The U.S. preens, and a conservative laments

Probably best known as a Reagan administration trade negotiator and a prominent Japan-basher of the late 1980s, Clyde Prestowitz, presumably a conservative Republican, has written a textbook for Democratic presidential candidates.

Regular readers of the Nation will be familiar with most of the arguments in “Rogue Nation.” Prestowitz attacks virtually all of the policies of the Bush administration, especially its unilateralist foreign policy. Horrified by President Bush’s West Point speech justifying preventive war and his threat to any would-be challengers to American dominance, he is outraged by the arrogance, hypocrisy and stupidity underlying American actions and the loss of the goodwill generated by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Most of his policy recommendations could have been written by Jimmy Carter. None of them will appeal to the Bush team.

To be sure, Prestowitz throws in a few asides to bolster his claim to being a “real” conservative. He sneers at the “professional leftists” -- and college kids in their Nikes -- demonstrating in Seattle against globalization. He mocks the Greens of Europe, the “anticapitalist left” in search of an issue after the discrediting of communism. And he manages slaps at Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine and Jerry Brown, all favorite targets of red-meat conservatives. But he is quick to concede that globalization has created genuine problems, both at home and in the developing world, and he insists that the United States reverse itself once more and sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.

What, then, is Prestowitz’s idea of real conservativism? It certainly has no room for the missionary zeal of a Paul Wolfowitz or Robert Kagan or for the assault on American civil liberties underway in the name of national security. Deriding the Bush administration’s calls for tax cuts and its refusal to consider the draft, Prestowitz contends that “traditional conservatives have always been careful to balance the budget and to insist on each citizen’s responsibility to perform civic duties.” He notes that Bush’s idea of civic duty is to urge Americans to go shopping to help the economy. For Prestowitz, the essential element of real conservatism is a demand for limited government -- a government that respects historical liberties and separation of church and state, a government that avoids imperialist adventures.

Prestowitz does not doubt that American leaders have been well-intentioned. He believes that the world is better off because the United States prevailed over the Soviet Union and especially because of the generous economic policies Washington pursued at the end of World War II. The Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, America’s open door to the world’s exports all generated enormous wealth worldwide. The critical point is that prior administrations defined the national interest broadly. Men such as Dean Acheson and George Marshall understood the need to aid in the reconstruction and development of the nation’s friends and were less prone to maximize American interests. More often than not they understood the value of working with allies rather than acting unilaterally.

Central to the problems with current policy is the concept of American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. operates on a higher moral level than any other state -- and thus can do no wrong -- and that its political, economic and social systems should be the model for the world. Prestowitz suggests that other peoples committed to democracy and economic and social justice might come closer to the ideal than Americans. Certainly no other developed nation has a comparable gap between rich and poor.

More to the point, he notes countless low points in America’s recent history, such as when the U.S. supported brutal dictators such as Synghman Rhee, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan in Korea, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Joseph Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, Greek colonels and an assortment of Guatemalan generals. He is sympathetic to the Arab view that Washington is hypocritical in its policies toward Israel. Americans mute the fact that the Israelis have weapons of mass destruction and oppress the Palestinians while we’re invading Iraq and criticizing other Arab states for undemocratic behavior. Even if we applaud Ariel Sharon’s recent statesmanlike gestures, how could anyone call him a man of peace? Prestowitz offers myriad reasons for why other peoples do not view the U.S. as a nation whose interventions are always benign. It’s time, he says, to see ourselves as others see us.

Prestowitz is perhaps most effective when he points to recent undermining of the norms of international behavior that earlier leaders worked so hard to establish, treaty violations and the obstruction by the U.S. of other countries’ efforts to ban land mines and the testing of nuclear weapons. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton comes in for well-deserved ridicule for his role in fighting efforts to restrict the sale of small arms, extending the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms to the rest of the world. Prestowitz also demonstrates the extraordinary efforts the international community made to gain American acceptance of the International Criminal Court, only to be rejected.

Admitting that he drives an SUV, Prestowitz nonetheless argues passionately for oil conservation. Use less oil and there will be no need to control the Persian Gulf, no need for empire in the Middle East. He notes the successes of West Europeans and Japanese in reducing energy consumption and insists the United States must follow suit. If the United States matched the European Union’s energy efficiency, he claims there would be no need to import any oil or drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His interest in alternative sources of energy allows him to praise France and others who have built nuclear power plants, but he has no illusions about the prospects for the nuclear power industry at home. Bush gets faint praise for his support of hydrogen cells to propel cars: Prestowitz is disdainful of the paltry amount committed.

As he ranges over American contacts with the rest of the world, Prestowitz declares himself a committed multilateralist. He recognizes flaws in the United Nations but insists on correcting them rather than ignoring the institution. He was appalled when Washington rejected Japanese proposals that they would use their reserves to mitigate the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Similarly, he argues for accepting assistance from friends and allies when offered, as by NATO in the war in Afghanistan, rather than arrogantly insisting we can do better alone. He wants to see an end to American treatment of its Japanese and European allies as protectorates, encouraging them to be able to look after their own interests. Let the Japanese write their own constitution rather than live with one handed to them by American occupation authorities. Let the EU develop its own military force.

The one area in which Prestowitz seems surprisingly off-base is the Taiwan Strait, where his analysis might have been written by Henry Kissinger. He sees China as a rising power with which the United States must come to terms. American trade with China is enormously important -- although he is astonishingly blase about the adverse terms of trade, given his history with Japan. But worst of all, he downplays the emergence of democracy in Taiwan after criticizing the United States for subordinating concern for democracy to other interests during the Cold War. Damning American support for Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship is fair enough, but as the only democracy in Chinese history, perhaps today’s Taiwan is worthy of the modest help it gets from the United States.

Prestowitz has done us an enormous service by pointing out that the men and women who call themselves conservatives today are truly radicals who have alienated America’s friends everywhere. The great power of the United States is no longer perceived as benign -- perhaps not anywhere outside of client states like Likud Israel and Taiwan. Prestowitz details the transgressions of rhetoric and action that have offended our erstwhile allies and led them to fear the Bush administration more than they fear the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il. America, he contends, has ceased to be viewed as a “good international citizen” and has become a “candidate for the rogue nation list.”