Guerre froide

The Cold War appears in Noam Chomsky’s analysis as a historical framework whose institutional and military consequences outlasted its formal end. He links the U.S.-backed mobilization of Islamist fighters against Soviet forces in Afghanistan to later transnational networks, then argues that the post-September 11 response extended established strategies of military dominance rather than marking a clean break with the past.

A Cold War inheritance

Chomsky places the end of the Cold War alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall among the major changes that shaped the contemporary world. His account resists treating that ending as a complete political reset: he connects later conflicts and U.S. policy to decisions made during the preceding era, emphasizing how military partnerships and armed networks could survive the purposes for which they were first assembled.

The central example is Afghanistan in the 1980s. Chomsky says that U.S. intelligence worked with Pakistani, Saudi, British, and other services to recruit, train, and arm Islamist fighters for a holy war against Soviet forces. In his account, this was not simply an episode of Cold War alignment; it helped create forces and connections that later operated in other conflicts.

From Afghanistan to wider networks

Chomsky describes the fighters commonly called Afghans as a multinational force, many of whose members, like Osama bin Laden, were not Afghan. After the war in Afghanistan ended, he says, some turned their attention to places including Chechnya and Bosnia; in Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers received citizenship in recognition of their military actions. He presents these later movements as evidence that the networks formed during the anti-Soviet war did not dissolve with its conclusion.

His account also distinguishes between direct and indirect causation. Chomsky says the September 11 attacks were not a direct consequence of U.S. policy, but argues that their perpetrators likely came from a network rooted in mercenary forces organized, trained, and armed through the CIA and other governments and intelligence services. The Cold War-era project is therefore part of the background to later violence, not a complete explanation of it.

Chomsky further stresses that the forces associated with this history acted against multiple targets. He cites the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 by elements drawing on the same groups, and notes that Osama bin Laden joined the forces in the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that might still exist. These details complicate any account that treats the anti-Soviet campaign as a bounded episode with no afterlife.

Continuity after the Cold War

For Chomsky, the post-Cold War order also retained familiar patterns of intervention and strategic power. He compares the post-September 11 campaign with the Reagan administration’s earlier war on terrorism, arguing that the Bush administration used the new crisis to consolidate overwhelming U.S. military superiority and promote global dominance. The language and circumstances changed, but the policy impulse, in his reading, had precedents.

He connects this continuity to geography and military infrastructure. The United States established major bases in Central Asia for the first time, which Chomsky links to access to regional resources, the contemporary “Great Game,” and the wider effort to surround the world’s most important energy reserves in the Persian Gulf. Before the Afghanistan war, he says, Diego Garcia was the most secure U.S. base serving that strategic system; the new Central Asian presence made intervention easier.

Chomsky interprets the bombing of Afghanistan as carrying a message beyond its stated aims. He suggests that the campaign demonstrated what the United States could do to states that failed to follow its rules, and compares this logic with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had justified in terms of preserving the alliance’s credibility. He presents these cases as instances of military action serving not only immediate objectives but also the demonstration and maintenance of power.

The politics of memory and response

The Cold War’s legacy also shapes how Chomsky reads public explanation. He argues that it is easier to personify an enemy in Osama bin Laden than to examine the origins of the forces and policies that helped produce later conflict. In his view, treating the network as an isolated embodiment of evil obscures the role of U.S. and allied support for the forces from which it emerged.

That criticism extends to media and intellectual responses. Chomsky says that, during crises, major media and intellectual classes tend to rally around state power and encourage public mobilization; he cites the bombing of Serbia and the Gulf War as examples. He also argues that self-censorship, rather than explicit government obstruction, commonly limits information in the United States, while reporting from the Arab world can expose perspectives neglected by dominant outlets. His broader point is that a history of intervention can disappear from public discussion precisely when it is needed to understand new violence.

The Cold War thus functions in Chomsky’s account as both a period of confrontation and a starting point for later developments: the armed networks built in Afghanistan, their subsequent activity across regions, and the persistence of U.S. military reach after the Soviet era. He concludes that September 11 brought significant and potentially unwelcome changes, but that the underlying international problems largely remained in place.