Reply #5: Continuation [View All]

[Jcrowley]

"Since World War II, the United States has faced the difficult task of finding policies which would be adequate for security and peace and at the same time compatible with its traditions. Never before has a great nation been called upon to adjust its thinking and its action so radically in so short a period."

--John Foster Dulles, April 1954 (1)

"For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply, but new threats also require new thinking."

--George W. Bush, June 2002 (2)

The work of Noam Chomsky rejects both the benign and democratic image of US foreign policy and the prevailing post-Cold War discontinuity thesis.5 For Chomsky, post-Cold War US foreign policy is characterised by overwhelming continuities with its earlier Cold War concerns, and continues to be malign and anti-democratic when US elite demands are opposed. He employs a revisionist historiography which traces the basis of these post-Cold War continuities to the interests and institutions that have remained in place to preserve a world order conducive for US capital and that largely dictate the direction and forms that US foreign policy takes.6 For Chomsky, the orthodox interpretation of US foreign policy provides the conditions of possibility for the claim of discontinuity in the post-Cold War era through its emphasis on the alleged centrality that Cold War bipolar tensions had upon US foreign policy in the developing world. The revisionist position rejects the subordination of North-South relations to an East-West framework and instead adopts a view of world order characterised by long-term structural inequalities and the differential distribution of power between the developed capitalist North and the underdeveloped South. Chomsky's work thus goes against the prevailing consensus within IR as a discipline and provides a radically different interpretation of post-Cold War US foreign policy than that of both mainstream and some of the more critical IR theorists. Chomsky's continuity thesis also offers an alternative normative framework for understanding international relations through its explicit focus on issues of exploitation between the developed industrialised North and the underdeveloped global South. His work moves away from an overly Eurocentric East versus West interpretation of the Cold War and is sensitive to the ways in which Western policies continue to lead to human rights violations in underdeveloped nations in the post-Cold War era. This makes his work valuable both through its challenge to the prevailing conventional wisdom within IR, and because it is an interesting and often neglected perspective on the underlying objectives of US foreign policy.

http://www.aqnt98.dsl.pipex.com/choms.htm