Hégémonie mondiale des États-Unis

U.S. global hegemony, as analyzed in the book, is the effort to preserve and extend American military and political predominance through control of strategic resources, access to markets, alliance management, and the demonstrated ability to use force. Chomsky argues that the campaign after September 11 accelerated this project: the establishment of major U.S. bases in Central Asia expanded the reach of an existing military network, while the language of counterterrorism helped justify both overseas power and domestic repression.

Strategic Geography and Military Reach

Chomsky places Afghanistan within a larger map of energy and military access. The most important energy reserves, he writes, lie in Saudi Arabia and the wider Persian Gulf, with substantial resources also in Central Asia. Afghanistan itself is a comparatively minor piece of this strategic landscape, but proposed pipelines through the country had long been connected to U.S. efforts to influence access to Central Asian resources. The region’s significance therefore exceeds the immediate battlefield: it joins energy routes, surrounding states, and the possibility of projecting force.

The establishment of major American military bases in Central Asia was, in Chomsky’s account, a major consequence of the war. He describes this as the first such American basing presence in the region and links it both to multinational corporations operating under U.S. predominance and to the contemporary “Great Game” over regional resources. The new installations also complemented a wider system directed toward the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia had been the safest base in that network; the Central Asian foothold, Chomsky argues, improved the United States’ position and made forceful intervention easier if Washington considered it necessary.

Continuity and Coalition Politics

The book presents the Bush administration’s post-September 11 policy as a sharper continuation of earlier practice, not a wholly new departure. In 1993, Bill Clinton told the United Nations that the United States intended to act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. Madeleine Albright reiterated the position, and in 1999 Defense Secretary William Cohen described reliance on unilateral military power to defend vital interests, including access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. Chomsky sees the Bush administration as going further, alarming allies without displacing the underlying principle.

The coalition assembled after the attacks could therefore soften Washington’s rhetoric without, in Chomsky’s judgment, changing its policy. Coalition partners were expected to provide support quietly and obediently rather than participate in deciding what the United States would do. Washington continued to reserve the right to act as it chose and, he argues, carefully avoided treating international institutions as the required basis for action. The distinction is central to his account of hegemony: cooperation could broaden political support while leaving command and strategic discretion concentrated in American hands.

Demonstration, Deterrence, and the Use of Force

Chomsky interprets the Afghanistan campaign as a demonstration of American capacity as well as a military response. During a visit by Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the prince urged the administration to pay greater attention to Arab reactions to U.S. support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that American officials answered that Washington did not care what he or other Arabs thought. A senior official contrasted the force used in Operation Desert Storm with the far greater power being shown in Afghanistan; a former military official predicted that firmness would earn respect and end further challenges. In the book’s analysis, these remarks make explicit a coercive conception of influence: military action communicates what may happen to states that defy the rules Washington sets.

Chomsky acknowledges that he has no access to classified documents and marks his account of the bombing’s principal purpose as an inference, not a documented decision. He considers it reasonable to suppose that the consequences were anticipated and that the attacks were intended in part to warn the world of American power. He compares this interpretation with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had justified in terms of preserving NATO’s credibility. Chomsky argues that the credibility at issue was chiefly that of the United States and its principal arms client, not that of Norway or Italy. In both cases, force appears in his account as a means of sustaining the perceived reliability of a dominant power and its alliances.

Domestic Power and the Limits of the Shift

The argument extends beyond overseas bases and intervention. Chomsky describes the Bush administration as using the fear and patriotism that followed the attacks to impose measures disciplining the domestic population and to advance policies unpopular with much of the public. He argues that the administration used the crisis to serve the narrow interests of large corporations that already dominated it, extending the pattern beyond its usual limits and imposing costs even on future generations. In this reading, global predominance and domestic control are connected: an external emergency can expand the government’s freedom of action at home while marginalizing public debate and dissent.

The book also identifies an important limit to the transformation. Chomsky concludes that most of the underlying international problems remained much as they had been, even as September 11 accelerated established tendencies and introduced changes with potentially serious consequences. U.S. global hegemony is thus presented neither as a sudden creation of the crisis nor as an unchanged status quo. The crisis enlarged military access, sharpened the rhetoric of dominance, and provided an occasion for repression, while extending a policy tradition that had already treated unilateral power and strategic access as vital interests.