Noam Chomsky has been a consistent and outspoken critic of the United States
government. In his book 9-11, a series of interviews about the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he claims, as he has done
before, that the United States government is the leading terrorist
state in modern times.

Chomsky has criticized the [US] government for its involvement in the
Vietnam War and the larger Indochina conflict, as well as its
interference in Central and South American countries and its military
support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Chomsky focuses his most
intense criticism on official friends of the United States government
while criticizing official enemies like the former Soviet Union and
North Vietnam only in passing. He explains this by the following
principle: it is more important to evaluate actions which you have
more possibility of affecting. His criticism of the former Soviet
Union and China must have had some effect in those countries; both
countries banned his work from publication.

Chomsky has repeatedly emphasized his theory that much of the United
States' foreign policy is based on the "threat of a good example"
(which he says is another name for the domino theory). The "threat of
a good example" is that a country could successfully develop
independently from capitalism and the United States' influences, thus
presenting a model for other countries, including countries in which
the United States has strong economic interests. This, Chomsky says,
has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene to quell
"socialist" or other "independence" movements in regions of the world
where it has no significant economic or safety interests. In one of
his most famous works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky uses this
particular theory as an explanation for the United States'
interventions in Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada.

Chomsky believes the US government's Cold War policies were not
entirely shaped by anti-Soviet paranoia, but rather toward preserving
the United States' ideological and economic dominance in the world. As
he wrote in Uncle Sam: "...What the US wants is 'stability,' meaning
security for the "upper classes and large foreign enterprises."