North Atlantic Treaty Organization

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization enters Noam Chomsky’s analysis as a military alliance whose credibility can be invoked to justify force, but whose strategic purpose must be distinguished from legal authority. Chomsky argues that the 1999 bombing of Serbia was conducted in part to demonstrate the alliance’s credibility, while the post-September 11 campaign offered the United States an opportunity to reinforce its military dominance and signal the reach of its power.

Alliance Credibility and the Serbia Bombing

Chomsky presents the bombing of Serbia as a precedent for reading military action through the language of credibility. He recalls that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton described the purpose of the campaign as ensuring the credibility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In his account, that explanation concerned the standing of the United States and its principal arms client, not the credibility of individual alliance members such as Norway or Italy. The alliance’s name thus framed a strategic concern as a collective one, while the stated object of reassurance remained concentrated in the power of its leading members.

Chomsky treats credibility as a recurring theme in diplomacy and international relations, not as an incidental justification peculiar to one conflict. The Serbia example allows him to compare the public rationale for military action with the strategic interpretation he proposes: an operation can be presented as necessary to preserve an alliance’s standing while also demonstrating the power of its dominant state.

September 11 and Military Dominance

In Chomsky’s account, the Bush administration regarded the new phase of the “war on terror” as an opportunity to consolidate an already overwhelming military superiority and advance global dominance. The campaign therefore appears not only as a response to terrorism but also as an extension of a broader policy of military primacy. Chomsky compares it with the Reagan administration’s “war on terror” two decades earlier, presenting the renewed campaign as a recurrence rather than a wholly new departure.

He connects this strategic ambition to the establishment of major United States military bases in Central Asia for the first time. He argues that the bases would facilitate the activity of United States-dominated multinational corporations and help secure control over the region’s substantial resources. They would also extend a wider system of bases directed toward the Persian Gulf, whose energy resources Chomsky describes as among the world’s most important. Before the war in Afghanistan, he identifies Diego Garcia as the system’s most secure base; the new Central Asian positions, he argues, improved the prospects for forceful intervention if Washington chose to act.

Force, Law, and Strategic Interpretation

Chomsky’s discussion separates the political explanation of an operation from the legal question of its authorization. He argues that the United States rejected a proposed international legal process for arresting and trying Osama bin Laden and his associates even though, if their guilt could be demonstrated, international institutions would likely support such action, including the use of force. He also notes that the Taliban had indicated possible diplomatic avenues, which the United States rejected in favor of force. This distinction matters to his account of the alliance: credibility and military capacity may explain how force is framed politically, but do not by themselves establish that it is lawful.

His wider comparison with the Nicaragua case underscores the problem of applying international rules selectively. Chomsky recalls that the International Court of Justice ruled against the United States over its actions against Nicaragua, ordering it to cease those actions and pay reparations; the United States rejected the ruling and vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for respect for international law. Against this background, his account of alliance credibility is part of a broader critique of powerful states treating legal constraints differently when their own conduct is at issue.

The Alliance in a Wider Politics of Power

Chomsky places the alliance within a world in which governments used the September 11 attacks to intensify repressive policies. Russia and China, he says, joined the counterterrorism coalition in hopes of gaining latitude for their actions in Chechnya and against domestic populations. Turkey offered troops for the new phase of the United States campaign, while its prime minister connected that offer to American support for Turkey’s repression of its Kurdish population. Chomsky’s examples show how counterterrorism cooperation could bring together governments whose own policies he describes as coercive.

He also argues that governments exploited fear and demands for patriotism to impose restrictive domestic measures. In the United States, he portrays the Bush administration as using the moment to advance policies serving the narrow interests of large corporations, at the expense of much of the population and future generations. The alliance’s role in his account is consequently not a separate institutional history: it belongs to a wider argument about how security language, military power, and international cooperation can reinforce the authority of dominant states, even as claims of collective credibility obscure whose power is being demonstrated.