A reader, Daniel Nikolic, asks a good question. He wants to know if there is a grain of truth in Noam Chomsky’s views on international relations that goes beyond his exaggerated statement of them. My answer to that is a categorical “no”. Either the theory of imperialism is true or it is false. That theory, which goes back to C. Wright Mills and before that to Lenin and where he got it, the British writer, J. A. Hobson, claims that the main explanation for international relations is that nations want to capture one another’s territories so that they can exploit the mineral wealth of the place and the labor of the inhabitants for the economic benefit of the imperialistic nation. The contending theory, that of realpolitik or geopolitics, is that nations are in quest of ever increased security, however powerful they are, so that their risk in dealing with other nations goes down. International relations is like a game of monopoly. You want enough money so you can afford to pay the rent even if you land on an expensive property owned by an opponent. You take risks only when you have no alternative, such as when you put all your money on a hotel hoping not to land on an opponents property because your only chance of survival is if the dice run your way. Sometimes nations are in that quandary, as Britain was in 1940, but most of the time you roll the dice when you are secure enough to withstand misfortune, as was the case in both Vietnam and Iraq, where the United States could sustain defeats and yet quickly rebound. There is so much the imperialist model cannot explain, as why we went into Vietnam, where there were no natural resources discovered until after the war was over, and which we can now access because Vietnam is an ally rather than an adversary, while the theory of realpolitik can explain all of international relations, back to the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens.