Rogue Nation Part 6

Korea.

I have already noted in Chapter 7 the growing estrangement between the United States and South Korea, which culminated to great annoyance in Washington in the election in December 2002 of Roh Moo-hyun as President of Korea to succeed Kim Dae-jung. Washington had been devoutly hoping for Roh's opponent, longtime U.S. friend Lee Hoi-chang to win on his platform of reversing Kim's Sunshine Policy toward the North.

And Roh not only won, he won with an overwhelming percentage of the vote of young people. His election coincided with the further escalation of tension between North Korea and the United States, as North Korea not only revealed a previously clandestine uranium enrichment program but expelled International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors and began preparations to restart its Yongbyon reactor. From this facility it would extract plutonium that could be used to make nuclear bombs, in violation of the non-proliferation treaty as well as of agreements with the United States. While Washington insisted it would not negotiate with North Korea until it halted these threatening activities, Roh announced that he both would continue the Sunshine Policy and undertake his own negotiations with the North. Behind this breach lies a view of the Korean situation that is never heard in Washington. It could, of course, be wrong, but it is important for Americans to understand it as one of South Korea's top negotiators explained it to me recently.

Americans know that the United States has no intention to invade North Korea, but North Korea doesn't know that. There has never been a peace treaty to end the Korean War. The United States has kept nearly forty thousand troops in South Korea as well as wartime command of the South Korean army for fifty years, and the obvious U.S. intention of attacking Iraq combined with North Korea's inclusion in the 'Axis of Evil' leads the North to see the United States as a threat to its security. Fundamental to the American view is the conviction that North Korea cannot be trusted to honor any bilateral or multilateral commitments. That it initiated the uranium enrichment program in violation of the agreements it made with the United States in the Agreed Framework of 1994 is typically cited in support of this view. Yet the specific provisions of the 1994 agreement were for the suspension of the North's plutonium production facilities, and those provisions have been honored. 36 Moreover, the United States itself has failed to honor key provisions of the deal. The promised installation of 2,000 megawatts of nuclear powered electric generating capacity by 2003 has not been delivered, nor has the 'full normalization of political and economic relations,' 37 nor have the 'formal assurances against the threat or the use of nuclear weapons by the United States' 38 been made. Thus in the eyes of the North Koreans, while the United States got what it wanted up front namely, the suspension of the North Korean plutonium program North Korea got mostly unfulfilled promises.

Moreover, when confronted with U.S. knowledge of the enriched uranium program by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly during his visit to Pyongyang in October 2002, the North Koreans offered to shut down the program in return for a U.S. commitment not to attack and to go ahead with the promised normalization of relations. But Kelly told them they had to halt the program, period, and that there would be no negotiations. What North Korea wants most, according to South Korea's negotiators, is U.S. recognition and a non-aggression treaty to end the war. The South doesn't see why that is so difficult in view of the fact that virtually every country in the world, except for the United States, Japan, and France, recognizes North Korea. The South Koreans believe Washington's policy is driven by hard-line ideological hawks who want to bring about the collapse of the North and maintain hostility in order to justify broader U.S. deployment in the Pacific. Thus, in the view of many South Koreans, the United States is as much an obstacle to resolution as the North.

Beyond this, South Koreans resent what they see as Washington's highhanded approach. Recently it has come out that the Clinton administration seriously considered launching air strikes to destroy the North's nuclear plants in 1994. Ultimately it did not do so and instead negotiated the Agreed Framework that resulted in the shutdown of the plant. But South Koreans were shocked to find that their government was only informed of the attack plan at the last moment, when the government vigorously objected. Given that South Korea's capital, Seoul, is only about 17 miles south of the border and that North Korea has it targeted by the heaviest concentration of artillery in the world, any such attack would almost certainly have resulted in the leveling of Seoul. It was a real blow to Koreans not to be asked, by a supposedly staunch ally, what they thought about the destruction of their own capital.

Nor did anyone in Washington consult the South Koreans about including North Korea in the 'Axis of Evil' or about undermining the South's sunshine policy with an American hard line. In short, the South Koreans think we take them for granted, and they resent it like hell. Ironically, this sentiment is driven by the newly ascendant democratic ideals of thousands of young people and business people who studied and worked in the United States and came back wanting Koreans to have the same rights as their American friends. The Koreans, like many Europeans, feel a sense of betrayal when America does not live up to its own ideals.

An interesting twist is that South Korea has begun to send missionaries to the United States. Having become a Christian country over the past fifty years, with a predominance of Protestant and especially Presbyterian churches, many Koreans have begun to see the United States as increasingly in need of spiritual rejuvenation.

Another important dynamic is the rise of the Chinese economy. China has become a major importer of Korean products, so much so that Korea can foresee the day when its exports to China will outstrip those to the United States. This has resulted in much discussion in Korea of a regional trade strategy and of regionalization generally. Along with this has come public debate over the status of U.S. troops in South Korea. For fifty years, Americans have been saying the troops are there to protect South Korea. Of course, Defense Secretary Cohen's 1997 comment that U.S. troops would stay even if Korea reunited let the cat out of the bag. The fact is, the United States has those troops there as part of its overall projection of power into Asia. Now, insensitivity and ideologically driven policy may undermine exactly the status of forces the United States has been trying to preserve.

Japan.

Across the straits from Korea, in Japan, is a much more complex and slowly developing situation, but with similar characteristics. Japan is truly in crisis, even if it is a quiet and largely invisible crisis. If you walk through Tokyo or travel through Japan, all appears quite normal. The traffic is impossible. Restaurants are crowded. The trains run exactly on time and the subway stops right in front of the door-opening marker. Construction cranes are everywhere, and even the tiniest villages are serviced by expressways and fast trains. And that is the clue. Despite the outward sheen, Japan's economy is on the edge of disaster and its politics are rotten at the core, and the evidence of both is all those construction cranes and expressways and trains to nowhere.

Japan has been governed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for all but about two of the past fifty-odd years. The party built its power on an iron triangle of support that includes farmers and rural residents, construction companies and their employees and related activities, and small business people and shopkeepers. The political system is rigged with rotten boroughs just like those of nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Because of the way votes are counted, a farmer's vote in Japan is worth about 2.2 votes from urban area residents. The LDP maintains this iron triangle by heavily subsidizing and protecting it. Farmers are protected from imports by some of the highest tariffs in the world. They are also heavily subsidized so that the domestic price of rice, for example, is ten times what it is on the world market. Small business is also subsidized in various ways and, best of all, pays virtually nothing in taxes. Construction lives on huge handouts from government contracts for roads that go to those farm villages and bridges that connect them. The result is that construction spending accounts for about 10 percent of the entire Japanese economy, about double the figure for the United States.

Beyond this, most of the Japanese economy has been highly protected for years both from imports and from foreign investors. After World War II, Japan adopted an export-led development strategy under which the government enforced high savings that were channeled through the banking system into mass production manufacturing industries like autos, electronics, and steel. Enormous production capacity was created, and much production was exported while the home market was reserved mainly for Japanese production. The system worked so well that by the mid-1980s, Japan was exporting so much and importing so little that the value of the yen was forced to rise in the 1985 Plaza Accord. The export strategy should have been changed, but it was hard to turn away from such a successful formula. Instead the government pumped money into the economy to offset the impact of a stronger yen and keep Japanese exporters competitive despite the stronger yen. The result was a classic bubble that burst in 1991-1992, leaving many companies virtually bankrupt and many banks with large non-performing loans. But many of these companies were construction companies and banks closely tied to the LDP. Rather than aggressively clean things up, the LDP for the past ten years has been shoveling out more and more in subsidies. Meanwhile, the economy has stagnated because banks, already carrying too much bad debt, lend mostly to keep zombie companies alive, thereby further increasing their bad debts. Japan's national debt is now the highest in the world and rising. It is caught in a threatening deflationary spiral for which the only solutions are substantial inflation, something likely to erode household wealth, or a 1930s-style depression that will do the same.

Where does the United States come into this? The LDP is a creature of the United States. Alfred C. Ulmer, Jr., CIA operations chief for East Asia 1955-1958; Roger Hilsman, head of intelligence and research in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; and U. Alexis Johnson, Ambassador to Japan 1966-1969, have all acknowledged making payoffs to the LDP from 1955 to 1972. 39 Moreover, there were close connections between the CIA, the LDP, and the Yakuza or Japanese Mafia. 40 From the end of the Japanese Occupation to the present, Washington has favored the LDP in Japan because it has been anti-Communist, has provided bases, and has followed the American lead in foreign policy. There has long been a deal. The United States takes care of security and has use of bases in Japan, and in return the United States supports, or at least accepts, Japan's economic policies. In recent years, it has been a matter not so much of accepting as of having become so structurally and financially intertwined with Japan as to have little ability to do much about it. But the point is that the United States has been an important factor (but far from the only one or even the greatest one) in Japan's ills and particularly in the suppression of a true democracy.

The United States has distorted Japan's development in other important ways as well. Because the Tokyo War Crimes trials excluded any discussion of the role of the emperor (by decision of the United States, which thought it needed to govern Japan through the emperor), these trials have never been accepted as anything other than victor's justice by the Japanese, and Japan has never come to grips with the history of the war. For the most part it doesn't even teach this history in its schools. This has made it impossible for Japan to bring closure on the war in its relations with other countries. The visits in recent years by Japanese prime ministers to Yasukuni Shrine (where the spirits of Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals, are enshrined) cause outrage in many countries, but the outrage baffles many Japanese, who see it as similar to visiting tombs in Arlington National Cemetery. Beyond this, the United States has created the same kind of fantasyland in Japan as in Europe. Because it has no real responsibility for the defense of the oil routes or overall strategic issues in Asia, Japan can indulge in low defense expenditures only 1 percent of GDP and avoid difficult issues. (Interestingly, the United States no longer complains about the level of Japan's defense expenditure even though it is far less than that of Europe.) The status of U.S. forces in Japan actually gives Japan's authorities more de facto jurisdiction than they have in Korea, but the issue is similar. Japan is a protectorate and a client state of the United States. It also was not fully consulted about U.S. policy toward North Korea even though it would surely be a target for North Korean missiles.

None of this has given rise to displays of anti-American feelings like those expressed in Korea, partly because Japan is a bigger beneficiary of the U.S. economic relationship, partly because Japan's democracy is not as well developed as Korea's, and partly because the Japanese tend to be less outspoken. But there are significant signals that should be noted. For example, one of the biggest hit movies in Japan in recent years was Pride, a film glorifying General Hideki Tojo, who led Japan during most of World War II and was convicted and executed as a war criminal. The producer, Hideaki Kase, who is now writing a book about kamikaze pilots, said, 'Tojo was a superstar and still is.' 41 Then there is Yoshinori Kobayashi, Japan's most popular cartoonist, who told me over coffee in Tokyo recently that for Japan World War II was about liberating Asia from western colonization. Most important of all is Shintaro Ishihara, the novelist and governor of Tokyo. Author with former Sony Chairman Akio Morita of the best-seller The Japan That Can Say No, Ishihara is an outspoken nationalist whose views, though sophisticated, are somewhat jingoistic. In the book, he suggested that Japan should cut off high-tech exports to the United States as an answer to U.S. complaints about Japanese trade barriers. In a country sick of the corruption and inarticulate leadership of the U.S.-backed LDP, he is now by far the most popular single political leader in the country, and his name keeps being mentioned as a possible prime minister. If he were elected, he would very likely join the South Koreans in moving to get the U.S. troops out. (I once debated him on Japanese TV, and he made sure to emphasize his opposition to U.S. military bases in his country.) Even without that there are increasing calls in Japan to reduce U.S. troop levels, and Japan's Foreign Minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, announced on February 2, 2003, that the Japanese government would strive to reduce the number of American troops on Okinawa. 42 It is important to understand that Japan's view of the role of the U.S. troops and bases is at great odds with that of most Americans'. While Americans think they are defending Japan and that Japanese should be grateful, the Japanese call the funds they provide for base maintenance 'the sympathy budget.' This budget is presented by political leaders in Japan not as the contribution of an ally to a critical joint mission but as a favor or a gift to the Americans, enabling them to indulge their hegemonic ambitions. Once again, perspective is of critical importance. Japanese like Americans. All the polls and all my forty years of contact with Japan confirm it. But we shouldn't ignore views like those of a Japanese friend of mine, a former ambassador to Thailand, who told me, 'America needs conflict to keep its economy going.' Japan is not going to renounce America tomorrow or perhaps ever, but those in the U.S. government who insist on betting on Japan as America's 'strategic partner' may find themselves sorely disappointed.

China.

As with Russia, so with China, U.S. relations are distinctly better today than before September 11. This continues the oscillating pattern of U.S.-China relations since Nixon's 'opening to China' in 1972. During the Reagan administration, China's economic development and common interests in containing the Soviet Union drew the two countries together. As a Reagan administration official, I participated in some of the early economic negotiations with China and can attest to the immense interest of American business in the Chinese market. The end of the Cold War and the Tienanmen Square incident of 1989 then introduced a chill that the first Bush administration eventually corrected in response to business pressure as well as to broader strategic interests. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton accused the Bush administration of 'mollycoddling' the Chinese and promised to take a sterner line. As president he initially did take a tough line on human rights and other issues, but he soon succumbed to the logic of economic development and initiated the policy of 'engagement,' calling China a 'strategic partner.' This angered some in Japan, who thought Japan was the 'strategic partner,' and many on the right wing of the Republican Party who still harbor the old hatred of the Chinese communists.

With the advent of the second Bush administration in 2001, the U.S. line hardened again. China was relabeled a 'strategic competitor,' and U.S. military surveillance of China was increased. It looked to many Chinese as if America needed an enemy to replace the Soviet Union and had chosen China. Osama bin Laden appeared to Beijing as something of a godsend. They quickly voiced sympathy and offered cooperation to Washington, after which relations warmed considerably. But the Chinese remain concerned that once the threat of terror is under control, they could once again become a target of American hostility.

By far the most important piece of the U.S.-China puzzle is Taiwan. As noted earlier, for mainland Chinese, putting Taiwan under the Chinese flag represents the last step in re-establishing the sovereignty and integrity that were lost to western colonialism in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century. Americas support of Taiwan is seen as intervention in a strictly internal matter and is inexplicable except in terms of a U.S. interest in weakening and containing China. In their view, every time a Taiwanese leader meets with a U.S. leader, and every time President Bush says something like 'we will do whatever it takes' to defend Taiwan, it simply encourages Taiwanese leaders to resist Chinas efforts at reunification and so puts more pressure on the leadership in Beijing to take a tougher line. The Chinese have told anyone who will listen (and most experts believe them) that the one thing that would almost certainly cause a war would be a declaration of independence by Taiwan. In a mirror image of the American view that China's buildup of forces across from Taiwan poses a threat demanding a U.S. response, the Chinese see our gestures of support to Taiwan as posing a threat to which they have no choice but to respond. In their view, it was the United States that created the Taiwan problem in the first place, and they see our support for a separate Taiwan as part of a larger effort to contain and undermine China's rising power and influence.

That brings us to the second piece of the puzzle hegemonic competition. Whether apocryphal or not, the story of the Chinese professor who commented that 'China has had 150 bad years, but now we're back' is very telling. Once one gets past the inevitable Taiwan discussion, the second major topic on the minds of Chinese elites is the country's bright prospects and return to the front rank of nations. Without being Chinese you probably cannot fully understand the deep sense of historical humiliation brought by the troubles of the past century, but the sense of euphoria and anticipation in the wake of China's current success is palpable. Yet there is also an anxiety in China that the United States fears this success and wants to limit it.

Again mirror images are at work. Recall, for example, the incident in early 2001 when a U.S. EP-3 electronic surveillance aircraft was forced to land on Hainan Island. Americans saw this as an unprovoked act of hostility that proved once more why we have to beware of China. But the Chinese asked why U.S. planes are constantly patrolling their coast, deliberately triggering Chinese defense communications in order to monitor China's defense capabilities. They point out that they neither have such aircraft nor do they patrol the coasts of the United States or even neighboring countries in Asia. In their view, the United States gains benefits from being the hegemonic power and seeks to maintain that power, perhaps even by forcibly preventing the rise of a rival. This sense is powerfully reinforced by U.S. actions and, of course, by the president's West Point speech and statements of other officials calling for preventive war and the abrogation of the rise of any competing power. Looking at the world from Beijing, the Chinese see U.S. troops and fleets all over the Pacific, advanced U.S. weapons being sent to Taiwan, U.S. detente with Russia, and U.S. forces based for the first time ever in several non-Democratic central Asian countries bordering China as a result of the conflict in Afghanistan. They see a U.S. National Missile Defense effort ostensibly aimed at 'rogue nations' like North Korea but also tending to negate the deterrent power of China's nuclear missiles; a unilateral move without UN backing in Iraq; and an arsenal of unparalleled sophistication and power. Altogether that makes a scary picture for the Chinese, indicating to them that America thinks they are a threat. They insist they are not an expansionist power and never have been and pose no threat to the United States other than economic competition, which the United States says it welcomes. Indeed, they say the U.S. posture forces them to waste resources on defense that they would much rather put into economic development. Many suspect the American threats are part of a strategy to reduce China's economic growth.

The third part of the puzzle is the issue of pride, respect, clash of cultures, and ultimate intent. The Chinese are perhaps more ambivalent about the United States than are any other people. Give a lecture at a Chinese university and, as an American, you will be sharply questioned and subjected to harsh criticism about American hegemonism, militarism, and intervention in Taiwan. But after the lecture, half of the students will crowd around to ask how they can go to M.I.T. or Stanford or get a job in America. They are endlessly fascinated by American technology, its industry and productivity, and its democratic government and spirit. Chinese also find Americans informal and expressive like themselves, easy to talk to. Yet they also have tremendous pride in their own culture and believe deeply that China must be ruled differently than America, and that Chinese ways must be incorporated into the framework of globalization. Time and again, Chinese officials, scholars, and students will express resentment that Americans take for granted that the American way or western way is the universally best way. They repeatedly insist that the world cannot run on an American standard only but must incorporate Chinese standards as well. In this discussion, they insist that China is no threat to anyone, that they have no desire to impose their standards.

This claim gets a mixed reaction in the rest of Asia. On the one hand, few in Asia outside of Taiwan fear a Chinese-armed attack. On the other hand, many have told me they feel threatened by the way China's hierarchical, authoritarian system will tend to reorder global structures as its power increases. Such people feel more comfortable with the United States in the neighborhood as well. One reason they do is demonstrated by a long conversation I had with students and faculty at Tsinghua University and the Unirule Institute of Economics in the spring of 2002. After having been berated for quite some time about the arrogance of America and the deficiencies of western standards, I asked if they could tell me exactly what the Chinese standard or system of future political and geo-political organization would be. They honestly admitted they could not.

Here then is the major issue. China wants to be a great power, and it aches for American acceptance and respect, a desire that offers us great potential influence. Yet China does not yet have institutions that can handle change in a systematic, predictable fashion, a fact that inevitably contains an element of risk. China is certainly not an enemy of the United States today, yet it might become so in response to its interpretations of our actions. In other words, we could make the hostility of China a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is thus a matter of the highest importance that we step carefully and do all we can to assure that China continues on a path of development and liberalization.

That brings us finally to the last piece of the puzzle: the economy Chinas transformation since I went on that early trade mission in 1982 is staggering. It is not completely a market economy but it is getting there at high speed, and this development has dramatically changed Chinese society and politics. While it is still far from a democracy, for the average person, China today is a much, much freer place than it has perhaps ever been. This development has been powerfully promoted both by the United States government and U.S. industry through enormous investment and technology transfer. This trend is the best guarantee of peaceful, friendly U.S.-China relations in the future. Indeed, there is a great irony here. Even as we have swung back and forth on whether China is a 'strategic partner' or a 'strategic competitor,' the U.S. economy has grown increasingly dependent on China in two critical ways. First, the U.S. trade deficit with China has reached $85 billion as America has come to rely more and more on China as the low-cost quality supplier of everything from paint brushes to cell phones. 53 Even more importantly, China is building up enormous dollar reserves and increasingly is an investor in U.S. securities. As we saw earlier, the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on a constant inflow of foreign capital, and as China becomes a bigger source of that capital, the United States will become more dependent on China. In Beijing, officials hope that by the time Osama bin Laden is out of the way, the United States will not be able to afford to see China as an enemy.

LATIN AMERICA.

'There is a huge weapon of mass destruction located just South of the U.S. border, and it's about to explode. It's called Latin America.' Those words, from former Mexican Finance Minister Angel Gurria, woke me up over breakfast in Mexico City in the fall of 2002. At the time, Argentina was in the process of defaulting on its loans from the IMF, unemployment was rising in Mexico, the endless strife in Colombia was intensifying, a coup attempt that looked as if it had at least tacit U.S. backing had failed in Venezuela, and the Brazilian economy was teetering on the edge of disaster as international investors pulled out money in the midst of a turbulent presidential election campaign that might bring a leftist to power. Gurria, lamented that 'market fundamentalists' in Washington with little knowledge of the circumstances in Latin America were delaying IMF assistance and making statements about the dangers of moral hazard (essentially enabling policies that are unwise in the long term in order to achieve short-term satisfaction) while paying no attention to the much greater risk of collapse of the whole system. 'Brazil,' he said, 'is being penalized by investors from the democracies for carrying out a democratic election. How do you expect Latin Americans to hold fast to democracy when that happens?' He also blasted the Washington Consensus for prescribing policies according to the textbook rather than according to the realities of developing country situations. 'The United States needs a Latin America strategy,' he said, 'but it never has had one.'

That was the assessment of one of America's better friends in Latin America. Given the U.S. record in the region of alternating intervention and neglect, widespread cynicism and suspicion of U.S. motives should be no surprise. The United States is widely seen to have interests but not friends and to be primarily interested in material gain and power. It is in no way seen as peace-loving. Indeed, another Latin American ambassador to the United States asked, 'Peace loving? Are you kidding? No one believes that nonsense in Latin America.' Here as elsewhere, there is widespread criticism of U.S. double standards. Yet here, too, the United States is admired for its economic success and its great universities and institutions, and is widely recognized as Latin America's only hope. But as the Brazilian Ambassador Rubens Barbosa notes, making that hope materialize is difficult because 'there is no security or nuclear threat in this hemisphere, and as a result Latin America is given a low priority in Washington.'

That low priority has been especially frustrating to Mexican President Vicente Fox, who staked the success of his presidency on the bet that his good friend and fellow rancher George W. Bush would dramatically change the form and substance of the whole relationship. That this doesn't seem to be happening is beginning to hurt Fox. But leaders I spoke with in the region are still hopeful that Bush will address three major issues in the course of his administration trade and economic development, drug traffic control, and support for democracy.

Economic development is the most pressing issue, and one on which the region sees Washington failing badly. The U.S. approach is to propose free trade agreements, along with domestic privatization and deregulation. The difficulty is that while NAFTA has brought a dramatic increase in trade between Mexico and the United States, it has not fulfilled many other expectations and forecasts. For example, Mexican salaries and wages have fallen considerably since 1994, and the numbers of those living below the poverty level have risen, along with unemployment and underemployment. Thus the attraction of illegal immigration in search of U.S. jobs remains strong. The problem is not solely due to NAFTA; it is also the result of the financial crisis of 1995 and the ups and downs of oil prices. But NAFTA has not been enough to offset any of this, and has brought its own problems. Mexican access to the U.S. market for products like sugar or services like trucking remains limited. At the same time, as Mexican agricultural markets open to heavily subsidized commodities like American corn, Mexican producers are increasingly faced with extinction. Unlike the EU, which provided substantial adjustment assistance, full market access, and new infrastructure funding when it took in Spain and Portugal, the U.S. under NAFTA has assumed that trade alone will provide the means for taking care of other necessities.

In the rest of Latin and South America outside of NAFTA, the problem is even more difficult. While various free trade agreements have been proposed, only one, with Chile, has been concluded. Brazil, with South Americas largest economy, finds over half its export items under some restriction in the U.S. market. On top of all this comes the challenge of China. Factories that first moved from a U.S. location to Mexico are now beginning to leave Mexico for China, where wages are far below Mexico's low levels. And what is true for Mexico holds even more for the rest of the hemisphere. China's entry into the WTO is seen south of the Rio Grande as the beginning of the end of NAFTA, and no one in Washington seems to be addressing this issue.

By far the most troubling issue is drug trafficking, where the U.S. stance resembles its behavior on oil imports. In that case, U.S. addiction to cheap gas has embroiled it in the dangerous politics of the Middle East and led it inadvertently to fund the spread of fundamentalist Islam and terrorists to its own detriment. In the same way, U.S. addiction to cocaine and other narcotics is funding the drug cartels of Latin America and the corruption and corrosion of the societies of Peru, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and elsewhere. Americans an estimated 20 million to 25 million marijuana smokers, 6 million regular cocaine users, and half a million heroin users spend about $64 billion annually on drugs. 44 Since 1909, the United States has taken a prohibitionist approach that effectively requires 'unconditional surrender from traffickers, dealers, and addicts.' That the surrender has not occurred is evident from the size of the market and the fact that world production of opium and coca more than doubled just between the years 1985 and 1996. 45 The U.S. government's interaction with drugs is complex and often corrupt. When the CIA helped organize the Mujahedin in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, it knew the guerillas were raising money by selling opium. By 1980, 60 percent of the heroin in the U.S. market originated in Afghanistan. 46 For many years, former Panama President Manuel Noriega was a CIA operative who also had a long collaboration with the Medellin Cartel of Colombia. In 1989, the first Bush administration invaded Panama and arrested Noriega, who is now in a U.S. prison serving a forty-year sentence for drug trafficking in a U.S. prison. Panama, however, remains a major money laundering and cocaine transshipment center.

The U.S. approach to drug trafficking has been not only prohibitionist but also para-military and highly interventionist. Although U.S. courts and jails are clogged with people arrested on drug charges, major efforts to reduce drug demand through treatment have never really been implemented in the United States. The control effort has been focused on stopping production and interdicting shipments. This effort employs a vast armada of ships and planes to spot, track, and stop the flow of drugs. The United States trains Latin military units and funds them to stop drug production and trafficking in their countries. Spray planes are used to destroy the coca crops planted by campesinos in the jungles and farm lands of Peru and Colombia. Often this spraying destroys legitimate crops as well as coca and also engenders soil erosion. Efforts to help campesinos establish alternative crops have been wholly inadequate and unsuccessful. Moreover, the training given to Latin narcotics control personnel is very similar to counterinsurgency training and has undoubtedly been applied for non-narcotics purposes in the region's endemic guerilla wars.

A major problem is the annual certification reviews for foreign governments. Every year, the White House has to certify to Congress that foreign governments are cooperating adequately with U.S. efforts on narcotics control. Decertified countries lose foreign aid and face trade sanctions. This peculiar policy effectively means that the war against drugs is waged not in partnership with allies but against them. The United States acts as prosecutor, judge, and jury in determining whether Mexico or Peru is acting properly to attempt to stop the flow of drugs across the U.S. border. The process is humiliating, maddening, and in the eyes of our Latin neighbors, full of U.S. hypocrisy. One bitter Mexican official told me, 'The United States manages to excuse its banks for handling drug money, and although it can track trucks to the U.S. border, somehow they vanish once in U.S. jurisdiction.' All over Latin America, people ask about the demand side of the equation. As long as the demand is so great and the trade so profitable, traffickers will find a way to supply. As a consequence, the police forces, judges, armies, and ordinary people of Latin America are being drowned in illicit money that eats away at the fiber of their societies. Yet they have no opportunity to certify us on our efforts to control our insatiable demand for drugs.

Which brings us to the issue of democracy. One of the bright aspects of the past fifteen years has been Latin America's turn to democracy. Yet there is increasing doubt whether it will work. 'Policy takes time to show results,' said one leader, 'but democracy doesn't give you any time.' Said another, 'Look, the countries that have successfully developed like Singapore, Taiwan, and Chile were not democracies during the development stages.' These leaders wonder how democracy can be sustained in an ocean of drug money. But most discouraging of all is their view that the United States doesn't really care that much about democracy in Latin America. Of course, they all note past U.S. comfort with and installation of dictators. But the prime example these days is Venezeuela, where in April 2002 U.S. officials seemed to lend support to the attempt at a coup to oust elected President Hugo Chavez. Of course, Washington backtracked and denied involvement, but no one in Latin America believes the denials for a minute. Here again, U.S. policies have not given much reason for faith.

MIDDLE EAST.

If Latin America has little faith in the United States, the Islamic countries of the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have virtually none left. This, too, reflects a great reverse. As deeply religious countries, they naturally rejected communist doctrine and were mostly allies of America during the Cold War despite their discomfort with U.S. backing of Israel. As noted in Chapter 4, Saudi Arabia has had particularly warm relations with the United States going back to the Americans' first discovery of oil in the Saudi desert when the British and others stoutly maintained the impossibility of any being there. The other key Middle East country, Egypt, has had a more up-and-down U.S. relationship, but after the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 it, too, became a firm friend. Jordan and Lebanon, while small, also played key roles as helpers of and friends of the United States. In particular, Jordan under King Hussein often acted as a moderating influence in the volatile politics of the region.

Today, as the Pew survey data noted in Chapters 1 and 2 indicate, good will has all been washed away. The immediate cause is the Iraq situation, but the longer-term and deeper factor is the perception of U.S. bias for Israel against the Palestinians. Also, undoubtedly an element of frustration and self-anger in many of these countries over their inability so far to cope with modernization gets redirected at the United States. But the loss of good will and respect I particularly refer to here is that of people who bet their careers and built their lives on the basis of being friends of the United States. Saudi Arabia is particularly important in this regard, because so many of its elite have studied and lived in the United States and because the country has, in its own eyes, done so much to be supportive in terms of providing backing for covert U.S. operations around the globe as well as disciplining oil prices. In the wake of September 11, the heretofore friendly, or mostly uninterested, American press suddenly turned a hard eye on Saudi Arabia because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens. After years of ignoring the kingdom or of favorably covering its strong support of most U.S. initiatives, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal could find nothing good in the kingdom. Its Islamic law, its veiling of women, its charitable giving institutions, its school system, its lack of democracy, and its support of the Palestinians were all severely condemned as barbaric, medieval, and anti-American. While some of the criticism pointed to real issues with which the Saudis are themselves wrestling, the harsh tone and sudden reversal of previously friendly attitudes stung as it became clear that Americans had forgotten, or perhaps never knew or cared, about the support Saudi Arabia had given them.

The bitterness this attitude caused was explained to me by the owner of a leading Saudi newspaper chain. The graduate of U.S. universities who spends much time at his second home in the United States, he described his shock that suddenly people who he had always thought of as friends now seemed to be suspicious of all Saudis. Even more significant was his description of the reaction of his 21-year-old son. Prior to September 11, the young man had been a student at a leading U.S. university where he had gone after graduating from a top U.S. preparatory school. He had always been a big fan of U.S. football and basketball, listened non-stop to American music, ate American junk food, played computer games, dated American girls, and paid no attention to politics or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As my newspaper friend explained it, his son was for all practical purposes an American. Now, however, in the wake of the sudden reversal of American attitudes, he told me that the son has dropped out of the university and refuses to travel to America or even to meet with Americans in Saudi Arabia. Even more worrying to my friend is the fact that the son has become intensely interested in politics, regularly attends meetings of radical political and religious figures, and is now not only strongly anti-American, but also anti-Israeli.

This is only one example, but it is indicative of a broader feeling that is already having consequences for the United States. The giant Prince Sultan airbase has been a key element in the U.S. structure for constant surveillance of the Persian Gulf. In recent months, however, Saudi leaders have let it be known that once a war with Iraq is over, they will ask President Bush to withdraw all American armed forces from the kingdom. Indeed, many Saudis seem to think the best part of a new American was with Iraq will not be so much the elimination of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, but the elimination of the American presence in Saudi Arabia. Thus, Osama bin Laden may yet see the dissolution of the Saudi-U.S. alliance he has long sought.

Like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are also troubled. In meetings with Jordanian leaders, I was impressed with the frustration expressed at what they took to be Washington's misinterpretation of events in the region. Their views were shared and best expressed by Abdel Monem Said, the director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. Over a breakfast, he explained that Americans tend to see the problems of Iraq, Iran, fundamentalism, terror, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as discrete and to be solved individually. To Arabs, he said, these are all related. In particular, he went on, the problem is not Iraq nearly so much as it is the Palestinian question. Indeed, hitting Iraq will only exacerbate the situation in the Middle East, he said. In particular, it is likely not to dampen but to stimulate fundamentalism and violence between Arabs and Israelis. What you in America don't understand, he emphasized, is the deep sense of injustice virtually all Arabs feel. They ask: Why can Israel have atomic weapons and Arab countries cannot? Why can Israel ignore UN resolutions with impunity, but Saddam must be attacked immediately? Why can Israel get away even with sinking the American naval ship Liberty in the 1967 war and using Americans like Jonathan Pollard, who is now in prison, to spy on the United States itself, while Arab nationals residing in the United States are routinely rounded up for questioning about terrorist activities just because they are Arabs? Moreover, he said, Arabs don't see Saddam as nearly as great a threat as terror is. By going after Iraq, he noted, America is taking the easy way out by attacking a capital it can bomb. For half a century, he continued, the U.S. tie with moderate Arabs worked to contain communist expansion to hold back the waves of the Iranian revolution, and to end the threat of Saddam in the Gulf War of 1991. Now, he said, Arabs see the major force for instability in the region to be the United States itself.

That view was echoed on a broader basis by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who told the 116-member Non-Aligned Movement in February 2003 that the United States is no longer just fighting a war against terror. Rather, it is a war to dominate the world, he said. He emphasized American unconcern with the frustration in the Islamic world over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and condemned the blatant double standards that infuriate Muslims, while arguing that current U.S.-led efforts are creating injustice and oppression of people of other ethnic origins and colors. This was the same Mahathir who had been feted at the White House less than a year previously for his staunch support of the United States on fighting terror.

SOUTH ASIA.

The legacy of Pakistan's split from India in 1947 and the Cold War, combined with the advent of the War on Terror, have created a witches' brew in South Asia that makes it perhaps the most dangerous place in the world today. The bitter parting of India and Pakistan left millions dead, along with the running sore of the partition of Kashmir. Over the past fifty years, India and Pakistan have fought three wars and been constantly engaged in competitive and immensely expensive weapons development despite their mutual poverty. The United States became entwined in all this as a result of the Cold War.

Although India has always been a democracy, and Pakistan more often than not a military dictatorship, India, with its socialist economic system and suspicion of America's ties to its excolonial ruler, Britain, leaned toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The United States thus tended to lean toward Pakistan, which jumped with alacrity into U.S.-sponsored alliances of the 1950s like CENTO (the Central Treaty Organization) and SEATO (the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization). But the U.S. relationship with Pakistan was a hot and cold one. In the early days of the Cold War, it was hot as the U.S. looked for allies in Asia. Then, when China attacked India in 1962, there was a short period of India-U.S. warming as Washington provided some aid to India. But Pakistan soon became an ally of China, to which Nixon wished to make an opening in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Pakistani leaders offered themselves as a channel to Beijing and so cemented a close tie to Washington. Indeed, it was so close that in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, the United States tilted toward authoritarian Pakistan and against democratic India. Thereafter, Washington seemed more or less to forget about the area until 1974, when India exploded its first nuclear device. Although it had trained Indian scientists and supplied critical nuclear material, the United States cut off supply of nuclear fuel to India after the explosion despite the fact that India promised not to weaponize its device. This only pushed India more tightly into the embrace of the Soviets, who gladly became India's supplier of heavy water.

Meanwhile, Pakistan had undertaken its own nuclear development program after its 1971 war with India. While Canada and Germany supplied critical equipment, the United States halted economic and military aid as an expression of opposition to what was not obviously a nuclear weapons program. By 1981, however, Pakistan had again become important to Washington as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To train, equip, and supply the Mujahedin, the United States needed a rear area, and Pakistan was perfect, being an Islamic country that harbored many of the same tribes that inhabited Afghanistan and spoke some of the same languages. The Reagan administration thus lifted the sanctions, despite arresting a smuggler attempting to ship two tons of zirconium to Pakistan, and renewed generous military and financial aid in return for help with the Mujahedin. In 1983, China reportedly supplied a bomb design to Pakistan; in response, Congress passed an amendment requiring economic sanctions unless the White House certified that Pakistan had not embarked on a nuclear weapons program. The White House so certified for the next five years, but finally imposed sanctions in 1990 when Pakistan, fearing war with India again, made cores for several nuclear weapons. The program continued, however, concluding in 1998 when both India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear test explosions. Again, Washington expressed its outrage.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as a large number of Indian entrepreneurs came to strike it rich in Silicon Valley and returned to create new companies at home, U.S.-Indian relations began to warm. They got even warmer when the new Bush administration declared China a 'strategic competitor' in 2001 and initiated greater military cooperation with India as a way of signaling to China that it was surrounded. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of Pakistan, the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan, which the United States had abandoned and forgotten after the Soviet army exit in 1989. As the Taliban put women under the veil and out of jobs, schools, and even hospitals, and provided facilities and support for Osama bin Laden while imposing a truly medieval regime, the United States remained mute until, that is, September 11.

Suddenly, we needed Pakistan again. Economic and military aid began to flow again, as President Musharraf pledged that in the war against terror he was 'with' the United States. Actually, in this pledge, Musharraf proved himself a brave man. His own military and secret services were deeply penetrated by Islamic radicals and Taliban supporters, while public opinion in the country, particularly in the provinces bordering Afghanistan, tended to be pro Osama. Given that Musharrafs is another military dictatorship, the possibility of assassination or a coup d'etat was, and is, ever present. But if Musharraf was brave, he was also disingenuous. When Al Qaeda supporters in Pakistan seized Wall Street Journal report Danny Pearl and murdered him, Pakistan's internal security services were aware of and very possibly involved in the killing. Musharraf almost certainly knew this when he visited Washington in February 2002, yet he told the American public he believed Danny to be still alive. Maybe he had to in order to stay alive himself. In any case, the situation today is that while Musharraf remains president with U.S. backing, he does not control the western provinces or the so-called tribal areas of his own country. Nor does he seem to control some of his internal services that continue to support terrorist activity in Kashmir. This activity could easily lead to war with India, but the United States is telling the Indians to cool it because Washington needs Musharraf to back its policy in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, however, U.S. policy in Iraq and in Israel-Palestine is radicalizing Pakistan to such an extent that, as a leading Pakistani publisher told me, it is very possible that a Taliban-like group could kill off Musharraf and take over Pakistan with its nukes and ballistic missiles. If you think that sounds dangerous, it is.

NEW WORLD ORDER.

The shape of the new world order is still somewhat amorphous, but increasingly uncomfortable. It is not exactly the United States against the world, as my Malaysian friend forecast. But tension between America and its old friends in South Korea, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Latin America are rising to dangerous levels. Relations with old opponents like Russia, India, and China have actually improved, but remain unpredictable. Indeed, the whole world order has become unpredictable and unstable. Is that, we need to ask ourselves, what we really want?

10.

City on a Hill.

'No need of moon or stars by night or sun to shine by day. It was the new Jerusalem that would not pass away.'

-The Holy City (Weatherly and Adams).

As I begin this last chapter, it seems very likely that U.S. troops, along jtl-with some British forces and perhaps a token representation of armed units from other members of the 'coalition of the willing,' will be occupying Iraq when this book appears. While that is probably better, at this point, than the alternative of allowing Sadam to defy and mock the UN Security Council while continuing to brutalize ordinary Iraqis, it seems to me that by trying to do the right thing, but in the worst possible way, we gave ourselves only bad options and created a lose-lose situation. For whether we go in soon, or, by reason of some last-minute change of Saddam's heart, delay, or don't go in at all, enormous damage has already been done. And even if the occupation goes by the book, and Iraq emerges as a model democracy in five years a very long-odds scenario the damage will have lasting consequences. This is particularly true if you look at Iraq and North Korea as part of a whole, rather than as discrete issues.

For one thing, by playing down the significance of North Korea's threats and withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty while moving heaven and earth to go to war with a so far non-nuclear Iraq, Washington sent a loud message that if you think you might be on America's bad side, you'd better go nuclear, quick. More fundamentally, by misunderstanding our own national interests and the basis of our power, we have already undermined it. The European Union, for example, is more than just a big market. It is the instrument that has laid to rest the ancient enmities and tribal warfare of Europe; that has created a generator and spreader of wealth able to be an equal partner with the United States; and that acts as a guarantor for the spread of democracy, peace, and stability in all of Europe, and now even in parts of Asia. This huge asset that the United States has historically promoted as being greatly in America's interest has been severely damaged internally by the divisions arising from the battle over how to handle Iraq, divisions that were exacerbated by U.S. policies. Beyond this, the relationship of the EU and most of the key European countries to the United States has been harmed. This is true even in those countries like Britain, where the leadership has backed America because the public-at-large had been overwhelmingly against U.S. policies. And don't be fooled by the 'Old Europe-New Europe' rhetoric. New Europe is not going to send any troops or help foot any bills; and by dint of going along with Washington and estranging itself from Old Europe, it has probably damaged its own development prospects.

Take NATO as another example. Americans are wont to see NATO and the maintenance of U.S. troops in Europe as a kind of favor we do for the Europeans. In fact, however, with the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no military threat to Europe. On the other hand, the United States cannot project power into the Middle East or Africa without use of NATO bases and cooperation. The truth is that we need NATO perhaps more than the Europeans. Yet, already there is talk in Europe of possible termination or restriction of U.S. use of bases and air space. It is already clear that Saudi Arabia will be asking us to evacuate bases there in the near future, and it seems possible South Korea will request the same, perhaps followed by Japan. The great irony here is that American unilateralism appears to be eroding the very basis of the hegemony its apostles are trying to enlarge.

THE DREAM THAT MIGHT HAVE COME TRUE.

It didn't, and doesn't, have to be that way. Another scenario was, and is, possible. It is not widely recognized that at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, neither the United States nor the UN put serious conditions on a cease fire. Indeed, when the Iraq army was fully routed, the coalition simply stopped fighting, and called for the Iraqi commanders to arrange a cease-fire. Operating with few instructions, commanding General Norman Schwarzkopf met on March 3, 1991 with Iraqi generals to arrange the terms of the cease-fire. No demands were made by the coalition for Saddam or any of his representatives to sign any document of surrender or of conditions calling for Iraqi disarmament, destruction of weapons of mass destruction, or protection of the Shia and Kurdish groups in Iraq that had been encouraged by the coalition to rise up against the Saddam regime. In effect, Saddam got a pass, and although Schwarzkopf did require that Iraq not fly fixed-wing aircraft near U.S. troops, no provisions were made to restrict helicopters. Thus, when the Shias and Kurds revolted, as urged by the coalition, they were butchered by Saddam's helicopters. Washington later blamed this on the need to respond to Saudi fears of the Shias, but top U.S. and Saudi officials, who were on the spot at the time, have told me that, in fact, the Saudis wanted to help the Shias. In any case, the United States eventually established the southern no-fly zone, but too late to rescue the Shias. Later, in April, the UN issued resolution 687 directing Saddam to destroy all weapons of mass destruction. Although Iraq's foreign minister responded with a letter accepting the directive, the moment for a decisive change had passed. It was now a cat-and-mouse game.

Suppose the United States and its allies (and they really were allies then) had imposed disarmament conditions on Iraq at the time of the cease-fire, requiring Saddam to sign a formal document with real conditions and enforcement mechanisms. We could have done what we are talking about doing now, with the full weight of world opinion backing us. Top U.S. experts who were in the area at the time have told me that such a requirement would definitely have meant the fall of Saddam. Instead, we allowed him to turn military disaster into political victory. We had most of the same leaders then that we have now: Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Haass were all there. Today, they argue that Congress and the UN only mandated them to eject Iraq from Kuwait, and that any advance to Baghdad would have torn the coalition asunder. While that may be true as far as it goes, it evades the point that there was no necessity to go to Baghdad, only a necessity to impose the conditions of the victor. You may remember that we feted these leaders, gave them ticker tape parades in Manhattan, and gave them accolades before Congress for their apparent victory over a third-world army. We should have been giving them a Bronx cheer, because they blew it, badly.

They blew it by not getting the weapons of mass destruction when they could have done so. They blew it again when they allowed Saddam to use his helicopters to gun down the rebel uprisings they had called for in the Kurdish and Shia areas of Iraq. They blew it out of a lack of postwar planning and out of ignorance of the true state of Iraq and, in fairness out of deference to our coalition allies who feared a vacuum in the region. They knew then that Saddam had used gas on his own people and that he was a brutal dictator. Certainly they hoped and maybe even believed that his officers would carry out a coup d'etat, but they were ready to accept his survival because they thought he was defeated and would not be a threat again.

But put that all aside. It seemed right to many at the time. Instead, suppose the United States had ratified the final Kyoto agreement, which is very close to the original American proposals. Suppose the United States had signed onto the International Criminal Court or at least refrained from campaigning against it. Suppose we had signed onto the landmine treaty and the small arms treaty, not gutted the chemical weapons treaty, and supported the antigenocide agreements and the agreement on the status of women. Suppose the United States had been leading efforts to redefine and restructure NATO and its relationship to the EU along with the other outdated Cold War institutions, including the UN. Suppose that instead of saying, 'Freedom itself has been attacked by a faceless coward' or, 'They hate our values and our freedoms,' we had had said something like 'We have been attacked by religious fanatics who misunderstand our values and policies and who have hijacked Islam, just as Christianity was hijacked by the Crusaders, in an attempt to right imagined wrongs that have much to do with the difficulties of their own societies in modernizing, difficulties we are committed to helping them overcome.' Suppose that instead of calling Ariel Sharon 'a man of peace' something no one in Israel, let alone the Arab nations, would call him we had committed ourselves to action on the Abdullah peace plan. Suppose that, instead of saying 'you're with us or against us,' in the wake of September 11, the president had taken advantage of the great outpouring of sympathy for America and flown to Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Cairo, Teheran, Seoul, Tokyo, and Islamabad and said, 'Thank you.'

Suppose he had called together the leaders of the world for a special conference to seek input and advice on how to deal with the terrorists and the sources of terrorism. Suppose the United States had not announced a new strategy of pre-emptive war with the objective of preventing the rise of any challenger to American hegemonic predominance.

In that context, suppose the United States had brought the matter of Iraq to the Security Council for a genuine debate instead of challenging the Council to make itself relevant. Would the international community have responded differently? Even if strong opposition remained, would there be more genuine support for the U.S. position? And in, ultimately, acting alone, would there have been less risk of doing so because it would have been seen as an exceptional act of unilateralism rather than the latest in a string of such acts? I believe our options now would be much better if we had been seen as a good international citizen rather than as a candidate for the rogue nation list.

What about the situation in Korea? Suppose instead of snubbing South Korean President Kim Dae-jung we had invited him to Washington and asked his advice on how to deal with the North. Suppose that instead of calling North Korea part of an 'Axis of Evil,' the president had maintained contact with North Korea's President Kim Jong-il, and assured him delivery of the promised electricity-generating equipment he so much needs. Suppose we had offered to negotiate a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War, and had offered diplomatic recognition to North Korea as we promised, and hadn't made such a big deal out of deploying a National Missile Defense to defend against 'rogue nations like North Korea.' Would we have a Korea crisis on our hands? Would the administration be in the ridiculous position of trying to explain why North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and is gearing up to produce more of both, is less of a threat than Saddam. And again, would the North be so obviously frightened of us if we had not announced our preventive war strategy? I think the answer is no. We have contributed mightily to the development of the bad choices now confronting us.

At issue beyond the immediate crises is the very large question of what our national strategy should be, and behind that the even larger question of what kind of people and nation we really want to be. Let's begin with strategy. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the United States pursued two interlocking strategies containment and economic globalization. The bargain America made with its allies was that they would get access to the huge American market and advanced American technology as well as American investment in return for embracing a system of geo-political partnership in which the United States was the senior but not always the dominant partner. As John Ikenberry has explained, 'U.S. power didn't destabilize the world order because the United States bound itself to an understood and accepted system of common rules.' 1 In other words, other countries identified their interests with U.S. interests because the United States 'made its power safe.' Writing in the Atlantic in October 2002, Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne called this the 'reassurance strategy.' 2 What has generated the foreign sense of alienation, fear, and betrayal described in these pages is, first, a dramatic relative growth in U.S. power. The Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash said it nicely when he wrote in the New York Times, 'I love this country [the U.S.]...contrary to what many Europeans think, 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...even democracy brings its own temptations when it exists in a hyperpower.' 3 Gar-ton Ash may be right, although the gap between the United States and the rest has not elicited his commentary in the past. It is noteworthy now, I believe, primarily because it has been accompanied by a fundamental shift in U.S. doctrine that increasingly makes American power 'unsafe' in the eyes of the world.

The shift began at the end of the first Bush administration, when the study group under Cheney and headed by Wolfowitz first developed the draft paper (quickly leaked to the New York Times ) that called for a strategy of preventing the rise of any challenging power. 4 Disavowed at the time as the unofficial musings of a few blue-sky thinkers, that doctrine has since become the official strategy of the United States as enunciated in the president's West Point speech, and in the National Security Strategy (NSS) document in September 2002. The United States no longer believes that containment works. The suicidal mentality of the adversary combined with the increasingly easy availability and transportability of weapons of mass destruction makes a no-first-strike strategy untenable. Thus, the new doctrine says, 'We will not wait while dangers gather' or until the 'mushroom cloud' rises. Instead we will strike pre-emptively and preventively wherever and whenever we sense unacceptable dangers gathering. This doctrine is presented in the guise and rhetoric of dealing with the instabilities caused by failed states and 'rogue nations,' and the NSS paper talks of cooperation among the major powers so as to allay their fears that it might also be aimed at them. 5 But the second part of the doctrine undermines this reassuring tone by insisting that the United States will maintain such a power gap between itself and the rest that no country would even consider raising a challenge. This is the doctrine of absolute security through overwhelming military superiority. It is in many ways an apt doctrine for America. Only America has the human, institutional, natural, and technological resources to pull it off. It plays to the long-developed sense of American invulnerability as a birthright and to the habitual American trust in superior arms. It also reflects the sense Americans have of being exceptional and apart from the rest of humankind, a special, chosen people who can achieve immunity because they deserve immunity, and from whom the rest of the world need have no fear because Americans have been vouchsafed the 'truth.' And the truth has made them free and good. Thus the solipsistic Manichaeism so palpable in the president's rhetoric about 'freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes.' 6 Make no mistake, this new doctrine is imperial, and it is heralded by a set of latter-day Rudyard Kiplings spawned by the Wall Street Journal and other right-wing publications that inaccurately label themselves 'conservative' and call for America to 'take up the white man's burden.' A former Wall Street Journal editor, Max Boot, argues in The Case for American Empire that the September 11 attacks were 'the result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in our implementation.' 7 Says Boot, 'Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.' 8 The Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby echoes this theme, saying that 'the logic of neoimpe-rialism is too compelling...to resist,' and urges that orderly societies led by the United States 'impose their own institutions on disorderly ones.' 9 Not to be outdone, the Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan calls for bringing 'prosperity to distant parts of the world under America's soft imperial influence.' 10 The argument is seductive on two counts. First, it is true that there are new asymmetric threats against which old deterrents may be inadequate. Second, to anyone living in a modern, secular, materialistic western ethos it seems obvious that American-administered order and economic development is preferable to chaos. Although its secularized proponents would deny it, this is the same thinking that McKinley invoked when, in deciding to add the Philippines to the American empire, he spoke of the need to 'uplift them and Christianize them.' Most neoimperialists would shrink from any association with 'Christianizing,' but substitute 'Americanizing,' and there isn't much difference.

The logic of the new doctrine is one of infinite expansion. In the era of globalization, the number of possible threats is very large, and the attempt to control one, such as Iraq, may only subject us to new dangers. We are already seeing this in Afghanistan. To counter the new threat it may thus be necessary to gain control over new territory or new entities. In the end, the only safety is in making every place an extension of yourself.

This would seem to be a daunting task. Traditional international relations theory holds that the rise of any imperial power will automatically generate counteralliances and cooperation among the other powers to offset the influence of the dominant power. As a result, the dominant power redoubles its efforts at countering the new alliance until eventually the empire becomes overstretched and collapses. But the neo-imperialists again believe America is exceptional because it is a democracy and harbors no lust for territorial gain, and its imperium is attractive and user-friendly, one of soft, even seductive, power. There will be no counterbalancing activity because all will welcome the American way. Who would not want to be American if they could? Thus American women and men are to be sent to the far corners of the earth on a crusade to spread the American creed to a world hungering and thirsting for it.

It won't work. Let me count the reasons.

First, there is no such thing as absolute military security. Did our laser-guided bombs and nuclear missiles and satellite photos protect us from the September 11 hijackers' boxcutters and suicidal fanaticism? Are our sophisticated military capabilities cowing the North Koreans into submission? Is the proliferation of our overseas bases reducing our risks? The answer is no in every case, and the proliferation of bases may even be increasing our risks.

Second, even as nice as we Americans are, the rest of the world doesn't necessarily see us as we see ourselves, doesn't necessarily want to be like us even if it likes us, and is already moving to counterbalance our power. This movement can be seen most obviously in the maneuvering in the UN Security Council over Iraq, but it is also apparent in the EU's drive to achieve more equal status with the United States, in the renewed ties between Russia and China, and in many countries active efforts of to promote Linux over Microsoft's Windows as the main computer operating system. There is a fundamental human factor at work here that Americans find hard to understand but that, given our history, we should be the first to understand. Nations are very much like individuals. More than desire for material gain or fear or love, they are driven by a craving for dignity and respect, by the need to be recognized as valid and just as valuable as the next person or country. The Turkish novelist Orham Pamuk, when asked what leads an old man in Istanbul to condone the World Trade Tower attacks or a Pakistani youth to admire the Taliban, responded, 'It is the feeling of impotence arising from degradation, the failure to be understood, and the inability of such people to make their voices heard.' 11 Much as it may like and admire Americans (and, as I have said, it does) the rest of the world has its own traditions, ways, and values for which it wants respect.

Globalization does not change this fact. A Frenchman doesn't stop being French or turn his back on Descartes by eating a McDonald's hamburger, and a young Indonesian woman leaving a traditional village to work in a Nike shoe factory and live in its dormitory may cling the more tenaciously to, or even return to wearing, the Muslim head scarf as a way of holding onto her values in a strange world. We can't stamp this out, and we shouldn't try.

Third, an American crusade won't work because it will increasingly involve us in the kinds of alliances of convenience and ruthless actions that only complicate our lives in the long run even as they corrupt our own character and institutions.

Fourth, economic globalization and American profligacy have already undermined our economic sovereignty and made us more dependent than we know on those we would dominate. The charge of wanting to invade Iraq in order to control its oil, which sounds false to many American ears, has such credence abroad precisely because much of the world knows of American economic vulnerabilities and sees American military threats as intended to keep capital flowing to the American safe haven and to control the prices of vital resources so as to maintain 'Bubba's' way of life. The U.S. economy is currently on an unsustainable track. Its growth is driven overwhelmingly by consumption that is based on ever-rising borrowing. As a nation, we consume increasingly more than we produce, and we are able to do so only by borrowing from abroad. Because of our status as the provider of the world's security and its major reserve currency, our dollar is strong, enabling us to enjoy a standard of living above what we actually earn. But the euro is beginning to provide an alternative reserve currency, and our international borrowing needs are rising to levels that increasingly make lenders nervous. How are we going to be the world's Caesar when we are shaking a tin cup, unless, of course, we just take what we need?

But that's the final reason why the American crusade won't work. Americans are not Romans or even Brits. America may do stupid and even bad things from time to time. But the American people don't regard body bags as symbols of their glorious valor, nor do they hanker to send their second sons or daughters into the colonial service. Having begun life in rebellion against empire, we never became really comfortable with the habit of empire and simply are not good imperialists. For one thing, we are too eager for people to like us.

What then is to be done? It's simple really, and something George W. Bush should be able to embrace in a heartbeat. In fact, Bush had it right the first time when he said during the campaign, 'If we are a humble nation, they'll see that and respect it.' 12 What we need is a return to real conservatism. The imperial project of the so-called neoconservatives is not conservatism at all but radicalism, egotism, and adventurism articulated in the stirring rhetoric of traditional patriotism. Real conservatives have never been messianic or doctrinaire. The very essence of conservatism, which the neoconservatives constantly preach, is limited government. Yet the imperial project they are proposing will greatly increase the role of government both at home and abroad. Already we have dramatically increased federal spending while beefing up our already overwhelming military machine and making the Department of Homeland Security the biggest domestic bureaucracy we have ever had. This is not conservatism. It is Big Government. Traditional conservatives have always been careful to balance the budget and to insist on each citizen's responsibility to perform civic duties. But the new imperialists are calling for tax cuts even as they raise spending. There is to be no draft and no sacrifice, and the president's only nod to civic duty came when he urged everyone to go shopping to help the economy.

This is neither conservatism nor liberalism but simple irresponsibility. Recall the words of the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke, who said of Britain's power in an earlier era, 'I dread our being too much dreaded.' Power is a magnet for threats, and the reaction to them can spur radical projects. Governor Winthrop saw a 'citty on a hill' as being attractive by dint of its virtue, not its power. And John Quincy Adams enjoined that we 'not go abroad in search of monsters to slay.' Those are all good conservative guides to consult on America's future strategy.

People often say that criticism of the United States is not to be taken too seriously, because it is normal for number one to be the butt of envy and complaint just as Rome and Britain were in their time. But this nonchalant injunction raises a serious question. Do we want to be like Rome or Britain? We say frequently that America must be the leader and that America is the 'indispensable nation.' But a Mexican friend asks, 'Why? Why must America be in charge of everything? Who appointed you?' Of course, there is a long history behind all this, but his comment reminds us that there is an alternative strategy that would not call for abandoning America's commitments and responsibilities. The United States cannot and should not try to withdraw from deep engagement in global affairs. Let's remember that despite all its mistakes, the United States, according to the Pew polling data, is still considered a relatively safe hegemon. But it would be desirable, from all points of view, for the United States to be the call of last resort, rather than the call of first resort. Here are some thoughts on what such a strategy might entail.

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. But we should do all in our power to avoid a long American occupation. We could avoid becoming the occupier and help to heal recent wounds by re-establishing the significance of the UN and asking it to form a consortium of countries like Malaysia, Jordan, Switzerland, Canada, and others to oversee creation of a new Iraq. The U.S. would be a major participant and would pay a large part of the bill, but it would not be alone or in charge.

The future of the UN itself must also be addressed. Although flawed, the UN exists because, as Winston Churchill said of democracy, 'it is the worst system except for all the rest.' Rather than scrap it, we must revitalize and redesign it. India, Brazil, and perhaps Japan and Saudi Arabia should be added as permanent members of the Security Council. At the same time, Britain and France should be replaced by a single EU representative. At some time, conditions must be established for selection of rotating Security Council members, and the extent of veto power reviewed. It may seem Utopian at the moment, but in the long run, a viable UN will make America more, rather than less, powerful.

Any action in Iraq should be coupled with a renewed effort at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. This should include making aid to Israel conditional on withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, a freeze on all settlement development, and closing of all settlements except those tentatively agreed on at Camp David and Taba. The outlines of the Taba non-agreement could be imposed with deployment of NATO troops on the West Bank and in Gaza to police it. In no way should any deal be conditioned on an end to all violence, a condition that simply gives veto power to the extremists on both sides.

With regard to North Korea, we should negotiate a new deal that both guarantees the security of the country from outside attack and assures it sufficient electricity and food; sign a peace treaty to conclude the Korean War and accord the North formal diplomatic recognition; and support South Korea's efforts at developing trade and investment with the North and at economic development. Internal economic development is far more likely to change the Kim regime than external threats. Of course, in return for all this North Korea must halt its nuclear weapons projects and make them subject to ongoing UN inspection and verification.

The term 'adult supervision' has been used to describe America's relationship with Europe and Japan. Other observers, like Kagan, argue that these countries are living in an artificial paradise that enables them to indulge in empty posturing and selfish cosseting because they leave to America the burdens of dealing with the real world. There is truth in this, and the argument is used to denigrate the Europeans and Japanese as ungrateful and unwilling to do the things necessary to take care of themselves. What goes unsaid, as I have suggested, is that the United States prefers to keep them in a state of extended adolescence as a condition of its own dominance. Unfortunately, we buy this dominance at an increasing cost. Like adolescents, the other developed nations resent our supervision and become more and more rebellious. At the same time, the costs to us of protecting their oil lanes and their neighborhoods are high and growing.

So why not let them grow up into real adults or, as Ozawa would say, 'normal countries'? Rather than object to an independent European Defense Force, why not welcome it and foster its development? We should relax restrictions on military technology flows to and from Europe, open Pentagon procurement to real European and Japanese participation, and encourage transnational consolidation of defense industries. The EU, of course, would have to agree to take complete responsibility for policing its own neighborhood in the case of future Kosovos or Bosnias. At the same time, we should consider revamping NATO to address more global issues. Why not let NATO patrol the oil routes and the Gulf? We would be part of it but not the only part. We could even lease a few carrier task forces to the Europeans. Beyond that, we could foster a truly common EU foreign and defense policy by declaring that we will deal only with the EU authorities on European defense and policy issues. This would end France's nostalgic pretensions to great power status, and a single EU authority would likely be more congenial to overall U.S. interests. At the same time, the EU would have to take on the responsibilities as well as the priveleges of the real power it so badly wishes to become.

In the Far East, once the North Korean situation is under control, the United States should reduce its troop deployments to a token force if the Koreans want them or remove them completely if they do not. The South Korean army should be placed under Korean command at all times, and SOFA agreements altered to assure that the Korean legal system is fully respected. The same is true in Japan. As for the National Missile Defense, it has already been shown not to prevent rogue states like North Korea from causing trouble. At the same time it does incite China to increase its military capacity, something not at all in our interest. So we should just stop deployment and save ourselves a lot of money. As with Europe, the United States should insist that Japan grow up and become a normal, adult country. This means first of all ending the Cold War by revising the U.S.-Japan security treaty such that it ends the fantasyland environment created by unilateral U.S. guarantees of Japan's security. A new arrangement should be mutual in terms both of responsibilities and decision-making power. Japan should be encouraged to end World War II by creating a formal commission to make a definitive statement on Japan's view of the causes, responsibilities for, and consequences of the war. This statement could be the basis for all textbooks and other commentary, and could also resolve contentions over visists to Yasukuni shrine. Moreover, Japan should be encouraged to do likewise and to make full apologies where apologies are due and generous restitution where restitution is due, such as for instance to the surviving 'comfort women' (Korean and other women who were forced to serve as prostitutes to Japanese troops during the war) Japan's constitution was written by Americans. It is unnatural and leads to dishonest distortions of Japan's political life domestically and internationally. The United States should encourage Japan to rethink it. As in Korea, U.S. troop levels should be drastically reduced. We should truly give Okinawa back to Japan. As for patrolling the western Pacific, the United States could propose a regional task force incorporating elements from the major countries in the area, including China.

The United States should make clear that it opposes any declaration of independence by Taiwan and would not defend Taiwan in the event of such a declaration. It should also make clear to mainland China that it would intervene in the event of an attack on Taiwan short of a Taiwanese declaration of independence, but at the same time it should refrain from further arms sales to and joint military activity with Taiwan. We should encourage further Taiwan-Beijing discussions aimed at achieving an internal modus vivendi. In our other dealings with China, we should take every opportunity to accord China the recognition and respect it craves.

For example, Russia is included in what was the G-7, and is now the G-8, group of the world's leading economic powers, whose leaders conduct periodic summit meetings to devise global economic strategies. Chinas economy is far larger than Russia's and its international currency reserves dwarf the Russian reserves. Why not include China? In fact, who not include China and India and make it a G-10?

The United States should immediately sign onto the Kyoto treaty, the landmine treaty, and the International Criminal Court. It should also review carefully its position on the other treaties discussed above and make a serious effort to sign if at all possible. We should also pay our dues to all international bodies of which we are members such as the UN. This should be coupled with a serious effort at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing energy use. There is no reason why America can't adopt many of the measures already working in other industrialized countries. The Bush administration's proposed increase of more than a billion dollars in funding for hydrogen energy research is a step in the right direction. But if we can offer $30 billion for base rights in Turkey, it would seem logical to think in terms of similar sums to ensure that we don't have to depend on the energy suppliers who make these wars necessary. A Manhattan project for alternative energy is long overdue.

In view of the fact that we already spend more on defense than the next fifteen countries combined, it is likely that the very existence of this concentration of power adds to pressures for others to increase military spending. As we gradually shift burdens to others, so should we plan for a gradual reduction in defense spending. Japan has for years been trying to raise its spending at our behest to a target of 1 percent of GDP. Perhaps we could set a target of 2 to 2.5 percent of GDP toward which to descend over time. The savings could be transferred to aid, disease control, and support of other international efforts, moving us back toward the balances of 1948.

The procedure of American foreign policy badly needs to be reviewed. It is terribly damaging when one or two powerful congressional chairpersons can dictate U.S. policy, despite a lack of significant public support. Even more importantly, the question of who decides when America goes to war desperately needs to be clarified. Congress seems to be less and less involved. But America was not meant to be run by a Caesar. Doing all this would greatly reduce U.S. exposure and costs while improving our relations with many key areas of the world. It would allow us to turn our attention to the two crises, currently invisible over the horizon, that need to be dealt with now; if not, they will make the violence of the twentieth century look like kindergarten.

The first is globalization. Despite the hoopla about its wonders, it is clear that the 'golden straitjacket' is not working, or at least not as the textbooks say it should. Countries like Mexico that are doing all the supposedly right things are falling behind. A conservative government should be against subsidies, and we need to stop subsidizing American cotton farmers so they can drive West African farmers out of business. The impact of China on other developing countries needs to be carefully analyzed, and appropriate polices devised to assure that countries like Mexico and Indonesia aren't the victims of China's development. It is clear that simply opening markets and waiting for free trade to solve problems frequently doesn't work. We need to give serious attention to the infrastructure and human capital and adjustment needs of the major developing areas. If economic development doesn't work, all the laser bombs and missile defenses in the world won't protect us, particularly because, while globalization may not automatically lead to development, it does let everybody see how others are living.

Even while we struggle to make globalization work, however, we need urgently to address more basic issues. In his recent State of the Union message, President Bush surprised everyone by announcing a $ 15 billion program to fight AIDS in Africa. It is a step in the right direction, but only a step. The devastation of AIDS in Africa has gotten some attention as infection rates have reached more than 40 percent in some countries, and the death count in sub-Saharan Africa has reached more than 2 million annually. 13 But even more ominous news has gotten little attention. Does anyone know that nearly everyone in West Africa has some form of malaria? 14 Or that tuberculosis is epidemic in much of the world, infecting more people than those who are suffering from AIDS?

What about issues like water, deforestation, desertification, soil depletion, and overpopulation? Is anyone at the National Security Council contemplating the possibility of war over water between our allies Turkey and Israel? Turkey's Ataturk Dam will soon control the flow of much of the water supply from its mountains to the countries to the south. According to the site manager, the flow of water to Syria and Iraq can be stopped for up to eight months. 15 Who is keeping track of the fact that by 2025 a third of the world's population will face water scarcity? Look at Pakistan, already one of the most dangerous countries on earth, with a congeries of ethnic groups increasingly influenced by Taliban-like elements and in possession of nuclear bombs and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. Nearly two-thirds of its land is dependent on intensive irrigation that is increasingly difficult to maintain because of extensive deforestation and rapid population growth. The country is heavily dependent on the Indus River, but so is India, which suffers from exactly the same problems on a larger scale. Already at the nuclear ready over Kashmir, what will these two countries do when the water runs out?