Clyde Prestowitz: Rogue Nation

Reviewed by MARK FRYER

"Nous sommes tous Americains" said the headline in the Paris newspaper Le Monde on September 12, 2001. "We are all Americans".

And for a while, many of us were. Those airliners were flown into buildings in New York and Washington but at the time it seemed they were aimed at the entire Western world.

That was then. More than two years on, sympathy and solidarity have faded. America has seldom been more isolated and distrusted - not just by its declared enemies, but by many people who share the "Western" values that Americans claim as their own.

How things came to this is the question at the centre of Rogue Nation.

And how did America squander the world's goodwill? Clyde Prestowitz doesn't put it so crudely, but by acting like a jerk, long before September 11.

An example: America frequently preaches the importance of the rule of law. But while it likes to talk the talk, the US has rejected or weakened international treaties, including the ban on landmines, limits on chemical and biological warfare, controls on the spread of nuclear weapons, and the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

Dozens of nations have accepted all of these; America is different.

Another example: America espouses free trade as the road to riches for poor nations.

But when a West African farmer tries to sell his cotton crop he has to compete with cotton raised in the US - at a much higher cost - dumped on the market while the grower gets a guaranteed return, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

One more: The alleged threat from weapons of mass destruction helped justify the US-led attack on Iraq - but only after the US had supplied advanced technology to Iraqi research centres known to be involved in developing chemical and nuclear weapons, and even given Saddam Hussein samples of anthrax and botulism.

Not much of this - or the many other examples of America's tendency to say one thing while doing the opposite - will be news to anyone who has been paying attention.

But Prestowitz connects the dots - the subsidies that reward American cotton growers for overproduction, for example, mean poverty and despair in Africa and create a ready audience when the radical mullahs come calling from Pakistan and the Middle East.

Or - more connections - the assumption that Americans have a God-given right to waste energy means they must import vast amounts of oil from the Persian Gulf.

If American vehicles got the same petrol mileage as their European and Japanese counterparts, the US would need no Gulf oil.

Connect the dots again. Since Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, access to that oil has been protected by thousands of American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, a provocation to some Muslims, most famously Osama bin Laden, who have responded by attacking America - financed in part by the billions of US dollars that pay for all that oil.

All this will be familiar territory for fans of John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, or even Mike Moore, but Prestowitz is hardly one of the usual suspects.

His arguments gain a lot of their force from the fact that he's everything a critic of America ought not to be: Republican, patriotic, Christian, Vietnam war supporter, businessman, even a trade negotiator for the Reagan administration.

This is one critic for whom "conservative" is not a dirty word, except when preceded by "neo" and used to describe the clique now ruling Washington.

His message to Americans is that their country has become an empire the likes of which the world has never seen.

It has an economy bigger than the European Union and a defence budget that accounts for 40 per cent of the world's military spending and is rising.

It is the place where 40 per cent of the world's research and development money is spent - even Rome and Britain at their peaks were nothing like this.

And there is nothing conservative about imperialism, says Prestowitz, who describes Washington's current strategy as "radicalism, egotism and adventurism articulated in the stirring rhetoric of traditional patriotism".

He also has plenty of ideas on how the US can earn back some of the trust it has squandered - boost overseas aid (of all industrialised countries, America is the smallest aid donor, as a proportion of its economy), cut farm subsidies, revitalise the United Nations, try to make globalisation work, instead of assuming that opening markets is all that matters, help poor countries fight diseases such as Aids, use America's financial muscle to persuade Israel to get out of the West Bank ...

Rogue Nation is written as a wake-up call to Americans, but anyone with an attachment to "Western" values can share the underlying message - the problem isn't American ideals, it is America's failure to live up to its ideals.

* Basic Books, $64.95