G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And I can't quite tell this week

which is the more dangerous of the following two opposite ideas. Either that American foreign policy

is a force for good in the world, or that America is on balance a global tyrant that does more harm than good.

It certainly depends where you're sitting, where you're standing, how proximate you are to

American bombs, how proximate you are to American populism. Something's obviously happened on

the American right in recent years with the rise of Donald Trump and the Make

America great, again, isolationist movement. It remains to be seen in the next Trump administration,

whether or not they actually are as isolationist as Donald Trump seems to indicate at his rallies

or whether they pursue a traditional neo-conservative line on American foreign policy.

But one man who has been

consistent for decades in his searing critique of American global power is Noam Chomsky.

Now, Noam isn't doing interviews. He's in his 90s these days, but he has written a book with

an enthusiastic and articulate young socialist writer named Nathan Robinson,

who is today's guest. He's the co-author of the Noam Tromsky, Nathan Robinson book,

The Myth of American Idealism, How U.S. foreign policy Endangers the World. Look, the book presents

a litany of cases for why America doesn't just

blunder, but is a force for tremendous bloodshed and calamity all over the globe. And I was really

less interested in plumbing each of those examples, because I think Vietnam and the Iraq war

sort of speak for themselves, and more interested in Nathan's ideas about socialism, about Bernie Sanders' form of populism

versus Donald Trump's form of populism, about whether or not what America and the West is doing

in Ukraine and supporting Ukraine and standing out to Vladimir Putin is inconsistent with the

ideas that he articulates in the book or somehow consistent with it, what a

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