NONFICTION - July 19, 1992

A COLD PEACE: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy by Jeffrey E. Garten (Times Books/Twentieth Century Fund; $22; 277 pp.) Although the “New World Order” called for by George Bush in the wake of communism assumed greater global cooperation, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the United States, as the lone remaining superpower, would dominate that order. Jeffrey Garten, an investment banker, former government official and now a sought-after economic commentator, holds a rather different view, one in which the New World Order will likely be “a world without order.” In this book he argues that that “the Big Three”--the U.S., Japan and Germany-- must determine how they will share economic and political power in the 1990s if they are to avoid a wheel-spinning, defensive “cold peace.” In “Different Kinds of Capitalism,” the book’s most interesting chapter, Garten distinguishes among the three nations’ economic policies and ends up implying (without saying so outright) that the U.S. economy should be more like those of Japan and Germany: fewer resources devoted to the military, for example, and more to long-term investments in infrastructure and education. Garten hopes to make readers see that foreign and domestic policies are deeply intertwined--or, to put it more concretely, that the U.S. needs to remake itself into “a society that others want to emulate.” Garten cites many statistics in this book, but the most shocking is the response to a post-unification poll asking Germans which country they saw as the best model for their nation. The U.S. was mentioned by just 6% of respondents, with Switzerland and Sweden taking 70% of the vote between them, and both Japan and Italy garnering 10%.