Downsizing American Imperialism
By Richard Gwyn
Toronto Star
13 October, 2003"The problem with American power is not that it is American. The problem is simply the power. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power."
-- Timothy Garton Ash, Oxford historian, New York Times, April 9, 2002.
That's an exceptionally shrewd observation. About all that can be added to it is that at the same time that most people around the world are uneasy at, or are enraged by, American power, so are most Americans. Other than a political-military elite for whom imperial power is a ticket to fame and fortune, what most Americans would like most is to be left alone.The obvious price that Americans are paying for being a hyper-power, a global hegemony, a reborn Rome, is the daily loss of soldiers in Iraq and the $87 billion that Washington will spend there instead of at home on health care, education, roads and the rest.
There is another severe price that Americans are paying.
An ever-growing number of people around the world are giving up on America itself. They remain fascinated by and drawn to the American dream of affluence, freedom, and democracy. But the U.S. itself now disgusts them or frightens them — more so, in quite a few instances, than the suicide bombers.
As one measure of this rejectionism, a blue-chip panel of experts assembled by President George W. Bush to advise on ways to improve the U.S. image in the Muslim world has just reported back: "Hostility towards America has reached shocking levels."
More shocking, certainly more surprising, is that the Number 4 on Germany's best-seller lists — the author is a former federal cabinet minister — is a book, Die CIA und de 11 September, which argues, much as is widely believed in the Middle East, that the mass murders of 9/11 were perpetrated by the CIA and Israel's Mossad.
A similar book topped the best-seller lists in France a few month back. In London, the wildly popular show, Jerry Springer: The Opera, depicts Americans as overweight, coarse, oversexed, vulgar, self-indulgent and stupid.
Specific policy miscalculations — the doctrine of a right of "pre-emption" most obviously — and Bush's personality and style, which evoke scorn, particularly among European cultural elites, explains a part of this dislike that's now shading over to hatred. So does the absence of other ideological causes, which has made anti-Americanism a self-justifying cause all by itself.
But maybe a major part of the phenomenon derives from Garton Ash's insight that American has too much power, for its own good or the world's good.
So the U.S. should downsize its power.
The source of this intriguing concept is Clyde Prestowitz, author of the new book, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism And The Failure of Good Intention (The quote from Garton Ash comes from it).
Prestowitz, who's best known as an economist and trade expert and who travels widely throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America, explained in an interview here that the most common word used by people to describe their feelings about contemporary America was that of "dignity." By this they mean that American power and unilateralism has offended everyone else's dignity and self-esteem, leaving them feeling marginalized, dispossessed and irrelevant.
While Bush has pushed the problem, "to its extremes," it pre-dates him, says Prestowitz. Bill Clinton, although widely admired abroad, acted pre-emptively by firing cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan, while his secretary of state Madelaine Albright described the U.S. as "the indispensable nation."
The root problem is all that power. So get rid of some of it. The U.S. should hand over Iraq to the United Nations as soon as possible and pull its troops out of South Korea and Japan, and scale back elsewhere.
Doing less, says Prestowitz, would compel others to do more. "Today, many get a free ride, which is an invitation to irresponsibility."
Historical precedents for imperial downsizing are hard to find. Prestowitz could think of only two: China in the 15th century when it pulled its fleets back from the seas and the U.S. right after World War II when it "sheathed its power" (Prestowitz's phrase) by embedding it into multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and NATO and the new international trade and other organizations.
This isn't his entire recipe. He wants other changes, such as a genuinely balanced drive to Middle East peace.
But Prestowitz's core message is: "An America that stressed its tolerance rather than its might, its tradition of open inquiry rather than its way of life, and that asked for God's blessing on all the world's people rather than just its own, would be the America the world desperately wants."
Richard Gwyn's column appears Wednesday and Sunday.Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited