Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There

A sobering assessment of American foreign policy from the end of the Vietnam era to Ronald Reagan.

With the same uncompromising style that characterized his breakthrough, Vietnam-era writings, Toward a New Cold War extends Chomsky's critique of US foreign policy through the early 1970s to Ronald Reagan's first term. Expanding on themes such as the cozy relationship of intellectuals to the state, and American adventurism after World War II, Chomsky goes on to exaamine the way that US policymakers set about the task of rewriting the horrible history of involvement in Indochina and turned their attention more squarely on the Middle East and Central America. He assesses US oil strategy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dissects the first volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, issues an urgent call to stem the bloodshed in then-unknown East Timor and, in the title essay, marks the increased posture of confrontation and rearmament under presidents Carter and Reagan that signaled the end of détente with the Soviet Union.

Featuring a new introduction by internationally acclaimed journalist John Pilger, this is the latest in the New Press series of Noam Chomsky's early political works.