chomsky examines the rhetorical construction of the “New World Order” after the Cold War and contrasts its stated principles with the actual behavior of the United States and its allies.
PRESENT: Chomsky opens by noting that the phrase “New World Order” was invoked by President George H.W. Bush during the Gulf War to describe a post-Cold War international system based on law, democracy, and cooperation. The phrase carried echoes of Woodrow Wilson’s post-World War I vision and Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime plans. Bush presented the Gulf War as the first test of this new order: aggression by one state against another would be met with collective action under UN authority. The United States claimed to be acting as the agent of the international community, enforcing the principle that “might does not make right.”
Chomsky argues that the reality was dramatically different. The New World Order, he contends, was not a system of international law but a system of great-power dominance dressed in universalist language. He traces the concept to a 1990 speech by Bush in which the president said the New World Order would be “a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle” and “where the strong respect the rights of the weak.” But Chomsky asks a simple question: did the United States apply this principle to itself?
He examines U.S. actions that were simultaneous with the Gulf War buildup. In November 1990, the United States invaded Panama, killing thousands of civilians and overthrowing the Noriega government. This was done without UN authorization, without the support of the OAS, and in direct violation of international law. The U.S. military bombed working-class neighborhoods in Panama City, and the death toll among Panamanian civilians was never officially tallied. Noriega was captured, brought to the United States, and tried on drug trafficking charges — though he had been on the CIA payroll for years. Chomsky notes that the invasion was condemned by the UN General Assembly and by the Organization of American States, but the United States vetoed any Security Council action.
“The New World Order is one in which the United States and its allies will enforce the rules for others, but will not be bound by them themselves.”
Chomsky extends the analysis to U.S. policy toward Iraq itself. He notes that during the 1980s, the United States had supported Saddam Hussein’s regime, providing weapons, intelligence, and agricultural credits even after the chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. The U.S. government had actively blocked UN Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s human rights abuses. It was only after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 — threatening Saudi oil fields and U.S. regional hegemony — that Saddam suddenly became the “new Hitler.” The shift was not about Saddam’s crimes, which were well known, but about his challenge to U.S. control of Middle East energy resources.
Chomsky then examines the aftermath of the Gulf War. The United States called for the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam, and both Bush and other administration officials made public statements encouraging internal uprising. When the Shi’ites in the south and the Kurds in the north rose up in March 1991, the United States did nothing to support them. The U.S. military stood by as Saddam’s Republican Guard — which had been allowed to keep its helicopters under the ceasefire terms — massacred the rebels. Chomsky notes that the helicopters were a special focus: the Iraqis used them to strafe fleeing civilians and to slaughter insurgents, and the United States did not ground them. In fact, the U.S. military continued to enforce the no-fly zone only in the north (to protect the Kurds, after international pressure) and later in the south (to protect the Shi’ites, only after they had already been crushed).
CLARIFY: Chomsky’s analysis of the New World Order is not about a single event but about a structural pattern. The contradiction between the rhetoric of universal law and the reality of selective enforcement is, for him, the defining feature of the post-Cold War international system. The United States presents itself as the guardian of international norms, but it reserves the right to violate them when its interests are at stake — and it punishes others for doing precisely what it does. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense; it is the logic of imperial power.
Lecture Ten: The Use (and Abuse) of International Law
LOCATE: Chomsky turns to the specific role of international law in the post-Cold War era, examining how the United States has simultaneously promoted legal institutions and undermined them.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by acknowledging that international law has expanded dramatically since World War II, particularly through the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and various human rights treaties. These instruments prohibit aggression, torture, genocide, and crimes against humanity. They create mechanisms for accountability, including the International Court of Justice and, more recently, the International Criminal Court. Chomsky states that this legal framework is, in principle, a genuine advance for civilization. It represents an effort to constrain state violence and to hold rulers accountable for their actions.
But he then argues that the United States has systematically undermined this framework whenever it has conflicted with its strategic interests. He provides several examples. The first is the 1986 ruling of the International Court of Justice in the case brought by Nicaragua against the United States. The Court found that the United States had violated international law by mining Nicaragua’s harbors, supporting the Contras, and engaging in economic warfare against the Sandinista government. The Court ordered the United States to pay reparations. The United States responded by withdrawing from the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction and vetoing a UN Security Council resolution that would have called on all states to comply with the ruling.
The second example is the U.S. refusal to join the International Criminal Court. Chomsky notes that the United States was one of only seven states to vote against the Rome Statute in 1998, and it subsequently engaged in a global campaign to pressure other states into signing bilateral agreements that would exempt U.S. citizens from ICC jurisdiction. The fear, Chomsky argues, was not that American soldiers would be prosecuted for legitimate acts of war, but that high-level civilian and military officials could be held accountable for decisions that constitute crimes under international law — such as the invasion of Panama, the bombing of Serbia, or the support for state terror in Central America.
“The United States wants a world in which international law applies to everyone except the United States and its clients.”
Chomsky then addresses the selective use of international law against enemies. The United States has been the strongest advocate for prosecuting war crimes committed by others — from Serbia to Iraq to Sudan — while blocking any investigation of its own actions. This selectivity, Chomsky argues, is not just hypocrisy; it actively undermines the legitimacy of the entire legal system. When the great powers can violate the law with impunity, the law becomes an instrument of power rather than a constraint on it. The Nuremberg principles — which held individuals responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — are applied to defeated enemies but not to victors.
Chomsky concludes this lecture by noting that the United States has used the UN Security Council as an instrument of its own policy. During the Gulf War, the Council authorized the use of force under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But the Council has refused to apply the same enforcement mechanisms to U.S. actions, such as the bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 (in retaliation for the embassy bombings, hitting a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that had no connection to Al Qaeda). The Security Council, Chomsky argues, is not a neutral body of international law; it is a political body whose permanent members — particularly the United States — can veto any action against themselves.
CLARIFY: For Chomsky, international law is a contradictory space. On one hand, it embodies genuine moral progress: the recognition that states should not be free to murder, torture, and destroy. On the other hand, it is embedded in a structure of power that allows the strongest states to use it as a weapon while remaining immune to it themselves. The solution, Chomsky implies, is not to abandon international law but to fight for its universal application — including against the great powers. But this requires a level of popular mobilization and democratic control that existing political systems do not encourage.
Lecture Eleven: The Structure of U.S. Dominance
LOCATE: In this lecture, Chomsky analyzes the institutional mechanisms through which the United States maintains its global dominance, focusing on economic institutions, military alliances, and ideological control.
PRESENT: Chomsky argues that U.S. global power rests on three pillars: military force, economic control, and ideological hegemony. Each pillar reinforces the others, and each has its own institutional structure. The military pillar is the most visible: the United States operates approximately 800 military bases in over 70 countries, maintains the largest navy in the world, and spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. This military apparatus is not primarily for defense; it is for power projection. It allows the United States to intervene anywhere in the world on short notice, to protect its interests and its clients.
The economic pillar operates through institutions created after World War II: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), later the World Trade Organization (WTO). These institutions, Chomsky argues, were designed to open markets for U.S. corporations, to ensure access to raw materials, and to prevent the spread of economic nationalism or socialism. The IMF, in particular, imposes “structural adjustment programs” on countries that seek loans — forcing them to cut social spending, privatize state enterprises, and eliminate trade barriers. The result is that poor countries become more dependent on foreign capital, their domestic industries are destroyed, and their wealth flows upward to the global rich.
Chomsky also examines the role of the World Trade Organization. The WTO, he notes, has the power to strike down national laws that violate trade agreements, even if those laws are designed to protect public health, the environment, or labor rights. This is not an accident; it is a deliberate feature of the system. The WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism is binding, and it allows corporations to sue governments for lost profits if regulations interfere with their business. The “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) provisions in trade agreements give corporations extraordinary power over democratic governments.
“The WTO is not a free trade agreement. It is a managed trade agreement — managed by and for the interests of the powerful.”
The third pillar is ideological hegemony. Chomsky returns to the concept of manufacturing consent that he developed with Edward Herman. The media, universities, and think tanks produce a framework of assumptions that limits what can be questioned. The Cold War, for example, was presented as a struggle between freedom and totalitarianism, with the United States standing for freedom. This framing made it impossible to raise certain questions: Was the United States itself a democracy when it supported dictatorships? Was the Soviet threat really a military threat or a challenge to U.S. economic dominance? The ideological framework of the Cold War also justified massive military spending, foreign interventions, and domestic surveillance — all in the name of defending freedom.
Chomsky notes that this ideological hegemony operates through self-censorship as much as through direct pressure. Journalists and academics learn what topics are safe and which ones are dangerous. They internalize the boundaries of acceptable debate. Those who challenge the framework are marginalized, attacked, or simply ignored. This is not a conspiracy, Chomsky insists; it is a structural feature of a system in which power and wealth are concentrated, and in which the media and universities depend on the state and corporations for funding.
CLARIFY: The three pillars of U.S. dominance are not separate; they work together. Military power enforces economic access; economic institutions create the conditions for ideological control; and ideological hegemony makes military and economic power appear natural and inevitable. The system is not monolithic — there are contradictions and tensions within it — but it is remarkably resilient. Chomsky’s argument is that challenging any one pillar requires challenging all three.
Lecture Twelve: The Decline of Democracy
LOCATE: In his final lecture, Chomsky argues that the United States itself is undergoing a crisis of democracy, as the power of the state and corporations increasingly escapes popular control.
PRESENT: Chomsky begins by noting that the United States was founded as a republic, not a democracy. The founders feared “mob rule” — that is, democracy for the masses. James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers that the purpose of the new Constitution was to “refine and enlarge the public views” by passing them through a filter of elected representatives, who would be drawn from the wealthy and educated classes. The Senate was originally appointed by state legislatures, not elected directly; the president was elected by an Electoral College; and the Supreme Court was appointed for life. These mechanisms were designed to insulate power from popular pressure.
Over the centuries, democratic reforms — the expansion of the franchise, the direct election of senators, the creation of primary elections, the civil rights movement — did extend some power to ordinary people. But Chomsky argues that these gains are now being reversed. The concentration of wealth has given corporations and the super-rich extraordinary influence over the political system. Campaign finance rulings like *Citizens United v. FEC* (2010) have removed limits on corporate spending in elections. The result is that the U.S. political system is effectively a plutocracy: a government of, by, and for the wealthy.
Chomsky cites the empirical work of political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, who studied the relationship between public opinion and policy outcomes in the United States. They found that the preferences of average citizens have virtually no impact on policy. Instead, policy is shaped by the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups. The United States is not a democracy in any meaningful sense; it is an oligarchy in which elections serve as a legitimating ritual.
“The United States is a one-party state — the business party, which has two factions, the Democrats and the Republicans.”
Chomsky also examines the decline of labor unions, which were historically the main counterweight to corporate power. The decline of organized labor — from about 35% of the private sector workforce in the 1950s to about 6% today — has left workers without collective bargaining power. Wages have stagnated, inequality has soared, and the social safety net has been dismantled. Both parties have contributed to this process, Chomsky argues, though the Republicans have done so more aggressively. The result is a political system in which the two parties compete for corporate funding while offering the public only superficial choices.
Finally, Chomsky addresses the role of the national security state. The post-9/11 period, he argues, has seen an unprecedented expansion of state surveillance and executive power. The PATRIOT Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the warrantless wiretapping program, and the use of indefinite detention — all of these have eroded the constitutional protections that were supposed to limit state power. Chomsky notes that these measures were justified in the name of fighting terrorism, but they have been used far more broadly, including against political activists, whistleblowers, and journalists.
CLARIFY: Chomsky ends the work with a bleak assessment of the state of democracy, but not with despair. He argues that democracy has always been a contested terrain — it must be fought for, defended, and expanded. The concentration of power is not inevitable; it is the result of specific political choices that can be reversed. But reversal requires popular mobilization, organization, and education. The manufacture of consent can be countered by an active, informed citizenry that refuses to accept the boundaries imposed by the ideological system. The work closes not with a solution but with a diagnosis — and a call to action, implicit in every page of the book, that the first step toward change is to understand the nature of the power that must be challenged.
