Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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lies between current American perceptions of the world and the world’s
perception of America.” He observes that “with the possible exceptions
of the Israelis, the South Africans, President Marcos of the Philippines
and a few right-wing governments in Central and South America,” most
of the world believes “that the Reagan administration has vastly
overreacted to the Soviet threat, thereby distorting the American (and
hence the world) economy, quickening the arms race, warping its own
judgment about events in the Third World, and further debasing the
language of international intercourse with feverish rhetoric. 39 He adds
that “it is in my experience almost impossible to convey even to the
most experienced Americans just how deeply rooted and widely spread
the critical view has become.” As if to confirm this judgment, in the
companion article on the current international scene in Foreign Affairs,
editor William Bundy writes that with regard to the “degree of threat
from the Soviet Union . . . the Reagan administration’s broad view
seems to this observer nearer to reality than the often excessively
sanguine and parochial stated positions of other major nations.” 40 Yet at
the same time, Europe is eager to gain what profit it can from US
enterprises at which it sometimes looks askance, such as SDI, and
European intellectuals are often more “colonized” by the US than they
like to believe, a fact already illustrated.
As in the case of the nuclear freeze, a majority of the US population
opposes “Star Wars,” despite the massive PR campaign: in a July 1985
poll, 53% disapproved while 41% approved, and only 26% would
approve if the program were to conflict with the ABM treaty, as it surely
will. 41
Again we must conclude that the factors that drive the military
system remain uninfluenced by public opinion here and abroad or by the
real dangers posed to American security. The lesson of the successes
and failures of the nuclear freeze movement, then, is reinforced: the