Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs

Described by the New York Times as “an exploder of received truths,” Noam Chomsky is an articulate opponent of political hypocrisy, state brutality, and abuse of power. Rogue States is the result of his tireless efforts to measure the world’s superpowers by their own standards and to hold them responsible for the acts they commit in the name of their people.

The United States and its allies come in for particular scrutiny for their numerous blatant violations of the very international laws they claim to uphold. With analysis of the United States’s bombing campaign against Iraq, NATO’S intervention in Kosovo, US support for a regime terror in East Timor, and the political crisis in Colombia, Chomsky interrogates the rhetoric of Western foreign policy to reveal the insidious interests behind insupportable actions —from paralyzing economic sanctions to surgical military strikes.

Chomsky also turns his penetrating gaze towards continuing US involvement in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America to trace the enduring combined effects of military domination and economic imperialism on these Regions.

Throughout, Chomsky reveals the United States’s increasingly open dismissal of United Nations resolutions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and international legal precedent in justifying its motives and actions. As his analysis of US statecraft and warmongering amply reveals, the rule of law has been reduced to a mere nuisance in the United States’s brazen bid for the title of “rogue state.”

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, and political analyst. He writes extensively and lectures around the world on international affairs, US foreign policy, and human rights. He has published many books with South End Press, including Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians and Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order.