Chomsky and Robinson: 'National Interest' Is a Euphemism
US foreign policy is run to serve its elites. The people are never involved. This was true before Trump.
For this post I’d like to promote a comment made recently to an earlier God’s Spies post on Palantir’s founder:
As Yves Smith often puts it at Naked Capitalism, “hoisted from the comments.” We’re doing the same. My thanks to Usamnesia for bringing this to our attention. Apropos Trump, she or he writes (formatting mine):
Well, actually the current entertainer in chief is just another receptionist in the empires front lobby. I think the excerpt by Robinson and Chomsky that follows is appropriate:
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson.
[For the quote, see below.]
Three notes before we begin:
1. The quote that Usamnesia offers us is part of a longer published excerpt from Chomsky and Robinson’s book. That can be found in the March 25, 2025 edition of The Boston Review. It begins thus:
Every ruling power tells itself stories to justify its rule. Nobody is the villain in their own history. Professed good intentions and humane principles are a constant. Even Heinrich Himmler, in describing the extermination of the Jews, claimed that the Nazis only “carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people” and thereby “suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.”
No one is the villain in their own story. Words to remember. Few men or nations, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, set out to be bad. Even the murderous Israel thinks itself good.
2. The “voice” is certainly Chomsky, his logic and cadences, his turn of phrase. This is not to discredit Robinson’s contribution, but to be glad to have more of his co-author’s work. (The book was written in 2023, before October 7 and Chomsky’s stroke. More about that process here.)
3. One quote from the longer excerpt is appropriate here: In its own understanding, “the United States does not act on the basis of the perceived self-interest of dominant groups in society. Only other states do that.”
This is the heart of America’s self-delusion, that its acts are the people’s acts. That’s never true. As the authors explain below, only elites control foreign policy, and only to benefit themselves.
With that, here’s Usamnesia’s offered quote. Bolded emphasis mine. Enjoy.
From The Myth of American Idealism, by Chomsky and Robinson
Needless to say, because even oppressive, criminal, and genocidal governments cloak their atrocities in the language of virtue, none of this rhetoric should be taken seriously. There is no reason to expect Americans to be uniquely immune to self- delusion. If those who commit evil and those who do good always both profess to be doing good, national stories are worthless as tests of truth. Sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, because they are a universal. What matters is the historical record.
The received wisdom is that the United States is committed to promoting democracy and human rights (sometimes called “Wilsonian idealism” or “American exceptionalism”). But the facts are consistent with the following theory instead: The United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population. In practice, this means that the United States has typically acted with almost complete disregard for moral principle and the rule of law, except insofar as complying with principle and law serves the interests of American elites. There is little evidence of authentic humanitarian concern among leading statesmen, and when it does exist, it is acted upon only to the extent that doing so does not go against domestic elites’ interests. American foreign policy is almost never made in accordance with the stated ideals, and in fact is far more consistent with what Adam Smith called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind” in “every age of the world,” namely: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.”
We might also call this the Mafia Doctrine. Its logic is straightforward and completely rational. The Godfather’s word is law. Those who defy the Godfather will be punished. The Godfather may be generous from time to time, but he does not tolerate disagreement. If some small storekeeper fails to pay protection money, the Godfather sends his goons, not just to collect the money, which he wouldn’t even notice, but to beat him to a pulp so that others do not get the idea that disobedience is permissible. But Godfathers, too, are known to convince themselves that they are kindly and benevolent.
The term “national interest” is itself a euphemism, for what is usually meant is the interest of a small sector of wealthy domestic elites. The American working class, whose members die in the country’s wars, do not have their “interest” served in any way by the wars that kill them. Nor are their interests served by the government spending money on weapons that could be used to repair school buildings. Indeed, when American actions abroad are exposed to the judgment of public opinion, they often prove deeply unpopular with the “nation” whose “interests” they are supposedly serving. A sophisticated propaganda system must keep the public in the dark, for if the truth were known, it would become immediately apparent that the public has a very different view of its “interests” than U.S. elites have.
We should also remember this the next time we hear talk about what “the Russians” or “Iran” have done. Totalitarians wish us to think that a country speaks with one voice, that it has a “national interest.” While it is the convention to refer to actions by the state as if they were actions by the country as a whole, and is unavoidable in discussions of policy, the formulation is ultimately misleading. The thousands of heroic antiwar protesters thrown in prison by Vladimir Putin have just as much claim to represent Russia as their ruler does. This is why it is an error to treat this book as arguing that “the United States is terrorist and destructive,” if the “United States” is understood to refer to some kind of collectivist of all Americans. Many in the United States have taken to the streets, and risked their lives and livelihoods, to oppose the acts of their government— when they have been permitted to learn about them, that is.
Wellie well well, I posted a NakCap comment ("Trump 2.0's Eurasian Balancing Act Has Failed," 10/15/25) on this very topic, which I will be so bold as to reproduce here (with minor mods):
National interest is not a thing. It is an ideal, a concept that conventionally imagines what, in some utilitarian way, represents the greatest good for the greatest number. It has one small problem. Power is not utilitarian. Power is what force determines: force of arms, force of money, force of personality, force of argument. Good and truth? Subordinate. Truth is an instrument, not an end. Power has to do with “good” only in the sense of good for the one with power, not the many without it.
In practice states are things not of popular sovereignty but of elite will, or wills, plural, because there is always contention among factions as the respond to internal and external circumstances. Policy emerges from that struggle, not from disinterested consideration of that mythical animal called national interest. When commentators call policies delusional, stupid, or contrary to national interest, at some higher level they may be correct, but, with rare exceptions, it is generally not at a higher level of intellectual disinterestedness or moral concern that policies are made. Analysis gets further in its understanding of interests by heuristically assuming they are appetitive, emergent, local, shortsighted, and selfish.
That is why putting internal politics outside the scope of international relations theory that fancies itself “realist” is … unrealistic. It is like limiting the study of literature to works in English. While it is an administrative convenience within the university and helps carve out a niche congenial to tenured appointments, it is a laughable taking of part for whole. As Mearsheimer might say, it is not a serious argument. Ironically, Mearsheimer, who regularly invokes national interest as if it were a self-evident thing that states pursue among themselves, wrote a seminal and quite courageous book with Stephen Walt on the Israel lobby, an internal faction that successfully hijacks U.S. policy against what Mearsheimer sees as the national interest. Curious, that.
I might add to the NakCap comment that by seeing national interest as a dynamic rather than a thing, questions arise about what maintains it and how institutions "select" for it, in a Darwinian sense. Another thought to consider: when seen by way of evolutionary substrates, elite power concentration can look like a parasitic exploitation of underlying cooperative drives that shape collective culture. That suggests strategies of non-cooperation (vs. elite substitution via largely empty and captive democratic formalism) as an interesting strategy for modification of elite behavior. Another story for another day.
It has long been abundantly obvious that the West (Not just the United States) is ruled, not by well-meaning do-gooders who occasionally go too far in their idealism or who at worst are occasionally led astray, but by full-blown Game of Thrones sociopaths and the occasional psychopath thrown in.
This is not peculiar to the West. All political systems are over time eventually ruled by such characters, because, unlike normies, sociopaths will do whatever it takes to get power.
Trump did nothing to change that.