Investor-Rights Globalization

Investor-Rights Globalization is the particular form of globalization that Noam Chomsky describes as imposed through rules favoring investors, rather than as a neutral, universally accepted process. His account places it amid popular resistance and unequal state power, but draws a firm distinction between that economic order and the causes of the September 11 attacks. The distinction matters: in his analysis, the attacks did not arise from globalization, while their political aftermath offered governments an opportunity to deepen militarization, transfer wealth, and constrain public dissent.

Definition and Opposition

Chomsky acknowledges that the United States plays a predominant role in globalization, but rejects the idea that it governs the whole process. The projects have met enormous opposition, especially in the Global South, where mass protests can be silenced or ignored. In recent years, protests also reached wealthy countries, prompting visible anxiety among those in power and putting them on the defensive. He regards opposition to the investor-rights model as having sound grounds, while setting aside a fuller account of those grounds in this discussion.

This distinction between predominance and control shapes the concept. The United States is not presented as the sole author of globalization, but as its leading defender; the model is contested, not simply administered from Washington. Chomsky also points to a double standard in economic doctrine: the American and broader Western model depends on substantial state intervention in the economy, even as neoliberal rules prescribe market discipline to others. The principle, as he frames it, is that the market is for others, not for the powerful themselves—except when they can use it to gain an advantage.

Explanations of September 11

The book resists making investor-rights globalization a catch-all explanation for anti-American violence. Asked whether globalization and cultural hegemony helped produce hatred of America, Chomsky argues that this framing conveniently releases Western intellectuals from responsibility for the actions that actually shaped the choice of the World Trade Center as a target. He asks whether the 1993 bombing of the same building, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, or the Afghan fighters supported by the CIA who fought Russia in Afghanistan and later in Chechnya can plausibly be explained by globalization. His examples challenge the assumption that resistance to American power can be reduced to resentment of consumer culture.

He reinforces that point through reports of affluent, Westernized Egyptians and other well-off Middle Easterners who criticized U.S. policy despite their pro-American outlook and participation in consumer culture. Their objections, he argues, concerned recognizable political grievances; in the street, similar views were more intense, not less, and could not be explained away by complaints about McDonald’s or jeans. The contrast is between a convenient cultural account of hostility and political objections that remain legible even among people who appear to embody the globalized lifestyle.

Chomsky says the September 11 attacks had practically nothing to do with the globalized economy and insists that nothing can justify the crimes. But he rejects describing the United States as an innocent victim if doing so requires ignoring its own conduct and that of its allies. He cites U.S. support for corrupt and brutal governments that obstruct democracy and development, tied to the protection of interests in Middle Eastern oil, and notes that anger toward U.S. policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq had intensified among the Muslims surveyed by The Wall Street Journal after the attacks. By contrast, explanations that attribute popular anger to hostility toward Western freedom, cultural weakness, or failure to participate in globalization appear reassuring to their proponents but, in his view, lack discernment.

Political Uses of the Crisis

Chomsky predicts that the U.S. government will use the crisis to press an existing domestic and strategic agenda. He names militarization, including missile defense and what he calls the militarization of space; weakening social-democratic programs; diverting attention from the harmful effects of globalization and from environmental and health-insurance concerns; and shifting still more wealth to a small number of people, including through the removal of corporate charges. He also identifies the subordination of society as a means of suppressing public debate and protest. These measures connect the economic model to a political response: the crisis does not create the agenda, but can help advance it.

He places these predicted measures within a wider pattern of elite influence. Governments, he argues, respond to powerful domestic constituencies, though popular currents also exert influence in every kind of society, including authoritarian states. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he expects the U.S. government to listen to foreign leaders, Middle East specialists, and intelligence agencies warning that a massive military offensive would fulfill Osama bin Laden’s wishes. At the same time, he warns that hawkish actors may exploit the occasion to attack their enemies regardless of the suffering inflicted on innocent people abroad, in the United States, or in Europe. The resulting cycle of violence, he says, is familiar; there are many Osama bin Ladens on both sides.

In his longer-term account, the attacks accelerate trends already underway. Governments including Russia and China join the counterterrorism coalition while seeking greater latitude for repression; Turkey offers troops after its prime minister invokes U.S. support for the country’s campaign against its Kurdish population. Chomsky further argues that the U.S. administration used the atmosphere of fear and patriotism to impose measures disciplining its own population and to enact policies contrary to popular interests, in service of powerful corporations. Investor-rights globalization is thus connected not only to distribution of wealth, but to who can set the political agenda and how dissent is contained.

Alliances, Resources, and U.S. Power

Chomsky treats the sudden alliance-building after September 11 as a tactical adjustment rather than evidence of a fundamental turn toward shared decision-making. He recalls that Bill Clinton told the United Nations in 1993 that the United States would act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. Madeleine Albright reiterated that position, and in 1999 Defense Secretary William Cohen described reliance on unilateral military power to defend U.S. vital interests. Those interests included securing access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. In Chomsky’s account, George W. Bush went further, causing alarm among allies; the need for a coalition could soften the rhetoric without changing the underlying policy. Coalition members, he says, were expected to support Washington quietly rather than participate in its decisions, while the United States reserved the right to act as it wished.

The strategic landscape he describes is organized around energy and access. The most important energy reserves lie chiefly in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region, with substantial resources also in Central Asia. Afghanistan is a minor piece on that board, but plans for pipelines through the country had long figured in U.S. efforts to control Central Asian resources. The surrounding states and regional alignments make the picture unstable: Uzbekistan was condemned by Human Rights Watch for grave abuses and was fighting an Islamist rebellion; Tajikistan faced a similar conflict and had become a major drug-trafficking hub, with the Northern Alliance controlling nearly all of Afghanistan’s border with it. The flight of Afghans north could, Chomsky warns, aggravate internal pressures.

Pakistan presents a different danger in his account. It had been the Taliban’s leading supporter and contained a strong Islamist movement; an openly available base for U.S. operations might provoke a violent reaction. Pakistan also possessed nuclear weapons, and its military remained wary despite wanting promised U.S. military assistance. Its concern included the possibility of a hostile Afghanistan aligning with India. The Northern Alliance, led by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other Afghan minorities hostile to Pakistan, was supported by India, Iran, Russia, and, by then, the United States. These competing ties make the alliance effort inseparable from the region’s strategic interests and risks.

Chomsky argues that the war in Afghanistan brought a consequential change in U.S. military presence: for the first time, the United States established large-scale bases in Central Asia. He links those bases to a contemporary version of the Great Game, to access to the region’s resources, and to encirclement of the Persian Gulf’s energy reserves. Before the war, the most secure U.S. base directed toward the Gulf was Diego Garcia; the new position, he contends, made forceful intervention easier if Washington deemed it appropriate. In this reading, military infrastructure gives durable form to the pursuit of resources and strategic access.

Strategic Signaling and Its Limits

Chomsky interprets the Afghanistan campaign not only as a military response but also as a demonstration of U.S. power. He suggests, while acknowledging that confidential documents were unavailable, that the consequences may have been calculated and that a principal aim of the bombing was to warn the world what the United States could do to those who did not respect its rules. He compares this interpretation with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton described as necessary to preserve NATO’s credibility. Chomsky argues that the relevant credibility was chiefly that of the United States and its principal arms client, not that of other alliance members. The comparison places the public language of coalition and intervention beside the claim that military force also communicates hierarchy.

He does not claim that September 11 transformed the underlying international order beyond recognition. Rather, he concludes that most fundamental problems remained, even as the attacks introduced changes with significant and potentially unpleasant consequences. The concept of investor-rights globalization belongs to this argument as a way of identifying one contested structure of power, not as a single-cause explanation of violence. Its significance lies in the book’s double emphasis: opposition to the imposed economic model is real, but treating that model as the cause of September 11 obscures political responsibility; meanwhile, the crisis can be used to consolidate the very military and economic arrangements that remain contested.