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

The Fifth Freedom
document “to a large extent established priorities for the programs of
economic and military assistance implemented in the name of
‘containment’ during the next three years.”
Kennan’s prescriptions refer to the Far East, but the US is a global
power, and this general geopolitical conception, amply illustrated over
many years, is applicable elsewhere as well, as Kennan among others
made clear.
Before considering its more general application, we might observe
that some questions can be raised about Kennan’s formulation of the
goals of national policy. One has to do with his concept of the disparity
between “us” and “them.” Ignored here are certain disparities among
“us.” In fact, planners recognized early on that more egalitarian social
arrangements at home might reduce the need to protect the Fifth
Freedom abroad. One participant in the War and Peace Studies Project
observed that the domains of US control must be sufficient to provide it
with “the ‘elbow room’ . . . needed in order to survive without major
readjustments”; it was understood that changes in the domestic
distribution of power, wealth, ownership and control might reduce the
significance of the Fifth Freedom for the American economy. 15
Furthermore, the harsh measures required to maintain the (somewhat
abstract) disparity between “us” and “them” carry severe costs, both
material and moral. Perhaps in the present narrow context the latter
should be put aside as irrelevant sentimentality. But it is far from clear
that “we” benefit materially from the national commitment to “maintain
this position of disparity” by force, a commitment that entails global
confrontation with the constant threat of nuclear war, an economy
driven by military production, loss of jobs to regions where US-supported
thugs ensure low wages and miserable living standards, almost 60,000
soldiers killed in an attempt to enforce “our” will in Indochina, and so
on.
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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