On Monday night, Democracy Now! celebrated its 20th anniversary at the historic Riverside Church in New York City. Among those who addressed more than 2,000 attendants was world-renowned linguistic Noam Chomsky, who spoke about the two most dangerous threats the human species faces today: the possibility of nuclear war and the accelerating destruction of human-fueled climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: We return now to MIT professor Noam Chomsky speaking at the event.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The U.S. isolation at Marrakech is symptomatic of broader developments that we should think about pretty carefully. They’re of considerable significance. U.S. isolation in the world is increasing in remarkable ways. Maybe the most striking is right in this hemisphere, what used to be called “our little region over here” — Henry Stimson, secretary of war under Roosevelt, “our little region over here,” where nobody bothers us. If anybody gets out of line, we punish them harshly; otherwise, they do what we say. That’s very far from true. During this century, Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, has freed itself from Western imperialism. Last century, that’s the United States. The International Monetary Fund, which is basically an agency of the U.S. Treasury, has been kicked out of the — of South America entirely. There are no U.S. military bases left. The international organizations, the — the hemispheric organizations are beginning to exclude the United States and Canada. In 2015, there was a summit coming up, and the United States might have been excluded completely from the hemisphere over the issue of Cuba. That was the crucial issue that the hemisphere — on which the hemisphere opposed U.S. policy, as does the world. That’s surely the reason why Obama made the gestures towards normalization, that were at least some step forward — and could be reversed under Trump. We don’t know.
On a much more far-reaching scale, something similar is happening in Asia. As you know, one of Obama’s major…