Noam Chomsky: ‘A war with China or Russia means nice knowing you, goodbye civilisation’

Noam Chomsky has praised Paul Keating’s assessment of China and argued lionising Zelensky ‘as Churchill’ was hampering the need for a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Noam Chomsky delivers a speech in Germany.

Veteran left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky has praised Paul Keating’s sanguine assessment of China’s growing power, slamming the AUKUS security pact in a marathon interview that also argued lionising Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “as Churchill” was hampering the need for a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Professor Chomsky, remarkably sharp at 93, said the US promise to provide Australia with nuclear submarines was part of a strategy to surround China with “sentinel states armed to the teeth with massive offensive capacity”, to provide a first round of defence against future Chinese aggression.

“The well known international statesman, former prime minister Paul Keating, reviews the various elements of the China threat, and concludes finally that the China threat is simply that China exists. And he’s correct,” Professor Chomsky, emeritus professor at MIT, said.

Mr Keating, prime minister from 1991 to 1996, in November rebuked the government for joining the AUKUS pact, claiming the promised submarines would make the Australian navy a “unit of any US naval force” and would be akin to “throwing toothpicks at a mountain”.

“What the US has connived in is the effective expropriation of Australia’s strategic sovereignty through the AUKUS program,” Mr Keating told The Australian last year.

Chomsky, a well known linguist and philosopher, author of over 100 books, said the US military’s goal of being able to win a war against both Russia and China was “beyond insanity”, and made that outcome more likely.

“A war with either China or Russia means nice knowing, you goodbye civilisation,” Chomsky said, speaking on a podcast earlier this month.

His comments foreshadowed US condemnation of Russian foreign Minister Lavrov this week for suggesting the risk of nuclear war “should not be underestimated” and Moscow’s turning off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. “The risks now are considerable,“ Lavrov said on Russian media on Monday, according to Reuters.

Former prime minister Paul Keating.

British historian Niall Ferguson, speaking on US cable news on Wednesday (Thursday AEST), said wars tended to escalate the longer they lasted, and put the chance of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent.

Chomsky, who condemned Russia’s invasion as an “utterly stupid” war crime that had “handed Europe to the US on a golden platter”, said a negotiated settlement in Ukraine should be the world’s top priority rather than “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian”.

“There are two ways for war to tend; one way is for one side to be destroyed, the other is a negotiated settlement, and the Russians won’t be destroyed,” he said, suggesting the emotional attachment to Zelensky was impeding a rational assessment of the war’s likely trajectory.

“Zelensky’s clear, explicit serious statements about what could be political settlement, [such as] neutralisation of Ukraine, those have been suppressed for long period in favour of heroic Winston Churchill impersonations,” he said.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking in Germany on Tuesday, said the US believed Ukraine could win the war.

“Ukraine needs our help to win today. And they will still need our help when the war is over,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Chomksy, for decades a trenchant critic of US foreign policy, especially the invasion of Iraq, said most of the world had not enforced US and European sanctions on Russia because they regarded the US as a “rogue state” that flouted international law when it suited, dwelling on US war in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

“They look at it, they condemn the invasion as a horrible crime, but their basic response is what’s new, what’s the fuss we’ve been subjected to this from you as far back as it goes,” Chomsky said, referring to the US interventions in other nations since the Second World war.

“Biden calls Putin a war criminal: yeah, takes one to know one, is the basic reacting. Look at the sanctions map…English speaking countries, Europe, and those who apartheid South Africa called honorary whites, Japan and its former colonies,” he said.

India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, and nations in Africa have so far failed to join the US, UK, Australia and others in imposing sanctions to punish Russia.

Professor Chomsky also defended Julian Assange, who is shortly facing extradition to the US, and potentially life imprison, for publishing illegally leaked US defence file over a decade ago “and doing what a journalist is supposed to do”

“The mainstream media used everything WikiLeaks exposed, happily used it, made money out of it. But are they supporting him? Not that I’ve seen, just joining the jackels snapping at his feet,” he said.