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NATIONAL INTEREST
pire. But don't forget the very criterion that I mentioned, namely
freeing the world for American economic penetration, makes the
United States anticolonialist.
It
makes us opposed in general to other
imperial systems which are semiclosed, unless those are, of course,
the only alternatives to worse things, say indigenous nationalist sys–
tems like the communist ones. So, in fact, during the Second World
War the United States acted very consistently and with considerable
success to take over British economic positions in Latin America
and the Middle East, to keep England on a string, sort of, with just
enough lend-lease aid to keep it going, but not enough to maintain
its preferential positions elsewhere in the world. And that was very
successful. The American oil companies and American interests in
Latin America, they just took over there. And, incidentally, it seems
to me to be the very same criterion I'm suggesting that by and large
governed the policy of the British Empire. Britain was protectionist,
strongly protectionist, until I think about 1830, until in fact it had
succeeded through protectionism in destroying Indian cottage in–
dustry and building up domestic textiles and other industry and be–
coming the industrial leader of the world by the rape of India and
other practices. Then for a very long period, about a century, England
was all in favor of free trade. Let's be perfectly equal. British indus–
try is equal to the industry in the most remote primitive country.
We are all on a par. Then in about 1930, say, when Japanese in–
dustry and Japanese textiles were beginning to press a httle too close
for comfort, all of a sudden Britain discovered that it wasn't really
too interested in free trade, and in 1932 at the Ottawa conference they
tried to close the empire to Japanese penetration. Why? Well, because
they couldn't win any more. The most advanced industrial power
in the world will naturally always be in favor of free trade, because
it hopes and expects that it will win in the competition. And when
it finds that it no longer can win in an open competition, it will
move to other policies. The United States by and large tends to the
same direction. On the other hand, in areas where the United States
won't be able to win it will introduce protectionist policies like any
other power. So I don' t think that there is really anything funda–
mentally different in the American policies that I'm talking about
and those of the British Empire. And with some modifications, the
same applies to other major imperial powers, like the Soviet Union.
R. WILLIAM FITELSON: May I make a personal comment and ask for
an answer from both, primarily from Professor Morgenthau? I think
that Professor Chomsky's position is the rather conventional one.
Re makes history rather consistent. We've made the same, not
errors, but deliberate moves, all the time. The more interesting posi-
