Are We the Bad Guys?

Noam Chomsky said so; Noah Smith objects

Noah Smith writes,

To borrow Imre Lakatos’ terminology, “America bad” was the core of Chomsky’s foreign policy thought, and everything else was an expendable periphery.

When I was in high school, I accepted Chomsky’s explanation for the Vietnam War, which is that it was motivated by corporate America’s insatiable desire for markets. Within a few years, I had grown out of this nutty conspiracy idea. Chomsky never outgrew it. And today there are people on the left and the right who have a need to believe that foreign policies they disagree with come from dark, evil motives.

The proverbial horseshoe of politics has been getting tighter recently, with opposition to American power as the unifying theme of leftists and “America first” rightists. Some on the right have even embraced the Palestinian cause (though this might just be an excuse to bash Jews). I’ve seen more and more rightists start to use Chomskyan language — “neoliberalism”, “imperialism”, etc. are now commonplace.

There are good reasons to regret many of America’s foreign policy interventions. I think that our foreign policy establishment is prone to making mistakes, especially when it embarks on exercises that require nation-building in order to succeed.

But I believe that American foreign policy is well-intentioned. We are not intervening on behalf of greedy capitalists (maybe we did that occasionally in Latin America many decades ago). We are not out to conquer an empire. Our ideals about human rights are legitimate.

The term “human rights” means that our policy makers have opinions about how other governments treat their people and behave relative to their neighbors. Most policy makers think that those issues should factor into our foreign policy. It may be better in foreign policy to put very little weight on these human rights issues. But it is childish to say that our concept of human rights is completely bogus.

I think that it is important to judge interventions by results, not intentions. And many American interventions have produced bad results. It is those unintended consequences that give “human rights” a bad odor in some quarters.

I would be less interventionist than Noah Smith, for the same reason that I am less enamored than he is about industrial policy. I see government as clumsy and error-prone.

Comparing government with markets, my line is “Markets fail. Use markets.” I see markets as having a more robust error-correction mechanism.

But when it comes to not having an error-correction mechanism, I think that the people who see America as the bad guy in the world are really guilty. Some people on both the left and the right believe that it is sophisticated to argue for the moral equivalence of the U.S. and Russia. I got over that after high school.

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Noam Chomsky and the end of "America bad"