The world’s foremost critic of US foreign policy exposes the hollow promises of democracy in US actions abroad and at home.

The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to intervene militarily against failed states’ around the globe. In this much anticipated follow-up to his international bestseller Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky shows how the United States itself shares features with other failed states and therefore is increasingly a danger to its own people and to the world.

Failed states, Chomsky writes, are those that are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction’ and regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law.‘ Though they may have democratic forms, Chomsky notes, failed states suffer from a serious democratic deficit’ that deprives their democratic institutions of real substance.

Exploring the latest developments in US foreign and domestic policy, Chomsky reveals Washington’s plans to further militarise the planet; assesses the dangerous consequences of the occupation of Iraq, which has fuelled global outrage at the United States; documents Washington’s self-exemption from international norms, including the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the Kyoto Protocol; and examines how the US electoral system is designed to eliminate genuine political alternatives, impeding any meaningful democracy.

Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations toppling governments it deems illegitimate, invading states judged to threaten its interests, imposing sanctions on regimes it opposes while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis, and its policies and practices recklessly place the world on the brink of nuclear and environmental disaster. Systematically dismantling the United States’ pretence of being the world’s arbiter of democracy, Failed States is Chomsky’s most focused and urgent critique to date.

Chomsky is a global phenomenon … perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet.‘

The New York Times Book Review