Putin’s invasion is a supreme crime, Chomsky says — and so was America’s in Iraq

Fridman opens with the century-scale question: will there be a war between the United States and China? Chomsky’s answer is a blunt full stop. If there is, we’re finished. A war between the two would destroy the possibilities of organized life on Earth. He then turns the sentence around, and it gets heavier. Unless Washington and Beijing reach an accommodation and actually work together, it is very unlikely that organized human society will survive.

The list of problems that do not respect borders is the rest of the interview in miniature: environmental destruction, pandemics, the threat of nuclear war, the decline of democratic functioning, the shrinking of an arena for rational discourse. Either the powers work together, which he says they can, or they sink together. Ukraine is the door into that argument, not the whole house. From Putin’s motives and NATO’s eastward march, the conversation runs through military aid, nuclear risk, and Western propaganda, and lands on a larger claim: the United States is dismantling the international order it still claims to lead, and nothing is lined up to replace it.

Asked what motivates Vladimir Putin — power, legacy, fame, geopolitical influence, or love of country — Chomsky refuses the psychology. He has no special insight into the man’s mind. He can watch the last twenty or twenty-five years of actions and read the statements. Putin took power around then and has held it as prime minister or president. The first task was to climb out of the chaos of the 1990s. Gorbachev had proposed a “common European home”: no military alliances, a shared reconstruction with the West, a move toward social democracy. Washington had no interest. Clinton arrived, Russia was pushed into shock therapy, the economy was gutted, oligarchs rose, mortality spiked. Clinton also began expanding NATO eastward, which Chomsky calls a violation of firm, unambiguous promises to Gorbachev. Yeltsin opposed it. Other Russian leaders opposed it. They accepted it anyway.

Putin, in this telling, continued that international line while rebuilding the economy and locking society into a deep authoritarianism, with himself at the center of a major kleptocracy, apparently very wealthy. Diplomats who had actually dealt with Russia, Chomsky says, had been warning since the 1990s that Clinton’s course, later expanded by Bush, was reckless and provocative. Russia had a clear red line before Putin, and he kept it: no NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In 2008 Bush invited Ukraine to join; France and Germany vetoed it; American pressure kept it on the agenda. The current CIA director and his predecessors, Chomsky says, warned against it. After the 2014 Maidan uprising threw out a pro-Russian president and new anti-Russian laws appeared, the United States and NATO moved toward what US military journals call de facto integration of Ukraine into the NATO command — exercises, training, weapons. Russia took Crimea that year to protect its warm-water and naval base. Washington objected and, in Chomsky’s phrasing, recognized the fact. Large-scale war did not follow.

When Biden came in, the program expanded again: an enhanced preparation for NATO missions proposed in September 2021 and locked in by a formal statement in November, almost up to the invasion. Putin’s position hardened. France, and to an extent Germany, made moves toward talks; Putin dismissed them and invaded. So the motive, Chomsky thinks, is what Putin has been saying: a legacy as the man who pulled Russia out of ruin, restored it as a world power, kept Ukraine out of NATO, and very likely sought domination of Ukraine. By now the position has probably tightened further — keep Crimea and the southeastern corridor to Russia, and some ambiguous arrangement for Donbass. A few weeks before the invasion, for the first time, Putin recognized Donbass independence, a harsher line than the old federal-autonomy formula.

The competing Western theory is that Putin suddenly became a madman restoring the great Russian empire. Chomsky is scathing because the story contradicts itself. The same commentators describe grandiose plans to attack NATO and conquer Europe, then gloat that the Russian military is a paper tiger that cannot take cities a couple of kilometers from the border, defended not even by a regular army. Those pictures cannot both be true. The speculations, he adds, are not based on Putin ever saying he would conquer NATO, and they collide with the same people’s assessment of actual Russian power.

Fridman asks who is to blame for the February 24 invasion. Chomsky does not dodge. Any power that commits aggression is to blame. He has been saying for months that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is on a par with the US invasion of Iraq and the Stalin-Hitler invasion of Poland: a supreme international crime under international law. Of course Putin is to blame. He puts the United States on the same ruler. That is not relativism, in his framing. It is one measure, used all the way down.

Since the invasion, Fridman notes, the United States has committed $6.9 billion in military assistance. Should that continue? Chomsky splits the question, and he treats the split as the most important fork in the interview. Supporting Ukraine’s defense against aggression is legitimate. Seeking ways to end the crime before still worse disasters is the second task. That second part, he says, is barely discussed in the West. Anyone who dares is hit with invective. If you are serious about Ukraine you ask both: how do we support the defense, and how do we move to end the war before worse destruction of Ukraine, more starvation worldwide, a reversal of the limited effort on global warming, and a possible climb toward nuclear war.

He reaches for a phrase attributed to Churchill: lots of war-war, and no jaw-jaw. Official US policy, as he describes it, is to reject a diplomatic settlement and to weaken Russia so that it cannot aggress again — and to do nothing on the talking side. So yes, the United States should continue the kind of calibrated support already given. The Pentagon, in a reversal of the usual cartoon, has been the dovish shop: it has vetoed steps that go from defense to attacking Russia, including a no-fly zone, because a no-fly zone means destroying air defenses that sit inside Russia, and nobody knows whether Moscow would then escalate. In Britain and the United States, he says, public discussion stays on the first question. Not everywhere in Europe.

Does he worry about nuclear war in this century, and how do we avoid it? Anyone who does not worry, Chomsky says, does not have a gray cell functioning. The steps that lead there are easy to see, and some people have recommended them in public. Liberal commentators write that pretenses should be dropped and the West should simply go to war until Russia is destroyed. Leading figures in Congress propose a no-fly zone. Almost everyone now says Ukraine must win and drive the Russians out. It sounds decent on paper. Notice the assumption, he says: that this madman, out of control and hungry only for power, will sit quietly, accept defeat, slink away, and not use the military means he obviously has to destroy Ukraine.

He cites a long Washington Post piece, built from what US intelligence and leaders had presented about the buildup, noting British and American surprise that Putin had not fought the American way — shock and awe, the wrecking of communications and energy. They could not understand why he had not done it. If you want to make that destruction likely, Chomsky says, insist on fighting until Russia faces total defeat. Then it is a gamble. If he is as insane as the commentary claims, he will presumably use weapons he has not used yet. The West, in this telling, is taking an extraordinary gamble with Ukraine’s fate: that “mad Vlad” will not smash the country and set the stage for an escalation that might go nuclear.

How much propaganda is there in Russia, Ukraine, and the West? In Russia, Chomsky says, it is total; independent outlets have been crushed. Ukraine is at war, and wartime propaganda is expected. For the West he quotes Graham Fuller, a longtime senior American intelligence official on Russia and Central Asia, who said that in all the years of the Cold War he had never seen Russophobia this extreme. Chomsky thinks that is pretty accurate. The United States has even canceled Russian outlets, which means that to hear Sergei Lavrov you go to Al Jazeera or Indian state television, places that still let the Russian position appear.

Fridman asks how we find the truth if the media is a source of inaccuracies and lies. Chomsky will not take the premise. He does not regard the media, by and large, as a factory of lies. Reporters do courageous, honest work; he has written that for fifty years and has not changed his mind. What they do is pick some things and not others. Selection, framing, and presentation form a propaganda system you have to work through. Straight, outright lying is the rare part. Of course there is a difference between propaganda and lying. A propaganda system shapes and limits the material. It may tell the truth inside that framework.

The example is from *Manufacturing Consent*, written with Edward Herman. A large part of that book, Chomsky says, is a defense of the media against Freedom House, which had published volumes charging that an adversarial, dishonest press lost the Vietnam War. He read the charges and the evidence. The evidence, he says, was all lies. The journalists were doing honest work — inside a frame that assumed the American cause was basically just and honorable, capable of mistakes and bad acts, but not of a major war crime. “The United States is committing a war crime” was off the record. Discussion became this error and that atrocity, which harmed the effort to do good. That is not lying. It is propaganda. How do you find the truth? “That’s what you have a brain for.” It is not deep, not quantum physics. Put in a little effort, look for other sources, think a little about history, look at the documentary record, and put those together.

If Chomsky could sit with Putin and ask one question, what would it be? He would walk out of the room, as with almost any other leader. He knows what the man will say; he has read the party line and the pronouncements. Putin does not want to hear from him. Is the question supposed to be: why did you carry out a crime comparable to the US invasion of Iraq and the Stalin-Hitler invasion of Poland? He applies the same refusal to John F. Kennedy. Would he ask why Kennedy radically escalated the war in Vietnam, launched the Air Force, authorized napalm, and drove villagers believed to support the National Liberation Front into camps? Of course not.

Fridman presses a more moral question: are the people who led the United States into Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the war in Ukraine evil? Chomsky will not be pulled into soul-judging. It is very hard to sit in the leadership of a violent, aggressive power without carrying out evil acts. Are the people evil? He is not their moral advisor. He knows nothing about them. He looks at actions, statements, and policies, and evaluates those. Their families can evaluate their personalities. The method matches the rest of the hour: the record, not the narrative, and not the inner life.

Current American policy, Chomsky says, is not a secret: encircle China with sentinel states — South Korea, Japan, Australia — heavily armed, supplied by Biden with precision weapons aimed at China, backed by major naval operations. RIMPAC, a huge Pacific exercise with many nations, barely registered in US coverage, was in his view a threat. Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan he calls a highly provocative, stupid act, opposed by the military and the White House, the sort of thing that draws a dangerous response. “We don’t have to increase the threat.” The last NATO summit, for the first time, invited those sentinel states and stretched the alliance into the so-called Indo-Pacific, until “North Atlantic” covers a region whose purpose is to handle the China threat.

What is that threat? He cites former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, writing in the Australian press, “right in the claws of the dragon,” walking through the claims and concluding that the China threat is that China exists. It exists. It does not follow US orders. Europe does what Washington tells it to do, even when it dislikes it. China ignores the instruction. Chomsky then names two international orders. The UN-based order theoretically binds the United States and, as supreme law under the Constitution, bans the threat or use of force except in circumstances that almost never arise. That ban, he says, is a ban on ordinary American foreign policy. Try to find a president who is not engaged in the threat or use of force. So Washington does not accept the UN system. What it wants is a “rules-based international order,” acceptable because the United States sets the rules. Commentary and even scholarship call for that order almost unanimously. Is it false? No. Is it propaganda? Of course, because of what is not said and what is presupposed.

China does not accept that order. After the United States unilaterally left the Iran nuclear deal, it imposed harsh sanctions, in Chomsky’s sardonic telling, to punish Iran for wrecking an agreement Washington had wrecked, in violation of Security Council orders. Europe condemned the sanctions and still obeyed, because disobeying American orders is too dangerous. China ignored them. Secretaries of state say out loud that China is challenging global hegemony. Yes, Chomsky says: they do not accept US hegemony, especially in the waters off China. China does plenty of rotten things internally — repression, violence. That is not a threat to the United States, and Washington does not actually care, because it accepts and supports comparable crimes inside allies. Protest, he says, but without hypocrisy. The United States has no standing. Look at foreign aid: the leading recipient is Israel, engaged in constant terror, violence, and repression; the second is Egypt, one of the worst dictatorships in its history, with about 60,000 political prisoners. “Do we care? Second leading recipient.” That is why, he says, most of the world laughs.

That double standard, Chomsky argues, is why the Global South will not join the West in a proxy war aimed at severely weakening Russia. The Western reaction is to ask what is wrong with them, and to inspect their minds for a defect. Their attitude, as he ventriloquizes it, is simpler. Yes, they oppose the invasion of Ukraine; it is a terrible crime. But what are you talking about? This is what you do to us all the time. You do not care about crimes like this.

That, he says, is most of the Global South. The United States cannot comprehend it because it is so insulated that it is obviously right, and anyone who does not go along must be wrong. The insulation is the method, not a mood. If your information system never puts certain options on the table, disagreement looks like pathology.

Will the United States as global leader, as empire, collapse in this century? It can certainly harm itself severely, Chomsky says, and is doing so now. The greatest threat is internal: the country tearing itself apart. Start with something as elementary as mortality. The United States is the only country, outside of war, where life expectancy is declining and mortality is rising. Health outcomes sit among the worst in the developed world while health spending is about twice as high. The charts bend in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before that, on mortality, incarceration, and health costs, the country was a fairly normal rich state. Then it fell off the chart. That, for him, is the neoliberal assault of the last forty years: anger, resentment, violence.

Meanwhile the Republican Party, in his account, has drifted off the spectrum. It is not a normal party. Its main policy is to block anything in order to regain power — stated almost openly by McConnell, followed by the congressional party. Democracy has declined. Violence has increased. The Supreme Court is the most reactionary in memory, walking back toward the nineteenth century, decision after decision, in what he calls an effort to create a country of white-supremacist Christian nationalists, scarcely hidden in the opinions of Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and others. Justice Thomas’s opinion striking down a 1913 New York law on carrying concealed weapons in public is, as Chomsky glosses it, an argument that the United States is such a decaying, collapsing, hateful society that people simply have to have guns — that you cannot expect someone to go to the grocery store unarmed in a country this hideous. Those were not Thomas’s words. They were, Chomsky says, the import.

The pathology he finds almost astonishing is infrastructure. Bridges and subways fail the American Association of Engineers every year. Congress finally passed a limited infrastructure bill. It had to be called a China Competition Act. “We can’t rebuild the bridges because they’re falling apart. We have to rebuild the bridges to beat China.” Fridman closes by asking what gives him hope about the United States and human civilization. Chomsky does not offer comfort. Civilization will not survive unless the United States takes a leading position on the crises, because it is the most powerful country not only in the world but in human history, and what it does overwhelms what happens elsewhere. When it alone pulled out of the Paris climate agreements, maximized fossil fuels, and dismantled mitigating regulation under Trump, that was a blow to the future of civilization. When Republican states now punish corporations for taking climate change into account in their investments, the United States is telling the world, in import if not in words, that it wants to destroy all of us. As long as a political organization is dedicated to gaining power at any cost and maximizing profit no matter the consequences, he sees no future for human civilization.