Emergence of New World Post-COVID-19: Prof. Noam Chomsky

Dr. Pramod Jaiswal, Research Director, NIICE had a conversation with American Philosopher and Intellectual Prof. Noam Chomsky on Emergence of New World Post-COVID-19. Here is the transcript of the conversation. The video can be accessed here.

What kind of world order are we going to witness Post COVID-19? Is it going to be a China dominated World Order?

Chomsky : “We are now in a situation which is somewhat similar to 17 years ago – 2003. At that point, there was a major Coronavirus epidemic – the SARS epidemic. It was contained, but scientists informed us that another pandemic, probably worse, was very likely to come. They also explained what could be done about it and what kind of preparations should be undertaken. Essentially, nothing was done and there were reasons for that. We have to explore those reasons because they still hold today and if we don’t answer those problems, a worse pandemic will recur almost certainly. Scientists are saying the same things today. So, what happened?

It was known how to proceed. But it’s not enough to have knowledge. Someone has to use it. Who could use it? Well, there’s the major drug companies and their huge resources, enormous profits and great laboratories. They could proceed, but they’re prevented by something called ‘capitalist logic’. You don’t invest in something that is not profitable. It’s not worth spending money on, to try to prevent a catastrophe that might happen in 10 years. So, they don’t do anything. Well, there’s the government. The government, again, has great laboratories and enormous resources. The government is, in fact, responsible for most of the work on vaccines and drugs, but works that they could have done are blocked by something else – the ‘Neoliberal Principles’. In Ronald Reagan’s famous words, ‘the government is the problem, not the solution.’. So, for 40 years, we’ve been living in a system which was announced by Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher, then implemented by major private and government power centres for 40 years, and it essentially nullifies government. So very little was done. Something was done.

But then you get particular cases and particular countries. So, when President Obama was elected, in the first days, he called a presidential scientific advisory council into session. He requested that they produce a preparation program for preparing in case a pandemic comes, because it was anticipated, and they did it. It was put into operation and it lasted until January 2017, when President Trump came into office. In the first days in office, he dismantled it and started defunding the Centre for Disease Control. As he did every year, he also cancelled programs that were of American scientists working in China with Chinese scientists on Coronaviruses. The end result is when it finally came, the US was completely unprepared. Other countries responded, often very effectively. East Asia, Oceania and New Zealand have apparently eradicated it. Other countries have it under control. In the US, the pandemic is raging. It’s the worst in the world. It’s gotten to the point where Europeans have wondered whether the United States has simply abandoned any effort to deal with it. Death rates are much higher than elsewhere. Report came out in one of the major medical journals just a few hours ago, estimating that probably 80 or 90 percent of the hundred thousand deaths could have been avoided if the president and the government had taken any action.

So, putting it all together, we have three problems. One is capitalist logic, which blocks the drug companies. The other is the neoliberal programs which has undermined government action. The third is actions of individual governments, of which the United States is far and away the worst. Brazil is not far behind and other countries have done something [like this], and often effectively. That’s what we’re facing for next time. So, we know what to do with it. Problem is to do it.”

In context to India, recently in an interview you said – What we are seeing is the symptoms of fascism without the fascist ideology. What makes you think so as India claims itself as the largest democracy in the world? Is it because India is housing millions of Muslim citizens after labelling then as illegal migrants?

Chomsky : “That’s correct. We’re seeing that the fascist ideology was a serious notion way beyond President Trump’s sophistication, with the sophistication of the other leaders around the world who are showing fascist symptoms or things like advocating violence, racism, and such things. Fascism was a serious ideology that held that the entire society should be under the control of a political party. The Nazi Party, [or] the Fascist Party in Italy, which would be led by a maximal leader and would organize and control the entire society, including the business world, which was subordinated to the fascist state. That’s not the world we live in and we live in almost the opposite world, where governments are subordinated to the businesses. That’s particularly true, say for the United States, the business world essentially dominates the government. Trump is tolerated by the business world, even though they don’t like him, as long as Trump makes sure that the legislative programs, every one of his programs, benefits them. So, if you take a look at the programs – not the rhetoric but the programs that are actually implemented, like the Corporate tax code, the businesses are very happy about that. They are willing to let him parade on the stage with his antics as long as he puts the dollars into the right pockets. Actually, there is a very dramatic example of that – the Davos meetings in January. Every January, the rich and powerful of the world, the ‘masters of universes’ they call themselves; they gather in Switzerland at an elegant ski resort to meet each other and congratulate each other on how wonderful they are and so on. This last meeting was very interesting, in January [2020]. Of course, they invited Trump to be the keynote speaker. They don’t like him at all, [because] his vulgarity and obscenity disrupts their effort to present themselves as humanistic, sophisticated and so on. So they don’t like it but they gave him a rousing applause because he described the programs he’s carrying out. Like, the benefits to corporations, the tax cuts for corporations reaching the very rich, so they tolerate the vulgarity and ugliness of his general performance, so, it’s not special. In fact, it’s some different thing. If you look closely at different countries, they are somewhat different, so in say the United States and Brazil – take the two major countries in the Western Hemisphere. The governments are turning them into the kind of small town, [where] small time dictators that you find in neo-colonial countries as well countries where there’s a military coup every couple of years, the dictators putting up with the business world remains the same and that’s what’s happening. So, Trump for example, has virtually eliminated, the executive branch of government. There’s no appointments anymore. It doesn’t even send appointments to the Senate for confirmation, it just takes people who are going to obey him. One of the recent things he did is just what you get in a tin-pot dictatorship – he fired all of theInspectors General. These are people who are designated by Congress to help inspectors to investigate and monitor the Departments of the government – the Treasury Department, the State Department and so on, to make sure that there isn’t corruption and malfeasance of one sort or another. They began looking into the swamp that Trump has created in Washington, so he just fired them. It’s a symptom of fascism, but it’ s not fascism. You find the same in Brazil. Now the parliament and the courts in Brazil are starting to look into the enormous Corruption of President Wilson or his family. They fired the investigators. They didn’t back down. They’re still doing it, [but] that’s different from the United States. The court is still independent in Brazil.

Military coup is threatening, may happen, but the United States is a little different.  Take a look at say, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – he is just turning it into a model of a dictatorship without affecting business domination and control. Again, fascist symptoms, but not fascism. Take a look at Modi’s India right next to you. Pretty much the same story. I don’t have to tell you, you now better than I do. Plenty of fascist symptoms, but the centres of private power are kept in place – they’re not under government control.”

Recently we heard about the tragic murder of Flyod in United States. How do you look at this incident? Is it a mere accident/ incident or the situation of Afro-Americans has not changed much? Your comment.

Chomsky : “It’s very interesting. I mean there have been police killings, severe police beatings before and there were protests, but nothing remotely like this. Now the closest one is the Rodney King case from 1992 i.e. 30 years ago. Now there were six days of protests. They finally had to call in federal troops to quell the disorder, 60 people were killed in a major protest. but it was in Los Angeles where it happened. Now, it’s totally different all over the country, in fact over much of the world. It that has enormous public support, which is very unusual. About two-thirds of the public supports the protest. That’s much more support than what Martin Luther King received at the peak of his popularity. There’s even support coming from the top military command, the two last Chairmans of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [who are] top Military Officers. Both proposed Trump’s call for violence and supported the protests. Nothing like this has ever happened. It’s a sign of increasing consciousness. There are many other signs and awareness of the horrors of 400 years of really vicious repression of black, which has a bitter legacy. It’s very late, but there’s some recognition of that but now, what will come out of it, we never know. There are proposals and demands for changes in police procedure, some efforts to go beyond to the much deeper problems, which go way beyond these. A lot of police work is in the black ghettos because these are high crime areas. Why are they high crime areas? Because people have no opportunities. They’re suffering from a legacy of literally and 400 years of repression. So yes, you get crying, then you get police and then you get police brutality, but looking at the sources not the symptoms, there are some moves in that direction, but its a turning point and in fact if you think about the present moment, it’s pretty astonishing.

There’s a kind of confluence of things that are coming together all at the same time. Terrible pandemic, huge protests all over the country, global warming is extremely threatening and developing, there is increasing threat of nuclear war, which is vivid, very threatening in your area. Global warming, if it continues on its present course, is going to make much of South Asia almost unlivable now, in a couple of decades. Pakistan and India are nuclear-armed states, which will be struggling to obtain the reducing amounts of water [which is] already very scarce, as the glaciers melt and so the rivers decline. I mean, all of this together is just a recipe for complete disaster, could happen soon, in the next few decades. It’s happening right now – all converging. It’s an incredible moment in human history. And you are right on the fringes of it.”

Nepal lies between India & China. Both are economic and military power of Asia, one claims to be the ‘Socialist’ while other a ‘Democratic’. In this context, how can a small state like Nepal survive? What should be Nepal’s foreign policy?

Chomsky : “One that claims to be socialist isn’t socialist and one that claims to be democratic has elements of democracy but they’re being demolished by the current government. The Modi government is essentially dismantling the Indian secular democracy and turning it into a racist state. So yes, Nepal is in a difficult position. In fact, the two countries are almost at war right now. Unfortunately, the war has been over the Ladakh area, the Aksai Chin and so on. The war is being kept to a low level but it could burst out. What Nepal has to do is take care of its internal problems as best as possible and try to remain neutral when the elephants are fighting. It’s not an easy position to be in.”

Trump came with America First. Modi came with India First – there is rise of nationalism in China and other parts of the world. Similar trend is seen even in small countries like Nepal. Do you see the chances of revival of fascism alongside the value of muscular nationalism and fiscal conservatism in the post-COVID-19 world? How is Globalisation going to get affected?

Chomsky : “I think we should look back to the effect of 4 years of Neoliberalism. It’s been quite harmful almost everywhere the policies have been applied. So for example in the United States, by now, literally 0.1 percent of the population has over 20 percent of the wealth and a large majority of the population is just getting by from week through week. You get a pay cheque on one Friday, maybe you get through the next week, that’s all, nothing saved. Real wages have gone back to what they were in the 1970s. Something similar has happened almost all over the world, where the Neoliberal programmes have been applied in one or another form and it has left people angry, frustrated, resentful. Easy for a demagogue to come alone and say it’s somebody else’s fault. It’s the fault of the immigrants, the Muslims, the Blacks, refugees and that people who are desperate can grab on to that and say okay, let’s close the borders, let’s just work for ourselves, and let’s forget about the world. And you get these pathological symptoms like ultra-nationalism. But there are also forces combatting them and these are not insignificant. For example a couple of weeks ago there was the first public announcement of, let’s call it the Progressive International. The Progressive International was initiated by Bernie Sanders in his movement in the United States by Yanis Varoufakis, and his DiEM 25 Movement in Europe. DiEM 25 is a transnational organisation in Europe working to try to preserve what is changeable and constructive in the European Union and to overcome the serious flaws in the Union. They are going to have the first meeting in Iceland, in a couple of months. The Prime Minister of Iceland is a member. They’re bringing together voices  from the global south – India, Africa, Pakistan and other countries.

It’s an effort to try to form a unified international organisation that will be able to confront the concentrated reactionary forces that are scattered in the White House in the United States, and would include Modi’s India, the dictatorships of the Gulf, Orbàn’s Hungary and other reactionary forces. There’s a question of effectivity but it’s a promising development. It’s important to remember that all of the major crises we face now are international and there cannot be a national response to the pandemic. New Zealand can get rid of the wires. As soon as it opens its borders it (the Coronavirus) is going to come back, and they cannot live in isolation. Global warming is an international problem, nuclear war is an international problem, racism is international. All are international problems. Setting up borders makes it harder and harder to deal with the crisis. What we should be seeing is the erosion of borders. Something like, we move towards integration in Europe, which was limited but was in the right direction. We could go from one country to another in Europe to study or work, and so on. In essence, that happened in the United States. The United States was plural – a collection of states, [these] states interacting one way or another, when the Civil War in 1860 made it a uniform country. Say if Kansas happens to be suffering and can’t deal with its economic problems, New York can help them survive. That’s automatic in the federal system. That’s what the world ought to be like. It’s far from it, but that’s what it should like.”

Do you find governments all over the world turning more authoritarian, anti-people, anti-human on the eve of the pandemic? Do you think that socialist alternatives are more relevant?

Chomsky : “Actually both things are happening. It’s going in both directions. For example there is a, as I said, progressive international forming. It’s based on very significant popular movements in the United States, in Europe, quite active and such movements [are] all over the world. Not a lot of attention is paid to them but they’re very real. Take say, Brazil, which is moving towards military dictatorship. On the other hand, Brazil has probably the largest and most effective popular movement in the world – the landless workers movement. An enormous movement of taking over unused lands by major corporations and land owners – taking them, settling them, building cooperative institutions, based on agriculture, but also beyond that, like dairy and dairy production, and many other things, like working on entering the general markets and serving the cities. So that’s happening on one hand, a move to a dictatorship on the other, and this is happening almost anywhere you see.

So the answer is, things are going in both directions. The question is, which will prevail. It’s a major crisis. At the international level, there is on the one hand, the Progressive International, on the other hand there’s a reactionary international being crafted from the Washington’s White House, the Trump administration, and include’s Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Modi’s India, Sisi’s Egypt, Orbàn’s Hungary, Gulf Dictatorships, Saudi Arabia – that’s one constellation. Progressive International is another constellation. So major conflict is going to determine the fate of the world.”

How has the foreign policy of the United States transformed in the last two-decades– from Bush to Obama to Trump era?

Chomsky : “Trump is a very unusual figure, he’s unlike any president in American history. In fact, anyone ever in the parliamentary system. He basically has no policies and no ideology, except himself. He’s a narcissistic megalomaniac. He is solely after making sure he can gain political power and be enriched. He’s a good politician; he understands how he can proceed. He has a primary constituency that he has to satisfy, or else they’ll kick him out of corporate power and private wealth, so he has to satisfy them, and he does. What I mentioned about Davos is an example. Its legislative programs are an example. All the programs he implements have to serve them. But he has to be voted in political democracy. He has to have a voting base. You can’t come to people and say, “I’m trying to destroy you, vote for me,” – that doesn’t work. So, you have to approach people on other grounds, what are called ‘Cultural grounds’. So, racism, xenophobia, extremist religion – United States is a very religious country – Christians and evangelicals, who care about nothing but Jesus coming, or about 25 percent of the population. There’s an enormous gun culture. Lot of people, where I live, in Arizona, have to be able to carry your assault rifle into the local coffee shop. So, appeal to people on those grounds. If you look at Trump’s pronouncements, when he’s basically trying to instigate violence, everyone one of them, just notice, says you have to protect your second amendment rights. What’s the second amendment rights? The right to walk into a coffee shop with your assault rifle. So that’s telling people, ‘I’m going to save your rights to do that, I’m going to keep the immigrants out, these rapists and murders that are coming from Mexico. I’m going to ensure that your pastors in church can be openly political in violation of the constitution. I’ll give you all of those things to vote for me. Meanwhile, I’ll make sure you’re in the worst possible situation.’ That’s kind of what’s called a confident man – on one hand he stands up and says, “I love you, I’m going to protect you,’ the other hand stabs you in the back and so far he’s gotten away with it pretty well. It’s actually declining now – people don’t have to read medical journals to know that the pandemic is being handled catastrophically and they don’t know that 80 or 90 percent of the deaths were preventable and it was Trump’s malice that cost, you know, eighty or ninety thousand people to die. They may not know that, but they know something’s going wrong, badly wrong and his support is in fact declining. But it’s a very uncertain situation now. There are people in high places by now who were talking openly about the possibility that he might just declare martial law. Nothing like that’s happened in American history. This is a unique situation without precedent. In fact, something similar is happening in England. England has three hundred and fifty years of parliamentary democracy. It’s not based on laws. Britain barely has a written constitution. It’s based on trust that good faith and that’s being torn to shreds when Boris Johnson closed the parliament. Remember, last fall, he prorogued the Parliament so he could ram through his proposal for Brexit without parliamentary discussion. That was a gross violation of the whole constitutional order of  years but was finally thrown out by the Supreme Court. But this attack on the basis of democracy in the two leading parliamentary democracies – England, three hundred fifty years, [and] United States two hundred fifty years – in both of them the basic structure of democracy is being severely eroded. It’s happening elsewhere – Brazil, Hungary and other countries. It’s another very serious problem happening at the same time.

I should maybe mention, I presume you know, every January the bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the main scientific journal that deals with security issues – every year they bring together the leading scientists and political analysts and do an assessment of the world security situation and they encapsulated, in a clock called the Doomsday Clock in which they set the minute and at hand a certain distance from midnight. Midnight means terminal disaster – we’re finished. The clock was established in 1947 after the atomic bombings that were set at seven minutes to midnight. It oscillated up and back over the years every January. When Trump came into office that was moved forward towards midnight. Every year he’s been an office, it’s been moved further towards midnight. Last year, it reached the closest point it had ever reached. This year it went beyond the closest point. In fact they abandoned minutes, and moved to seconds and they had three basic reasons – one, the growing threat of nuclear war which is quite serious. Trump has dismantled the arms control regime which offered some protection against building new weapons and so that’s increasing. The second is global warming which is a very severe threat – don’t have to go through the details but it’s extremely severe, and the third is decline of democracy. These are the three major issues that seem at first like they don’t fit together but they do. Decline of democracy eliminates the only way there is to deal with the first two crises, [which] can only be dealt with by an informed, engaged public. So if that declines the other crises will just escalate. That’s the world we’re in. There’s never been anything like it in human history.”

What will be the fate of Capitalism in Post COVID-19 world order?

Chomsky : “I think that’s again the matter of direct conflict right now. The forces who created the current system, who created the neoliberal system with all of its consequences, they’re working very hard, relentlessly, every minute, to try to ensure that it remains and it comes even in a harsher form, with more and more surveillance, more control and so on. Again, take the Trump administration, most important government in the world, the world dominant government – every minute they are under the cover of the pandemic, passing legislation which will make the situation harsher and more brutal. Just take the latest case – the labour secretary who’s a corporate lawyer, with a strong background of opposing labour rights, so naturally he’s labour’s secretary. While nobody was looking, he passed a regulation that allows private equity firms to buy into the 401K system, have to explain what this is – part of the neoliberal programs has been to eliminate pensions so people don’t have security but they replace pensions by what are called 401k investments – so throw people into the market, you’re a victim of market forces, you have no security and it’s very serious. I mean it happened with me. I don’t have a pension but I have a 401 K, so whatever the market does I am subject to it. But nobody knows it has any idea what the investments are, that’s way up there with some banker. So, everybody’s in the market, [and] we’ve eliminated pensions. Now what did Scalia do? He said private equity firms can enter the market for your 401Ks. Private equity firms are predatory institutions who have only one function – to take over some business or something else, break it apart and see how much money you can make out of it and destroy it. So it’s one of the curses of the neoliberal theory. So, now they can enter into what’s left of the shreds of your pensions.

Every time every moment you look something like this is being done, Shortly before that, there was an executive order saying that the companies have to be protected if they force their workers back to work. So, suppose some meatpacking company demands that its workers come back to work – I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a meatpacking plant but it’s horrible. In a pandemic it’ll spread in one second – everybody’s standing right next to each other, working like a maniac, cutting up chicken and so on. So, if they force their workers back to work, they can’t and the workers refuse, they can be punished. If they go back to work and get sick, the company is protected from any liability by government order. That’s a couple of weeks ago before that, it’s something else. Other governments, reactionary governments are doing the same kind of things – you know what India’s been doing. It’s right on the surface. So these people are working relentlessly. The question is whether counter forces will develop to make sure they can’t get away with it. So, we’re back to the same question. It’s basically class war on an international scale, on an enormous scale and one of the classes is very powerful, very wealthy, organised, relentless, and knows exactly what it’s doing. Problem is, will the rest of the world respond and overcome? That’s the situation we’re in now. The title of my last book is ‘Internationalism or Extinction’ and I think that’s exactly what we face. If we don’t move towards a progressive form of internationalism, a human society will simply be destroyed.”

What will be the impact of COVID-19 on Educational Systems around the world? Will the use of digital technology in education cause further marginalisation of people and countries? What will be a collective global response to reach out to those marginalised communities?

Chomsky : “Interestingly, it’s pretty much the same answer that I gave before, so let’s be concrete. Again, we’ll take the United States, by far the most important country in the world. The Secretary of Education is a very rich – [with a] super rich family, very reactionary, and strongly opposed to education. They want to destroy the public education system and turn it into private education, religious schools, schools for the elites, vertical charter schools which take money from the public and set up privately controlled institutions, and this is Betsy DeVos. She is using the cover of the pandemic to advance this program. There’s a lot of stimulus money coming in from the government that’s supposed to go to help people. But 80 percent of it is going to the corporate system, and she’s using the part that goes to education to ensure that it doesn’t go to public schools but it goes to private schools, to try to undermine public education. In the United States this is a remarkable development. One of the great achievements of American democracy, back in the 19th century, was to pioneer mass public education – you didn’t have that in Europe, [and] you didn’t have it in England. The United States essentially initiated this great program. That was one of the great achievements of the United States, [which is] now being destroyed by the Trump administration in the interest of private wealth and corporate power. Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education is the one doing it. In other countries, similar things are happening. Depends on the country. It’s a big battle. Interestingly in the United States, the labour movement has been pretty much crushed by the neoliberal programs, but it’s reviving and the revival began with teacher strikes. Teachers around the country, some of them in very reactionary states, organising to try to demand more funding for schools. They’re not just calling for wages that they need that – but funding for schools so you don’t have to have 60 kids sitting in a class, you can have properly funded schools, you can have nurses, you can have educational consultants, you can have arts and all the things that have been taken away by the attacks on the public schools. So, the teachers are now forming teachers unions in my own state, in Arizona, to try to reinforce the legislature [that] education works by. State forks the legislature to fund the education properly, and they’re having an impact – they have a lot of public support. So again, you have the same battle being waged on the local scale, on the national scale, but everywhere you look and the answer to what will happen depends on how this class war turns out.”

Can the world really abandon relations with China considering vast trade dependency? And if not, what will be China’s political position in the world in days to come?

Chomsky : “Well, there’s a lot of talk about China becoming the next hegemonic power. It’s very misleading. China’s has had enormous economic progress in recent years. The poverty has been radically reduced, there are many more educational opportunities, scientific institutions are developing, in some areas China’s in the lead in the world – sustainable energy for example, solar power, windmills, electrification and so on. China’s way ahead and there is a lot of talk about it. It has been for years, about American decline, power shifting in Asia to China and India. Very unlikely. China remains a poor country. If you take a look at the United Nations Human Development Index which measures various aspects of the country’s welfare, China’s about the 90th, I think. India’s maybe a hundred and thirtieth. These are poor countries with very serious problems. That’s a pretty recent development incidentally. You go back to the 18th century – India and China were the centres of economic power and social advancement. They were subject to imperial conquest which devastated them. They are now sort of coming back, but they have a long way to go. Take a look at one of the standard measures of power in the world, [it] is Gross Domestic Product – how much is produced in the country. It’s a very misleading measure. In these days of neoliberal globalisation, that measure doesn’t mean much. A much more reasonable measure is how much of world wealth is owned by multinational corporations in a particular country. So how much of world wealth is owned by corporations based in the United States. The answer to that is spectacular. 50 percent of world’s wealth is owned by the US-based multinationals. In almost every category, they are first, sometimes second. In Retail, in industry, agriculture, commerce, the first almost everywhere. The China is the source of production for most of the world. If you have an iPhone, it was put together in China. China gets almost nothing from that. [It] barely gets any of the profit. Much of the profit goes to Taiwan because the Taiwanese companies like Foxconn are organising production for Apple Corporation in China. The vast majority of the profit comes to the United States, to the Apple Corporation, which has the design, the development, the management and so on. So, China gets something, Taiwan gets more the United States gets most of it. That’s what you find industry after industry. That aside, China has and India also have very severe problems that the West doesn’t have – demographic problems, ecological problems, lack of agricultural resources – very serious problems. So I think China is surely going to be a major power in the world but it’s not going to be dominant. In fact, if you look at the military dimension, it [the United States] is so far ahead that nobody’s even in the game. The United States out -spends the 10 most following countries – out-spends them together – [it] spends almost as much as the rest of the world. [Its] technologically much more advanced. It’s declining. Trump is very seriously harming the United States. It’s becoming a pariah state. It’s like other countries hate it. He’s very seriously harming the United States. But even Trump can’t destroy a country that’s that powerful.

Take a look at the international press today, one of the lead stories in the New York Times [and] other papers is that Europe cannot understand why the United States is giving up any effort to deal with a pandemic. Almost every other country is doing important things. The United States is just letting it rage. In my own state, where I live – Arizona, the governor, who is a Republican, has lifted the lockdown because Trump says you have to. So, coronavirus cases are spiking. It’s now the worst in the country. Europe is looking at this and saying ‘it’s as if the country has gone crazy. They’re not even trying to deal with a major crisis that has already killed a hundred thousand people. They just want to let it rage and get worse. What’s happening to that country?’ So it’s losing respect and admiration. Europe and the rest of the world hates a lot of things they’re doing but they’re afraid if the United States gives an order, they follow it. You see this over and over. You take, say Iran. The joint agreement on the nuclear program was working very effectively. The US intelligence agreed, everybody agreed. Trump destroyed it because the only thing he can think of doing is wrecking things. So, he destroyed it, [and] imposed very harsh sanctions on Iran. The United States is the only country in the world that can impose sanctions. In fact, about a quarter of the world is under the US sanctions and when the US imposes sanctions, everybody has to obey them. Europe hates them but they have to obey them, [lest] they get thrown out of the international financial system. So, Europe doesn’t like the sanctions, they can’t do anything about it – they have to abide by them [just like] other countries do. [It’s] another sign of the US power. Trump is trying desperately to find some way to cover up for the fact that he’s responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans. He doesn’t want people to see that obviously, so he’s trying to blame it on somebody else. One of the targets was the World Health Organisation. So he’s now trying to pull out of the World Health Organisation, trying to destroy it. What does that mean, pulling out of the World Health Organisation? What does it mean to people in Africa or in Yemen, who depend on World Health Organisation services for survival. I mean, they’re suffering from all kinds of epidemics even before the Coronavirus came, and the support they’re getting is from the World Health Organisation. So here’s this maniac in Washington who, in order to improve his electoral prospects, is deciding to kill, murder uncountable numbers of people in Africa, in Yemen, where [there is] the worst humanitarian crisis of the world, other poor countries, [and] nobody can do anything about it because this country has the hammer that can beat you on the head but we didn’t do anything. Horrible situation. Till it changes in the United States, it’s going to be extremely dangerous for the whole world. But who’s doing anything about it? Nobody very much. [It’s] too dangerous. That’s the answer to the question whether China will be the hegemonic power or not. [There’s] a lot to criticise in China, they do a lot of really rotten things, but they don’t have the power in the world against the United States.”

How do you see the role of multilateral institutions in Post-COVID-19 World Oder?

Chomsky : “I mentioned the World Health Organisation. Trump administration’s trying to destroy it. What about the United Nations? I think this goes back to the beginning of the neoliberal period – the United States basically created the United Nations but since Reagan, it’s trying to destroy it. The United States stopped paying its dues. [For] some parts like UNESCO, it just refuses to pay anything. If any part of the United Nations doesn’t follow the US orders, the United States demolishes it, ever since Reagan. Clinton’s was the same – a little different, but not very much. Take something else – take what’s happening in Israel and Palestine. Very interesting. The United States came out with what it called the greatest deal of the century. It’s devastating. It essentially destroys all Palestinian rights. It gives the ultra-right to Israel, everything they want. Since it came from the United States, it became the basis for international discussion. So, all international discussion now is how can we fix up the greatest deal of the century. Suppose some other country had come out with that. Suppose China had produced it, or Germany or France, or India. Nobody would have even looked at it. They would have left. They wouldn’t even be bothered if you throw it out. Now the United States comes, well you have to obey it. That’s a sign of power, just like the sanctions and everything else I’ve mentioned. That’s, in other words, the way the world works. It’s kind of like the Mafia – there’s a godfather everybody has to obey, otherwise you’re in trouble. The world is not very far from there. The political scientists [and] international relations experts have a prettier picture, [to] make it look nice. But if you look at the way the world actually works, it pretty much resembles this. There are international institutions, they work only and so far the great powers permit them to, and the most important of them is the United States.”

Is there the possibility of Second Cold War between China and US? What is the likelihood of such a confrontation escalating into a hot war?

Chomsky : “We very confidently predict that they’re not going to go to war. That’s the most confident prediction you can make, and the reason is if you turn out to be wrong, there won’t be anybody around to say anything about it. So it’s a safe prediction. But will it happen? It could. If you look over the record of the last 70 years carefully, there’s no time to do it now, but it’s a virtual miracle that we survived just by accident over and over. We have come to a very close to war as the military systems grow and expand, as they are doing now. Both Russia and the United States, [it is] mostly Trump’s initiative and as they move to more automated control systems, using artificial intelligence to control the response systems, the danger goes up. So just, purely by accident, it might happen. It’s come very close in the past. Sometimes, also by just reckless actions of governments, but often, literally thousands of times by accident. So it’s a very hazardous situation. The arms control regime has somewhat protected it. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in Europe, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev significantly reduced the threat of nuclear war in Europe. The Open Skies treaty initiated by President Eisenhower reduced the threat that one of the two powers would mistake what’s happening in the other and go to war by a first-strike. [The treaty] reduced. Trump has demolished both of them. The only one that’s left is the New START treaty which keeps a lid on the number of nuclear weapons that the two nuclear states have. Russia has been asking for a year to renegotiate. The White House has been refusing. They finally agreed a couple of days ago but only by imposing an impossible condition that China has to join. [It] doesn’t make any sense. The number of Chinese weapons is way below the minimum that the treaty can reach. So to insist that China comes in is just to say, let’s block it somehow. Russia responded by saying, ‘well if China comes in why not France – they have more nuclear weapons than China’. So these are just ways of preventing it from happening and if that treaty isn’t signed – it’s due next February – there’s no more launch control system. So, the danger of war sharply increases. The United States builds more advanced weapons, Russia will build more advanced weapons to counter them and here we are going off with them to the outer space. So it’s a very threatening situation. That’s why the Doomsday Clock shifted to seconds, not minutes, because we’re moving closer to termination. In the meanwhile, polar ice caps are melting, and our glaciers were threatened, sea level rise will make most of Bangladesh underwater – what happens then? Temperatures are rising to almost fifty degree centigrade in parts of India. What happens then becomes unliveable. That’s all going on. There’s a monitor of the number of carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere. It’s done by a major institution in the United States. They just came out with their latest analysis – keeps going up, escalating, there was a slight effect of the pandemic – it was so slight, [it] couldn’t even register. They’re warning that if we don’t change this soon we might approach the level of three and a half million years ago, when sea levels were fifty to eighty feet, twenty meters higher than today. I mean, not unimaginable. This doesn’t happen in one step. It comes step by step. So that’s the situation.”