American power

Good intentions

Aug 7th 2003
From The Economist print edition

SINCE the Bush administration took power in January 2001 and even more since September 11th of the same year, the stale arguments of the cold war have been replaced by a passionate international debate about the political uses and limitations of American power. Triumphant and triumphalist conservative and neo-conservative voices have welcomed victory in Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence that the United States can do whatever it wants. Sceptics in America and elsewhere, however, question whether the United States actually knows what it wants to do. Even that super-realist, Henry Kissinger, has asked whether Americans have the stamina to achieve what lies in their power.

Now two thoughtful books, both written for the general reader by American writers, tackle the dilemmas of American power from different perspectives.

If he were not a former corporate executive who was one of President Reagan's trade negotiators, it would be easy to typecast Clyde Prestowitz, the president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, as a liberal, even as a “cheese-eating surrender monkey”, as French intellectuals were so memorably described. In fact Mr Prestowitz's book deserves to be read even by those who utterly reject his thesis for its courage, its clarity and its attempt to see the United States as all too many others see it.

Mr Prestowitz believes that the United States has practised for decades an anti-imperialist imperialism. He quotes with approval a scholar who concluded that “the United States has compromised or acted to undermine in some crucial way every treaty we have studied”, and shows that since the coming of the Bush administration America has done just that in relation to landmines, small-arms sales, nuclear proliferation, torture, the international criminal court—even, he says, the rights of children.

He highlights every incident in history that appears to contradict American values, from the installation of anti-communist dictators in a dozen countries during the cold war to what he sees as the economic militarism of the military-industrial complex.

He reminds us that the United States tacitly accepted the Taliban's assumption of power in Afghanistan, tells us that it supplied him with anthrax and botulin, and unkindly notes that it was one Donald Rumsfeld who went to Baghdad in 1983 to assure Saddam Hussein of American support. Bravely, Mr Prestowitz analyses the hostages to fortune given by American policy towards both Israel and Taiwan.

He believes American power has become dangerous “because it has been accompanied by a fundamental shift in US doctrine that increasingly makes American power ‘unsafe' in the eyes of the world.” Nor does he criticise the Bush administration alone. On the contrary, he blames the whole thrust of American exceptionalism. “We are a well-intentioned people”, he concludes, “who have been blessed by fortune. We have an admirable democracy, but it is not the only possible democracy and not always the best possible democracy. We have a very successful economy, but so do others.”

Elsewhere, this may be seen as refreshing and wise. But while many in the rest of the world (and indeed some Americans) agree with Mr Prestowitz, most of those who now control American power, in the executive branch, but also in the Congress, the military, the think-tanks and the corporate hierarchies, will think it offensive, if not raving mad.

Michael Hirsh's book is very different. Mr Hirsh is a Newsweek reporter, and although he has travelled widely, his perspective is a Washington one. He is better at describing how the world looks from Washington than at understanding how Washington looks to the world. Even so, Mr Hirsh understands the limitations of the widespread American assumption that the United States “can make the world a better and safer place by asserting America's power and spreading cardinal American values such as democracy and free markets.” Mr Hirsh believes that this effort is likely to fail. The world, he says, “has already heard an earful from America”.

Instead he argues that “We have no choice but to strike a middle course between the soft globalism that the Bush hegemonists despised and the take-it-or-leave-it unilateralism they offered up as an alternative.” He puts forward a strong argument in favour of the notion that Americans, with a little help from their friends, have already gone a long way towards creating that integrated international society whose existence the arch-realist Hans Morgenthau denied.

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