Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance is a book about the United States and its foreign policy written by American political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky. It was first published in the United States in November 2003 by Metropolitan Books and then in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books. It was republished by Haymarket Books in January 2024.
Chomsky's main argument in Hegemony or Survival is that the socio-economic elite who control the United States have pursued an "Imperial Grand Strategy" since the end of World War II to maintain global hegemony through military, political, and economic means. He argues that in doing so they have repeatedly shown a total disregard for democracy and human rights, in stark contrast to the US government's professed support for those values. He further argues that this continual pursuit of global hegemony threatens the existence of humanity itself because of the increasing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Drawing historical examples from 1945 through to 2003, Chomsky looks at the US government's support for regimes responsible for mass human rights abuses—including ethnic cleansing and genocide—namely El Salvador, Colombia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, and Indonesia. He also discusses US support for militant dissident groups widely considered "terrorists", particularly in Nicaragua and Cuba, as well as direct military interventions, such as the Vietnam War, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Afghan War and Iraq War, to further its power and grasp of resources. He argues that US foreign policy—whether controlled by Republican or Democratic administrations—pursues the same agenda of gaining access to lucrative resources and maintaining US world dominance.
Mainstream press reviews in the US were mixed and were largely negative in the UK, although a review in Asia was more positive. In a speech before the UN General Assembly in September 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez openly praised the work. Sales of the book surged after the recommendation, its rank on Amazon.com rising to No. 1 in paperback and No. 6 in hardcover in only a few days.
Background
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Becoming academically involved in the field of linguistics, Chomsky gained a PhD and secured a teaching job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the field of linguistics, he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy and the universal grammar theory, achieving international recognition for his work.
Politically, Chomsky had held radical leftist views since childhood, identifying himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. A staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, he arose to public attention for these views in 1967, when The New York Times published his article, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", a criticism of the Vietnam War. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
Chomsky is the author of over 100 books, and has been described as a prominent cultural figure. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall.
The book was published as the first in The American Empire Series, edited for Metropolitan Books by Steve Fraser and Tom Engelhardt. The series had been devised as a vehicle for works of anti-imperialism that were critical of U.S. foreign policy. Engelhardt informed an interviewer that the series reflected their "counterinterventionary impulse" and represented an attempt to reclaim "the word" from the political right in the United States. They agreed to publish with Metropolitan because it was co-run by Engelhardt and Sara Bershtel. In conjunction with the publication of the book, Chomsky answered a series of public questions on the website of The Washington Post.
Synopsis Chomsky's first chapter, "Priorities and Prospects", provides an introduction to U.S. global dominance at the start of 2003. He looks at the role of propaganda – employed by government and mass media – in shaping public opinion in both the U.S. and United Kingdom, arguing that it allows a wealthy elite to thrive at the expense of the majority. As evidence for the manner in which the media shapes public opinion on foreign policy, he discusses the role of the U.S. government in protecting its economic interests in Nicaragua, first by supporting the military junta of General Somoza and then by supporting the Contra militias, in both instances leading to mass human rights abuses which were ignored by the mainstream U.S. media.
Chapter two, "Imperial Grand Strategy", looks at the U.S. government's belief that it should take part in "preventative war" against states who threaten its global hegemony, despite the illegality of these actions under international law. Chomsky argues that the targets of U.S. preventative war must be weak, yet important and easy to depict as a threat to the U.S. populace. Using the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example, he discusses how the U.S. government and media portrayed the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein as a threat to the U.S. and other Middle Eastern states, something which Chomsky argues it was not.
Chapter three, "The New Era of Enlightenment", explores further examples of U.S. interventionism in world affairs. Criticising the standard U.S. government claim that such interventionism is for humanitarian purposes, Chomsky maintains that it is an attempt to further the power of U.S. capitalism, with little interest in the welfare of the people involved. Using the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo as an example, he argues that western forces intervened not to protect Albanian Kosovans from Serbian aggression (as they claimed), but to humiliate and weaken Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, who had remained resistant to western demands for years. He asserts that western criticism of foreign human rights abuses is politically motivated, highlighting that while the U.S. were intervening in Kosovo, they were simultaneously supporting the governments of Turkey, Colombia and Indonesia, all of whom were involved in widespread human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing (see Kurdish–Turkish conflict (1978–present), Plan Colombia, 1999 East Timorese crisis, respectively).
In the fourth chapter, "Dangerous Times", Chomsky focuses primarily on U.S. interventionism throughout Latin America, which the government has defended through its Monroe Doctrine. He discusses the U.S. campaign to topple the socialist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, highlighting both its economic embargo of the island and its financial backing for militant groups that attack Cuban targets, including the perpetrators of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the bombing of Cubana Flight 455. He furthermore discusses the U.S. government's role in training Latin American right wing paramilitary squads, who have perpetrated widespread human rights abuses across the region.
Chapter five, "The Iraq Connection", looks at the background to the 2003 Iraq War, beginning with an analysis of the activities of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, who focused their military efforts in Central America and the Middle East. Chomsky argues that Reagan's administration utilized fear and nationalist rhetoric to distract the public from the poor economic situation that the U.S. was facing, finding scapegoats in the form of the leftist governments of Libya, Grenada and Nicaragua, as well as the international drug trade. He examines the long relationship that the U.S. had with the Hussein's Iraqi government, noting that they actively supported Hussein throughout the Iran–Iraq War, Al-Anfal Campaign and the Halabja poison gas attack, only turning against their former ally after his Invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Proceeding to critique the idea that the Bush II administration was genuinely concerned about threats to U.S. security, he criticises their attempts to undermine international efforts to prevent the militarization of space, the abolition of biological warfare, and the fight against global pollution, as well as the fact that they ignored all warnings that the Iraq invasion would cause a worldwide anti-American backlash. Exploring the dismissive attitude that the U.S. took towards European governments who opposed the war, namely France and Germany, he critiques the idea that the U.S. wanted to install a democratic government in Iraq, arguing that they wanted to install a puppet regime that would be obedient to U.S. corporate interests.
In the sixth chapter, "Dilemmas of Dominance", Chomsky explores the relationship that the U.S. has had with Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union and with East Asia since the Second World War. In the former, Chomsky argues, the U.S. has allied itself with the capitalist reformers who have advocated privatization and neoliberalism at the expense of the welfare state, leading to increased poverty and demographic decline across the region. In the latter, he has explored the role that the U.S. has played – through the likes of the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 – in supporting capitalist development, but trying to ensure its own economic hegemony at the same time.
Chapter seven, "Cauldron of Animosities", opens with a discussion of U.S. support for the increasing militarization of Israel and its illegal development of nuclear weapons, something Chomsky believes threatens peace in the Middle East by encouraging nations like Iran and Iraq to do the same. He explores the longstanding western exploitation of the Middle East for its oil resources, first by the British Empire and subsequently by the U.S. post-World War II, and then looks at the U.S.' role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, continually supporting Israel both militarily and politically, furthering human right abuses against the Palestinian people and repeatedly sabotaging the peace process.
The eighth chapter, "Terrorism and Justice: Some Useful Truisms", looks at what Chomsky calls "a few simple truths" regarding the criteria that is accepted for a conflict to be internationally recognized as a "just war". He argues that these truisms are continually ignored when it comes to the actions of the U.S. and her allies. Exploring the concepts of "terror" and "terrorism", he argues that the U.S. only use the term to refer to the actions of their enemies, and never to their own actions, no matter how similar they may be. As an example of such double standards, he highlights the public outcry at the killing of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled American murdered by Palestinian militants in 1985, contrasting it with the complete U.S. ignorance of the Israeli military's killing of a disabled Palestinian, Kemal Zughayer, in 2002. Focusing in on the Afghan War – widely described as a "just war" in the U.S. press – he criticizes such a description, arguing that the conflict was opposed by the majority of the world's population, including the Afghan people.