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

The Race to Destruction
6. The Consequences
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
337
I
t is to be expected that domestic militarization will be accompanied
by an “activist” (i.e., aggressive) foreign policy. One reason, already
mentioned, is that the population must be mobilized to pay the costs
and must therefore be convinced that it faces a terrible threat. A
domestic program of military Keynesianism thus fosters a search for
confrontation and military adventures abroad. The relation may also
arise in the opposite direction. Concern over a loss of hegemony abroad
requires intervention, hence reinforcement of the nuclear umbrella under
which it may proceed effectively. An ideology of assertiveness, mock
heroics and machismo fosters both domestic militarization and foreign
adventures. These processes quite generally develop in parallel. We
observe them today in the idiocies of the Rambo cult and the equivalent
among the jingoist intellectuals, who, mimicking Goebbels, speak of “the
sickly inhibitions against the use of military force” of earlier years, now
happily overcome with such “inspiriting” acts as the invasion of
Grenada, a fabulous triumph of American arms. 95
The correlation between domestic militarization and foreign
“activism” held in the three periods of military expansion mentioned
earlier, notably the latter two. Consider just Latin America. In 1951, “in
a historic turn,” Congress passed the Military Defense Assistance Act
“that created new ties between Washington and Latin American armed
forces,” and the US undertook training of Latin American officers at the
School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. “By the end of
1954,” not merely coincidentally, “military dictators ruled thirteen of the
twenty Latin American nations,” “a new high for the twentieth century,”
including all Central American nations except Costa Rica. 96 The Kennedy