If you’re not familiar with Noam Chomsky’s insights into the real causes and consequences of US foreign policy, The Myth of American Idealism is an excellent introduction. If you are familiar, it’s a great refresher. IMO, the biggest, high-level takeaways:
1. Rulers have far more in common with and concern for each other than regard for the people they rule (that is, discussing any country as a monolith and failing to distinguish between the interests and desires of the country’s rulers and its ruled will produce inaccurate results);
2. Rulers throughout time and across the world have justified the most atrocious actions with the highest-minded rhetoric; and
3. America’s rulers are much like other rulers, and what prevents people from recognizing this obvious truth is a relentless stream of in-group propaganda (supply side), coupled with a profound psychological need to believe our tribe is good (demand side). That is, cynical combined with clinical—one of the most powerful confluences of forces in human affairs.
To put it another way, my approach to creating characters in my novels is based on the recognition that humans are more alike than dissimilar, that our commonalities are more consequential than our differences. If that’s true, than a good start to understanding the behavior of others is to understand ourselves. America is run by humans, which means it’s run by the same kinds of people—subject to the same laws of human nature—as those who run China, Iran, Russia, etc. Of course culture matters, but culture is only a finite expression of human nature, which itself is unvarying.
See, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society:
“Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.”
I wish more people would read this book and others like it, including Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, if for no other reason than in recognition that any story a society tells itself about itself is apt to be excessively kind and in need of a corrective. Understanding the real nature of one’s own government isn’t comfortable, but the alternative is a dangerous fantasy of good guys and bad guys that right now has the world on the edge of a nuclear precipice.
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