Rogue Nation

Bush's Foreign Policy Failure, per a prominent Republican: Cyde Prestowitz

Anyone read his book yet?

Synopsis From: http://www.forbesbookclub.com/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=IH7LC


Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Prestowitz, Clyde
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A timely and stinging indictment of the Bush administration's foreign policy, from one of Washington's most-cited intellectuals and political analysts During the six months prior to the World Trade Center attack, the United States walked away from a treaty to control the world traffic in small arms, the Kyoto accords, a treaty to combat bioterrorism, and many other international agreements. After 9/11 there was a flurry of coalition building, but Europe and Asia quickly came to see the conflict in Afghanistan as an American war with Tony Blair leading cheers from the sidelines. Recent American calls to action in Iraq have only reinforced international perception that the U.S. plans to remain a solitary actor on the world stage. Despite our stated good intentions--the causes of justice and democracy--we have become the world's largest rogue nation. The Bush administration did not invent the American tradition of unilateralism, but, Clyde Prestowitz argues, they have taken it to unprecedented heights. Rogue Nation explores the historical roots of the unilateral impulse and shows how it helps shape American foreign policy in every important area: trade and economic policy, arms control, energy, environment, drug trafficking, agriculture. Even now, when the need for multilateral action--and the danger of going it alone--has never been greater, we continue to act contrary to international law, custom, and our own best interests.



Excerpt from interview in Fortune magazine:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,456973,00.html


The Cost of Living in a Rogue Nation
Interview with Clyde Prestowitz.
FORTUNE
Monday, June 9, 2003
By Bill Powell


A former Commerce Department official during the Reagan administration, Clyde Prestowitz, 61, is probably best known as the author of Trading Places. The influential 1989 book argued for an overhaul of U.S. trade relations with Japan--at a time when, believe it or not, Tokyo seemed as if it could do no wrong economically. Prestowitz, who since leaving government has been the president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, has now written another provocative book. Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions is an indictment of what Prestowitz calls the "unilateral impulse" in American foreign policy. We caught up with Prestowitz to talk about Bush, Saddam, and ticking off the European Union.

Q: I take it that despite being a Republican, you're probably not looking for work in the Bush administration? I don't imagine your book is too popular with them.
A: I think people who read the book will see that I am not opposed to the exercise of American power in the world--indeed, of American dominance in the world. I supported the war in Iraq. What I'm against is stupidity--unilateralism that doesn't do anything but create ill will needlessly.

Q: For example?
A: Take the Kyoto Treaty. Everyone agrees the treaty was flawed and that it would never have come into force as written. The irony is, we so angered the EU by rejecting the treaty outright, and not offering an alternative, that in order to get everyone else onboard they made concessions (to the Japanese and the Australians, among others) that we had argued for in the first place! The administration's rejection was pointless, and we're now in a position where the rest of the world sees the United States, the inventor of environmentalism, as its enemy.

Q: You argue in the book that unilateralism is going to cost our multinationals business. Do you see any evidence supporting that yet?
A: I think you'll start to see it. And I think this is something that many companies are quietly thinking about and worrying about. I am on the advisory committee of a very well-known high-tech company I'd rather not name, and they called me out for a long discussion about exactly this subject. This is the type of thing that's going to be subtle; it will be played out in regulations that discriminate against a U.S. company, or in antitrust rulings, or in health or environmental standards. Not necessarily high-profile "do we buy Airbus or do we buy Boeing ?" decisions--though there may be some of those--but in ways that will have an impact nonetheless.

Q: You say you supported the war in Iraq. Why?
A: Well, I just agreed with the judgment that the world, and the Middle East in particular, would be better off without Saddam Hussein in power. But obviously it would have been better to get more allies with us. In particular, it would have been better in terms of trying to manage the aftermath, which, as we can see, is a mess. It would be nice to have a little more help dealing with that, wouldn't it?

From the Jun. 23, 2003 Issue

 

Another Review, from the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...ode=&contentId=A49665-2003Jun12&notFound=true


Carrying a Big Stick
'Rogue Nation' by Clyde Prestowitz; 'At War With Ourselves' by Michael Hirsh

Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, June 15, 2003; Page BW05

ROGUE NATION
American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
By Clyde Prestowitz
Basic. 328 pp. $26

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

These two critiques of present-day U. S. foreign policy have much in common. Both authors believe that by all rights the events of Sept. 11, 2001 should have solidified America's claim to global leadership. Both are dismayed that instead, less than two years later, the United States stands increasingly at odds with the rest of the world. Both find George W. Bush and his neoconservative lieutenants chiefly to blame for landing us in this predicament.

Both books propose that the United States abandon its high-handed unilateralism, henceforth working through rather than against the international community. Seeing no incompatibility between our own long-term interests and those of the rest of the world, both argue, in effect, that there's nothing wrong with U.S. policy that striking the right posture can't fix. In the end, both fail to recognize the persistence of liberal internationalism as the true underpinnings of American statecraft.

That said, these two books differ markedly in tone and overall value. Rogue Nation, the lesser of the two, reads like an extended hissy fit. Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, offers readers a pastiche of American flaws and failures, garnered from "thousands of conversations around the world." The operative assumption appears to be that, coming from a retired Southeast Asian diplomat or European finance minister, complaints of American "inconsistency, self-righteousness, and ignorance" should be taken at face value.

The resulting litany of charges is a familiar one. The citizens of this country, Prestowitz reports, are spoiled, greedy, wasteful, excessively religious and obsessed with gas-guzzlers and guns. With regard to foreign policy, they are also hypocrites. When it comes to caring for the dispossessed, the world's richest nation is downright stingy. Proclaiming its devotion to liberal ideals, the world's preeminent democracy shamelessly cozies up to right-wing dictators. Insisting that it acts on behalf of the global common good, the world's sole superpower adamantly refuses to compromise its freedom of action or to rein in its profligate way of life. Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has exacerbated these tendencies, committing the United States to an imperial doctrine of "infinite expansion." That way, Prestowitz concludes, lie militarism, backlash, overstretch and ultimately exhaustion, as the United States, transformed into a rogue state, rouses a terrified world into opposition.

As bad as this may sound, Prestowitz hastens to add, all is not lost. With an engaging Ross Perot-like glibness, he writes that putting things right is "simple really, and something George W. Bush should be able to embrace in a heartbeat." What's required is a "return to real conservatism." Instead of pursuing dreams of empire, Washington should implement "a strategy of making our power safe for others." We should accept limits and constraints, treat other countries like adults and share with them responsibility for addressing the world's problems.

Although it shares some of the limitations of Rogue Nation, Michael Hirsh's At War with Ourselves is the better of the two books -- balanced, judicious, thoughtful and engagingly written, if still superficial. Where Prestowitz rants, Hirsh reasons.

A senior editor in the Washington bureau of Newsweek and formerly that magazine's foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent, Hirsh coins yet another neologism to characterize present-day American preeminence. We are today, he writes, "the Überpower." Yet for all of its might, the United States cannot escape -- should not even attempt to escape -- the complex system of trading rules, international law and norms of behavior that stands as our own flawed but "unfinished masterpiece." Instead of tearing this global system down, as President Bush seems determined to do, we should strive to prop it up and to perfect it.

Accepting the necessity of this task does not come easily to a body politic still infected, according to Hirsh, with "the spore of isolationism." Americans today can ill afford to give in to their ancient inclination to turn inward. Neither, however, can they succumb to the parallel temptation to remake the world in their image. Hirsh views the lingering belief in American exceptionalism as a narcotic, one that triggers the latent megalomania of the political class, prompts the unwashed to go off on crusades and frightens the rest of the world.

Besides, on the values front we've already won. According to Hirsh, most of the world has already embraced American ideals, and the few holdouts will soon collapse. Thus, he predicts, "it is only a matter of time" before radical Islam is "crushed by the tectonics of Westernization." In short, things are going our way. We just need to maintain the momentum, allowing "the institutions of the international system that we built, such as the UN and the WTO, to do the main work of continuing to promote these values." That means preserving and reinforcing that system's legitimacy. Doing so requires the timely and effective use of American military muscle on the system's behalf -- something that Bill Clinton gushing about the wonders of globalization failed to appreciate. But it also entails a willingness to compromise and collaborate -- very much at odds with Bush's "stark unilateralism."

Note the adjective. For Hirsh, unilateralism as such is not the problem; stark unilateralism is. While Prestowitz, confronting America's penchant for going it alone, proposes a "conservative" antidote, Hirsh actually calls for greater assertiveness. Certain that "perpetuating American dominance is a good policy for the world," he sees the issue as one of maintaining U.S. preeminence at tolerable costs.

In that regard, he writes, the United States suffers at present not from overstretch but from "understretch." The imperative is not to trim U.S. commitments but to deepen them. Instead of going it alone, Washington needs to co-opt the international system and manipulate it to our own advantage, albeit while disguising our true purpose. "Merely by talking more multilaterally, even as they continue to behave unilaterally," Hirsh writes, American policymakers can "make U.S. hegemony much more palatable." Why would nations like France, China and Russia play along with this charade? Because U.S. hegemony serves their interests too. As a good American, Hirsh knows this to be true.

For both authors, getting U.S. policy back on track turns out to be a fairly straightforward proposition. For Prestowitz, it is just a matter of energizing a conservative diplomatic tradition. (Alas, that tradition died with Sen. Robert Taft in 1953, and periodic efforts to revive it since have fallen flat.) For Hirsh, it is just a matter of Americans suppressing their strange ideological preoccupations and pretending to love the United Nations. But one might as well counsel Bostonians to give up their odd infatuation with the Red Sox and to root instead for the Yankees. It's not going to happen.

U.S. foreign policy derives from the powerful blend of ideals, myths and prejudices, bolstered today by national self-regard and unprecedented military power, that is liberal internationalism. When it comes to all matters related to foreign policy, this is the ideology to which both Left and Right earnestly subscribe. Whence does that hegemony derive? That's the key question, and one that neither of these books even lays a glove on. •

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University and the author of "American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy."