The late Napoleon Duarte, president of El Salvador, was a right-wing Christian Democrat—demonstrably so after 1980, when a quarter of his party left and joined the guerrillas. At the time of the mid-1980s election in which Duarte lost power, the BBC news characterised him as “left of centre”. Given that the only candidate to Duarte's right was a neo-fascist, this is a bit like calling Harvey Proctor a Red. A veil of normality had to be thrown over the facts, though: the elections were being held with US (and British) government approval.

There are many stories here as unpleasantly revealing as this one: this is a good book, but not entirely a good read. Part of the problem is the browbeating style in which much of it is written, by turns belligerently partisan and heavily ironic. Above all, Chomsky is that rare beast, a consistent anti-imperialist. This gives him a gift for drawing unpalatable but entirely logical conclusions that his more liberal rivals cannot match. I finished this book feeling weary and bruised, but with a deepened understanding of the dynamics of global politics before, during and after the cold war.

“Before, during and after”; this, in a nutshell, is Chomsky's main argument. So far from confining the superpowers to arm-wrestling across the Berlin Wall, the cold war saw the US wage war, directly and by proxy, against the threat of political and economic independence in countries around the world. The USSR, meanwhile, did little more than assist ex-colonial states that preferred Soviet patronage to US control. As the cold war ends, a major constraint on US imperialism vanishes, and the remaining superpower has the world to itself. The results, from Kurdistan to Kampuchea, are not going to be pretty.

To understand this development, we do not need to ascribe sadistic tendencies to national security advisors and directors of the CIA (though some of the historical evidence on this point is equivocal). Despite some gloomy remarks about the “national psychosis” of the US, Chomsky recognises the economic roots of imperialism. At home, business needs stability and guaranteed investment; business therefore gets a choice of two pro-business parties and a system of military Keynesianism. (The free market is fine for other countries: it makes it that much easier for the US to win.)

Abroad, business needs materials and markets; business gets them, regardless of the human costs. Any nation where US interests set the limits of the possible is therefore a “democratic” nation led by “moderates” (which, Chomsky helpfully informs us, was how the State Department regarded Mussolini in the 1930s). The US élites both shape the world and define the terms in which we know it. Only one real challenge to their global dominance is presented here: the economic power of the rival élites of Germany and Japan.

The only significant flaw in this compendious and thought-provoking work stems from Chomsky's conception of the élite, which is at once his favourite theme and his blind spot. Considering the industrial democracies, he argues that in some countries élite power is imposed by consensual means and has no need of cruder methods of enforcement; he then gives a brisk rundown of occasions on which precisely those methods were used (half a page on the Italian conspirators of P2, seven lines on the Gehlen organisation).

Chomsky is uninterested in the crucial question of how these two faces of politics fit together: whether by running a secret army staffed by ex-Nazis or by cutting income tax, the élites always win. Beside them, moreover, stands the “secular priesthood” of intellectuals, dedicated to “serving the owners of the state capitalist systems” when they cannot take power in their own right (“in the Leninist model”).

So élite power rests on a trahison des clercs: an assumption that clarifies Chomsky's expressed contempt for Vaclav Havel as well as his general tendency to bellicose sarcasm. Looking outside the ranks of the élite, Chomsky gestures towards the “historic mission” of “people who regard themselves as moral agents”, but his own mission is plainly that of the lone incorruptible within the élite world-machine. It is a position in which some uncomfortable truths can be told, but that holds out very little hope of anything actually changing.