Beyond  /  Book Excerpt

Noam Chomsky on How America Sanitizes the Horror of Its Wars

On the origins of America's hegemonic foreign policy.

From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department resulted in a policy they called “Grand Area” planning. The Grand Area referred to any region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy and was considered “strategically necessary for world control.”

“The British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear,” mused one planner, and thus “the United States may have to take its place.” Another stated frankly that the US “must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement.”

The Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over. Ideally it would also include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions that were to organize and police it.

George Kennan, head of the State Department planning staff and one of the leading architects of the post-World War II order, outlined the basic thinking in an important 1948 planning document:

We have about fifty percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population in this situation, we cannot fail to be object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity  We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction… We should cease to talk about vague and  unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

The planning staff recognized further that “the foremost requirement” to secure these ends was “the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament”—then, as now, a central component of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.”

This policy of military and economic supremacy is openly stated everywhere from the 1940s planning documents to the National Security Strategies put out by the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Implementing it has not just involved ignoring democracy and human rights, but often actively opposing them with tremendous ferocity.