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Title: The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone by Joseph S. Nye Jr. ISBN: 0-19-515088-0 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.97 (29 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Where is the beef?
Comment: This book should be required reading for all U.S. Senators and State Department officials. Nye has offered us a recommended course to steer the American Ship of State in the comming decades. Reasonable people will agree with his recommendations.
However, Nye would have been more credible if he would have devoted a chapter to the difficulty the president and the congress have in confronting the influence of American lobbies. Yes, Virginia, lobbies influence our policies. How can we bring on board the sugar lobby, the tobacco lobby, the Christian Right lobby, the oil lobby, the Israeli lobby, the Florida Cuban lobby, the anti-abortion lobby, etc.?
Rating: 4
Summary: An elite liberal looks at the flaws of our foreign policy
Comment: . Nye argues that an aggressive unilateral military approach will backfire on U.S. interests in the long-term. If we are genuinely seen as a responsible player in the international arena and not a self-righteous out-of-control bully, then more people will buy more of our products, will seek America's aid, will come to America to study, will support U.S. positions in international affairs, and so on. In other words our soft power will be greatly increased and help the U.S. maintain an edge over its rivals even as those rivals increase their power.. In this country, he notes, the national poverty rate was at 22 percent in 1960, 11 percent in 1973, but up to 15 percent in 1993. In this country in 1995, the richest fifth of the population had 45 percent of the income while the poorest fifth had only 5 percent. In Brazil, cited over the decades as a prime example of third world capitalist success, the richest fifth had 64 percent of the income, while the poorest fifth had 2.5 percent. He quotes from the Economist a statement, which seems to state that the poor in Japan are much better off than than the poor in the U.S.
Nye's declaration of the benefits of globalization while pointing out statistics which show increasing inequality and even decreases in rates of growth (such as in labor productivity which dropped from previous decades during the deregulated Reagan years) is rather odd. He seems mostly concerned about the disruptions caused by in the third world and the opposition to corporate globalization as a hindrance to America's soft power He notes that our economy rests precariously on foreign investments in our capital markets, which could be easily withdrawn due to deregulated currency flows. Nye writes that the welfare state is needed but has only been "constrained" not "destroyed" by globalization. Well, I think it safe to say that the welfare reform of 1996 and the recent Medicare bill giving massive subsidies to companies that offer Medicare-type plans are steps along the destruction of our measly welfare state.
Nye refers to what he calls the pro-democracy policies of the Reagan-Clinton years. If in the Reagan years, he means supporting death squad militaries to wipe out popular opposition movements to oligarchies in Central America on a bogus Soviet threat and then holding elections when such movements are banned or terrorized into nothingness then I would agree. Really is pro-democracy policies such that as that in not recognizing a free and fair election in Sandanista Nicaragua in 1984 and then continuing to use the contra's to terrorize Nicaraguan civilians to the point where the weak international court of Justice in 1986 would call on the United States to stop supporting the Contras and pay Nicaragua 17 billion in reparations? And to the point where the U.S. would have to veto a resolution at the Security Council calling on all states to observe international law? Are pro-democracy policies threatening the Nicaraguan people with continuing sanctions(made again in the Nicaraguan 2001 election) and contra terror if they didn't vote out the Sandanistas in 1990?
And as for the Kosovo humanitarian intervention, Nye is surely aware of the Western documentation claiming that the Kosovo Liberation Army was responsible for most terrorism in Kosovo in the year before Nato started bombing. He surely is aware that the Rambouillet agreement called on Milosevic to accept something he could not: an All-Nato as opposed to a more natural occupation force that would have the right occupy the whole of Yugoslavia. And he has surely read the heroic General Clark's memoirs where it is admitted that when Nato started bombing it dramatically increased the incentive for the Serbs to start cleansing the Albanians of Kosovo. But of course America's hard power "credibility" was greatly increased by destroying a state opposed to America's hegemony. Nye does allow that the ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Albanians under Nato's watch that occurred afterwards was not a good thing.
Nye mentions that U.S. economic sanctions failed to dislodge Saddam. Well he should know that the U.S. wanted him to remain in power after the gulf war because it didn't trust the Iraqi rebels and preferred Saddam remain in power for the moment and eventually be overthrown by "iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" that would govern Iraq like Saddam did when he was friends with Rummy Rumsfeld and Bob Dole. It surely did not increase America's soft power when throughout the Clinton years, the U.S. was vetoing at the UN sanctions committee Iraqi requests to repair its civilian infrastructure like its electricity and sanitation facilities which were deliberately bombed by the U.S. during the first Gulf War. Currently it surely doesn't help our soft power when we engage in bombing of fields and whole towns to "pacify" the resistance to our current illegal occupation and shoot dead protestors and arrest and harass people speaking out against the occupation. It surely doesn't help when we handpick their government that will allow us to sell off their resources and use their oil money to partially pay for the reconstruction of damages we are at fault for.
Nye did not mention our more subtle interference in the internal affairs of other countries, such as through funding of opposition to mostly leftist governments by the National Endowment for Democracy which has played in a role in the subversion of Chavez by the opposition in Venezuela. And recently NED money poured into Georgia after the now-overthrown tyrant Shevradnadze made a deal with the Russians about an oil pipeline after which the U.S. suddenly expressing abhorrence at his rigging of elections. He mentions U.S. sanctions against Burma but fails to note that these sanctions allowed companies already in the country to continue to do business there and enrich the monstrous SLORC.
Dr. Nye was asst secretary of Defense during the Clinton years and is currently head of the JFK school of government at Harvard. He probably had a hand in many of the policies which I excoriate. Nonetheless this is a much more compelling discussion in this book that would would expect from say Henry Kissinger, who has a blurb on the back cover praising this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant Indictment of Arrogant Unilateralist Thinking
Comment: The paradox of American Power, argues Joseph Nye Jr., is that it is too powerful to be defeated militarily yet not powerful enough to meet all of its global challenges by itself. Nye expands this argument in a series of well-researched essays that are as deeply practical as they are intelligent. Few people are probably as uniquely qualified to examine the nature and problems of American power as he is. Nye is the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Clinton Administration. This man is no ideologue and he knows what he's talking about.
Nye's argument is largely a refutation of the simplemindedness demonstrated by a clique of policy makers whom he refers to as the new unilateralists or hegemonists but who are more popularly known today as neoconservatives. Because these people are infatuated with military aggression, argues Nye, they fail to understand that power is a complex phenomenon best understood in terms of its "hard" and "soft" components. Hard power consists of military and economic leverage while soft power contains less obvious but no less significant components such as cultural appeal, universally respected values, opportunities, and policies that are tied to global interest as much as national gain. Nye correctly argues that the great empires of the past including the United States ruled through a skillful application of both hard and soft power. To jettison our soft power because our leaders are so enamored of hard power, argues Nye, is a colossal blunder.
Nye also argues that power is distributed on different levels some of which require cooperation with other nations and some of which don't. He elaborates by describing American power in terms of a three level chessboard. On the top level of the chessboard, which constitutes military power, the United States is preeminent and can act unilaterally. The middle level, which constitutes economic power, however is multi-polar. In this area the United States must act in concert with a select group of other players such as Japan, China, France, Germany, India, and others. The bottom level of the chessboard constitutes trans-national issues that occur with no regard to national boundaries. In these areas, which include international finance and the actions of stateless organizations, including terrorists, the United States can only act in an inclusive global fashion. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs Magazine, Nye criticized the Bush Regime for its nearly exclusive focus on the first level of the chessboard and described its policy makers as one-dimensional thinkers in a three dimensional chess game.
Nye reinforces his argument by explaining the impact that contextual developments such as the information revolution and globalization have on American power. The information revolution, argues Nye, circumvents borders and challenges state sovereignty and control. America is both a product and a beneficiary of globalization, according to Nye, but must use its soft power to shape the evolution of globalization in a manner that endows it with universal appeal. Failure to do so could have disastrous consequences.
In his chapter entitled "The Home Front" Nye begins with the ominous observation that instead of being defeated by the barbarians, Rome rotted from within. "People lost confidence their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased, and the economy failed to grow adequately." Terrorists cannot defeat the United States, argues Nye, unless it rots from within. More importantly, Nye points out that disastrous fiscal policies that drive up deficit spending that destroy time honored American social services can dramatically erode American hard and soft power. Deficit spending inevitably generates a recession and a severe recession will likely result in the flight of foreign investment capital thereby weakening America's hard power. But also as deficit spending destroys social services and opportunities, it also chips away at America's global appeal-a blow to our soft power.
In his concluding chapter, entitled "Redefining the National Interest" Nye calls upon the United States to pursue multilateral policies that foster badly needed international cooperation. Although Nye acknowledges that the multilateral approach provides America with less freedom to act at will than the unilateral approach, he also points out that it is better suited to dealing with the transnational issues that constitute some of our greatest challenges in the Twenty-first Century. Nye concludes that the United States should develop a combined policy that: (1) protects our traditional vital interests, (2) addresses the global public good, and (3) promotes human rights and democracy abroad.
Although this book was published in late 2002, it practically reads like a post mortem of the Bush Regime's disastrous foreign policies with respect to the Middle East, North Korea, Europe, and Iraq, which have arguably reduced both our hard and soft power. My hope is that more people will become familiar with Nye's arguments and will subsequently judge their leaders not by the entertainment value of their speech acts, but by whether or not their policies properly address the national interest.
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Title: Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan ISBN: 1400040930 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer ISBN: 039332396X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria ISBN: 0393047644 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century by Charles Kupchan ISBN: 0375412158 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 29 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century by Michael Mandelbaum ISBN: 1586481347 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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