The Ethics of Intervention

Noam Chomsky debates with Stanley Hoffmann

The New York Review of Books, March 27, 1969

To the Editors:
Whether or not one agrees with the substance of Professor Chomskys arguments, or with his use
of quotations, or with his tendency to draw from an authors statements inferences that
correspond neither to the authors intentions nor to the statements meaning, he has raised so
many important issues that I feel almost petty in replying mainly to his comments about my
contribution to No More Vietnams? in his letter in your issue of February 13. I appreciate his
attempt to understand my position and I applaud his suggestion that the reader should find out
for himself. But since he had provided the reader with his interpretation of what I mean, maybe
I should, in turn, deal with three areas of apparent contention between him and me.
1) He insists that we disagree on American military intervention and political subversion in
general. I insist that we do not. I stand behind my statement: we must learn to accept violent
social and political change. We should not behave as cosmic Metternichs. When I describe
American interventions in Iran or Guatemala as successful, I only mean that they did what they
were designed to accomplish. They were effective: just like Soviet interventions in Hungary or
Czechoslovakia. But successful is not the same as good. In my opinion, those kinds of American
operations should not have been undertaken, both for political reasons they made the
international system more rather than less immoderate and for ethical reasons, because the
means corrupted the ends and entailed costs of value greater than the costs of not resorting to
them. These operations were undertaken because of our tendency to feel threatened by any
tremor anywhere. What I have called for is a basic distinction between threats to world order
that result from interstate conflicts, as in the Middle East, and outbreaks of domestic violence,
which we must learn to live with.
2) We do disagree on the subject of American objectives in Vietnam. Professor Chomsky believes
that they were wicked; I do not. I believe that they were, in a way, far worse; for often the
greatest threat to moderation and peace, and certainly the most insidious, comes from
objectives that are couched in terms of fine principles in which the policymaker fervently
believes, yet that turn out to have no relation to political realities and can therefore be applied
only by tortuous or brutal methods which broaden ad infinitum the gap between motives and
effects. What matters in international affairs, alas, far more than intentions and objectives, is
behavior and results. Because I do not believe that our professed goals in Vietnam were
obviously wicked, Professor Chomsky reads this as in essence an argument for the legitimacy of
military intervention. If he had not stopped his quotation of my analysis where he did, he

would have had to show that my case against the war is exactly the opposite: worthy ends
divorced from local political realities lead to political and moral disaster, just as British
resistance to the American revolution was bound to get bankrupt. What Vietnam proves, in my
opinion, is not the wickedness of our intentions or objectives but the wickedness that results
from irrelevant objectives and disembodied intentions, applied by hideous and massive means. It
has its roots, intellectual and emotional, in elements of the American style that I have been at
pains to analyze in detail. The Americans very conviction that their goals are good blinds them
to the consequences of their acts. To focus on intentions is to prolong a futile clash of inflamed
selfrighteousness; to focus on behavior and results could get us somewhere. I detect in
Professor Chomskys approach, in his uncomplicated attribution of evil objectives to his foes, in
his fondness for abstract principles, in his moral impatience, the mirror image of the very
features that both he and I dislike in American foreign policy. To me sanity does not consist of
replying to a crusade with an anticrusade. As scholars and as citizens, we must require and
provide discriminating and disciplined reasoning on behalf of our values.
3) I am puzzled by Professor Chomskys conception of a mass movement for resistance and social
change in this country. Does he believe that the only legitimate form of resistance, for scholars
or scientists, is total noncooperation with the Government, which leaves the Government free
to pursue blithely its policies and leaves the noncooperating scholar or scientist with the
comfort of a good conscience at the cost of total ineffectiveness? Does any scholar or scientist
who tries to affect Government policy by means other than total repudiation disqualify himself
in Professor Chomskys eyes? In other words, does he believe that America today is a grievously
imperfect but perfectible polity, or that it is so evil that any cooperation with its established
institutions is comparable to collaborating with the Nazis? Should the mass movement he calls
for be a genuine revolutionary movement? In this case, the best arguments about both its
futility and its danger in the United States are those presented by Professor Barrington Moore in
the previous issue of The New York Review. If the mass movement desired by Professor Chomsky
is of the sort that Professor Moore calls for, an attempt at synthesizing the achievements of
liberalism with those of revolutionary radicalism, then it will be necessary to spend much more
time on defining, eclectically and undogmatically, the positive intellectual and political tasks
which Professor Chomsky hints at in the last part of his letter, and less time on the negative task
of pillorying ones enemies. The latter is emotionally more satisfying and is necessary as a
beginning, but it is the former that ultimately matters. On this I am sure that Professor Chomsky
and I will agree.
Stanley Hoffmann
Professor of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge

Chomskys response:

In the letter to which Professor Hoffmann refers, I offered an interpretation of his remarks in No
More Vietnams? on the legitimacy of intervention, explaining in some detail how I was led to it.
His letter reinforces this interpretation.
To summarize briefly, Professor Hoffmanns statements in No More Vietnams? and again in his
letter, fall roughly into two categories. In the first category are strong condemnations of any
policy of universal intervention and the plea that we learn to accept violent social and
political change. But I also cited many statements in which he merely urges modesty and
limitation and expresses his belief that the central problem does not lie in the nature of
Americas objectives but rather in the relevance of its ends to specific cases. Our objectives
in Vietnam, which he maintains are worthy ends, are: protecting the nonCommunist majority
from an armed minority supplied from outside, buying time for the countries situated
around China, etc. The tragedy is our failure to grasp political realities. He offers the following
summary in one formula: From incorrect premises about a local situation and about our
abilities, a bad policy is likely to follow.
The ethical grounds for his argument against our Vietnam policy are those cited once again in his
letter, and which I quoted, namely, that the means corrupted the ends and the costs were
greater than the costs of nonintervention. In the absence of any other effective agency, it is we
who determine the costs. It would follow from all of this that had our premises about the local
situation and our abilities been accurate, had the means been less corrupting and the costs (as
calculated by us) properly balanced, then military intervention would have been legitimate; all
of the objections Hoffmann raises would be met. To this view I counterposed a very different
one: that we have no authority and no competence to make such judgments about Vietnam or
any other country and to use our military power to act on these judgments.
I have no desire to find conflict where it does not exist, but it is clear that these views do differ
in a fundamental way and that only confusion can arise from a failure to consider this distinction
carefully. In my letter in the New York Review of February 13 I did not try to justify the
counterposed view, though I do accept it; rather I attempted to make clear the distinction,
which seems to me an essential and important one.
The matter of Iran and Guatemala illustrates my point fairly well. Professor Hoffmann states
that he was opposed to these interventions because they made the international system more
immoderate, and for ethical reasons: namely, the means corrupted the ends and the costs were
greater than the costs of nonintervention. This is very different from a criticism based on the
premise that we have no right to use force to overthrow a government (which we freely admit to
be popular and properly constituted), even if this action has no international implications and
the means do not corrupt the ends, and independently of our judgment of the relative costs
of intervention and nonintervention a judgment which, I repeat, we have no competence to

make and no authority to act upon. Again, I would like to stress the fundamental distinction
between these approaches.
Professor Hoffmann offers the analogy to Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Suppose that we were to read a discussion of intervention by a Soviet scholar in which he
distinguishes:

two kinds of interventions, one of which we have practiced with some proficiency
over the years. This category has been what I would call negative interventions. We
did not exactly know what we were for, but we did know what we were against. We
intervened essentially against a threat, and we have sometimes been quite
successful Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and what have you. As for this category of
interventions, I would argue that in the future we at least ought to define more
rigorously what it is that so threatens us that we feel we have to intervene either by
political subversion or by military action. [No More Vietnams? p. 2845, with
Guatemala and Iran replaced by Hungary and Czechoslovakia]
I would read this as a tempered argument for the legitimacy of intervention, where certain
conditions of scale and cost are met, particularly in the context of the remarks just quoted. And
I strongly oppose this point of view. Since I see no reason for maintaining a double standard, I
feel justified in reaching the same conclusion when Guatemala and Iran replace Hungary
and Czechoslovakia in the above quotation, which is Professor Hoffmanns only reference to
these interventions.
Professor Hoffmanns second point is based on a confusion between objectives and professed
goals. Quite illegitimately, Professor Hoffmann uses these concepts as though they were
interchangeable, in the case of American policy a usage that no one would countenance in the
analysis of policy in the case of any other power. Thus he is wrong in attributing to me the belief
that our professed goals in Vietnam were obviously wicked. On the contrary, the goals we
profess are as worthy as the goals professed by Soviet spokesmen in the case of Hungary and
Czechoslovakia (to prevent a fascist takeover, to protect the majority against warlike neighbors,
etc.). But the analyst of international affairs does not waste a moment considering the
professed goals of official Russian spokesmen or other apologists. Rather, he tries to
determine their real objectives on the basis of their behavior in this instance, and in its evolving
pattern.
The analyst who does not adhere to a double standard will approach American policy in exactly
the same way. The confusion just noted vitiates Professor Hoffmanns second comment.
Furthermore, he is quite mistaken in saying that had I not stopped my quotations where I did, I

would have seen that his case is the opposite of what I claimed. In fact, I quoted directly the
very statements to which he alludes as expressing his position.
I disagree with Professor Hoffmanns proposal that we should not focus on intentions and
objectives but rather on behavior and results. To understand Soviet policy, we must use
behavior as evidence for intentions and objectives, distinguishing carefully between professed
goals and objectives as inferred from an evolving pattern of behavior. The same is true in the
case of American policy. In the latter case, it is of far greater importance to try to determine
both immediate objectives and longrange tendencies for at least three reasons: (1) it is much
easier to be deluded about ones own purity; (2) American force and the willingness to use it is,
at the moment, the major factor in international affairs; (3) we have some hope of changing
American intentions and objectives if we can come to understand them. If we concentrate
merely on behavior and results and automatically identify objectives with professed
goals, we condemn ourselves to superficiality and political irrelevance.
Professor Hoffmanns third comment raises important issues, but his reference to my remarks is
inaccurate. Nothing I said suggests a policy of total noncooperation with the Government or
total repudiation. Rather, I proposed that it is possible to undertake resistance to ominous,
deepseated tendencies in our society. For example, scientists can organize to refuse to take
part in criminal acts, and scholars can strike at one pillar of American counterrevolutionary
ideology through more objective work. In fact, one of the examples that I cited was Alperovitzs
work on community development, which involved preparation of Congressional legislation and
adaptation of federal programs.
It is far from clear that the alternatives are sensibly to be posed as reform or revolution.
There is also the possibility of working towards what Andre Gorz calls structural reform:
namely, a decentralization of the decisionmaking power, a restriction on the powers of State
or Capital, an extension of popular power, that is to say, a victory of democracy over the
dictatorship of profit (his italics). As Gorz argues, such reforms may have a potentially
revolutionary content. It is impossible to predict whether an attempt to extend democratic
decisionmaking will, if it ever develops on a mass scale, face such repressive force that it leads
to a revolutionary confrontation, or whether it will be able to proceed peaceably. The goal of a
movement for social change should be to introduce meaningful structural reforms, in this sense,
avoiding unnecessary confrontations but remaining committed to the defense of democratic
values against repression, if it arises.
I would agree with Professor Hoffmann that pillorying ones enemies is a worthless endeavor.
But the study of counterrevolutionary subordination, of the subversion of scholarship, of
ideological constraints that limit objectivity and distort analysis this is a task of considerable
intellectual interest and great importance. Of even greater importance, no doubt, is the task of
moving on to develop the positive intellectual and political effort to which Professor Hoffmann

refers. I would certainly hope that insofar as we can come to understand with clarity the nature
of our society and its international role, insofar as we can settle on decent principles of
international behavior, we can proceed to devise and carry out a program of social and cultural
change that will enable us to use our immense resources in a civilized and humane fashion.

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