Linguist Noam Chomsky says the decline in American power has been “increasingly self-inflicted” in recent decades.

In the first part of a two-part column for TomDispatch, the political activist argues that America’s decline is very real.

To make the point that the damage has been self-inflicted, Chomsky cites a recent issue of Foreign Affairs that asks “Is America Over?”

“The title article calls for ‘retrenchment’ in the ‘humanitarian missions’ abroad that are consuming the country’s wealth, so as to arrest the American decline that is a major theme of international affairs discourse, usually accompanied by the corollary that power is shifting to the East, to China and (maybe) India,” he writes.