'Rogue Nation' and 'At War With Ourselves': Does Not Play Well With Others

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/books/review/22KELLERT.html?pagewanted=print&position=>

The New York Times


June 22, 2003 

'Rogue Nation' and 'At War With Ourselves': Does Not Play Well With Others 
By BILL KELLER 


AT WAR WITH OURSELVES 
Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World. 
By Michael Hirsh. 
288 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $26. 

Americans make lousy imperialists. Our hulking military and economic might make the Roman Empire seem inconsequential by comparison, but our hearts are not in conquest. We want to be liked, and are surprised when we're not. We are inward-looking, a little complacent, and we have been, at least since Vietnam, more than a little risk averse. When we do go to war we go to win, but we don't stick around. America put the hedge in hegemon. 

At least, that's the way we see ourselves. It is increasingly not the impression held by the rest of the world. The Bush administration, provoked by those September blows to the heart, has set about persuading America to step up to its imperial potential. In the 30 months of the Bush era, America has led posses of its own choosing into two wars, withdrawn from international arrangements that we considered confining, adopted a with-us-or-against-us rhetorical style and declared as a matter of national purpose that we will allow no rival to grow into our weight class. 

These two books are offered as multilateralist rebuttals to the ascendant above-it-all doctrine. Both volumes are short and aimed at a general audience. Both conclude that the unilateralism of the Bush administration is wrong, not because it violates some abstract moral code but because it is inimical to American interests. Inevitably the two books cover a lot of the same ground, but from different vantage points. 

If you want to know how the American colossus looks to the rest of the world, ''Rogue Nation,'' by Clyde Prestowitz, is your book -- an unsparing but unhysterical catalog of American behavior that has made the world see us as self-centered and hypocritical. The counts in the indictment are familiar: We preach fair trade but underwrite American cotton farmers at such high prices that we keep African farmers in poverty. We guzzle petroleum, and then need a foreign policy that overemphasizes one region of the globe. We preach democracy and dance with tyrants. ''Rogue Nation'' could serve as an appendix to this month's global poll by the Pew Research Center, which shows a balloning fear and mistrust of the United States around the world. 

Prestowitz is president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington and a former trade negotiator. (His 1988 book, ''Trading Places,'' was a mildly alarmist look at the competitive threat of Japan.) He is at his best translating the forbidding details of international commerce into lucid narrative. How American indifference contributed to the Asian economic crisis of 1997, for example, and how world currencies came to be pegged to the dollar -- a kind of monetary unilateralism that enables us to export our economic problems -- are explained with welcome clarity, and without a trace of antiglobalist cant. Likewise, his recounting of the dispute over the Kyoto treaty on global warming is fair-minded. He acknowledges the weaknesses of the treaty and the culpability of the European greens, frustrated leftists who hijacked the cause of environmentalism, but he concludes that in the end what was lost was much more than an inadequate treaty. He is sometimes glib on the politic!
s -- his co

While he focuses his opprobrium on the Bush administration, Prestowitz understands that America has long been an outlier, a feet-and-Fahrenheit power in a metric world, gripped by an assumption that the rest of the world should conform to us as the benchmark of normal civilized values. ''Indeed, the chief reason Americans are blind to their own empire is their implicit belief that every human being is a potential American, and that his or her present national or cultural affiliations are an unfortunate but reversible accident.'' 

And the solution? Essentially, spontaneous enlightenment. Americans should wise up, throw out unilateralist politicians, treat the world with respect and generally be just a little less . . . American. While we're at it, I propose that we eat right, floss daily, tithe generously and stop watching mindless TV shows. 

Michael Hirsh's ''At War With Ourselves'' is a more introspective look at America, particularly the America of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which Hirsh followed in his jobs as foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek. Although the book is enlivened by reporting trips he has taken, it is written from inside the intellectual bubble of the Council on Foreign Relations. Hirsh drizzles the text so liberally with bylines from the world of scholarly punditry that the prose often becomes sodden with attribution. Someone should have advised him to put his sources in the footnotes and trust his own judgment. 

For his judgment is fundamentally sound. His book is well informed, historically literate, nonideological common sense. That may sound like faint praise, but in an America that sometimes seems poised between reckless adventure and helpless inertia, centrist common sense is something to be treasured. By ''centrist,'' I mean Hirsh is a liberal internationalist who has come to see the value, as well as the inevitability, of applying American muscle to the world's problems, up to a point. 

Where, exactly, that point is, the reader may have trouble telling. Hirsh is a hawk on the Balkan wars (who isn't, these days?), and he confesses to having been badly wrong in anticipating that our ouster of the Taliban would turn out disastrously. On a harder test -- Iraq -- he ducks. Both of these books apparently went to press on the cusp of the war, so the authors knew whatever they said would be overtaken by events. Prestowitz nonetheless plunges in; he says that ''at this point there is little choice but for the United States and whatever partners it can gather to overthrow Saddam and occupy Iraq. The cost of not doing so is now greater than that of doing so.'' Hirsh does not quite say what he would do, though he gives the impression he would not have supported an invasion without United Nations sanction. 

Poor, maligned, unsexy multilateralism has, for all its faults, historically been the default position of American foreign policy, and Hirsh does a powerful job of reminding us why. He demonstrates that the ''international community'' we often disparage as feckless, corrupt and inhospitable (Condoleezza Rice called it ''illusory'') is in fact an instrument we built, one that most often serves as an extension of American power, and one that we desperately need. 

Even the United Nations, despite its noisy membership of pipsqueak tyrants and volatile states, serves a variety of useful functions, most importantly co-opting potential adversaries like China and Russia. As for other international bodies, ''the W.T.O. is the world's rule-setter; the I.M.F. its credit union; and the World Bank its principal charity,'' he writes. America dominates all of these organizations, and can use them to ''take the raw edge off American hegemony.'' 

More than useful instruments, Hirsh argues, these agencies have become, bit by bit, better advocates of the values we profess -- the freedoms of marketplace and voting booth, the rule of law. We need these imperfect surrogates because America has a serious credibility problem peddling values on its own. Hirsh calls this ''ideological blowback.'' For example, we cherish democracy in principle, just not in Pakistan, not right now. 

Hirsh is good on the subtleties of how, as countries develop the wherewithal to challenge us, they become inexorably entangled in the global order -- the way, for example, the manager of a privatized Chinese enterprise quickly develops ''a kind of dual citizenship'' as he learns to anticipate the needs of his foreign customers. And America is inescapably entangled, too. Even our defense industry, once the domain of sheltered, single-client weapons manufacturers, has shifted more and more to global suppliers of technology whose health depends on the rules of free trade. 

Hirsh outlines a sensible basis for detente between the warring hegemonists and internationalists, an America that leads without bullying. That is an accomplishment to be congratulated, even if you do not entirely share his optimism that this consensus is emerging before our eyes. 

Bill Keller is a Times columnist and a senior writer for The Times Magazine. 

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'