Clyde Prestowitz’s Rogue Nation is an important book, not necessarily because of what it says but because of what it represents. Prestowitz is a former Reagan Administration official, who was catapulted to prominence during the 1980s because of his scorching critique of Japan, and what he then saw as its unfair trading practices.
In Rogue Nation, he assails the Bush Administration’s foreign policy on matters ranging from the Middle East to the Kyoto Treaty, the environment, the International Criminal Court our policy toward the European Union and China. Readers of this journal will find little new information within these pages – but that is precisely what makes this book important. When a self- described “conservative” makes a critique of the Bush White House that, in a sense, would not seem out of place in Political Affairs, then something remarkable is taking place.
Moreover, this book comes with a murderers’ row of endorsements from the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish former National Security chief in the Carter administration; billionaire investor George Soros; and former high-ranking General Wesley Clark; even leading European Union officials Chris Patten and Pascal Lamy weigh in with words of praise.
The title itself is bracing. Referring to US imperialism as “rogue” is infrequent in leading bourgeois circles. But what better term can be deployed to describe a nation whose justification for war on Iraq relied on the “imminent threat” posed by “weapons of mass destruction” that have yet to be discovered. Yes, there were “WMDs” involved that drove this nation to war –“whoppers of mass dimension.” There is increasing unease in ever wider circles about the policies of the present occupant of the White House. This book is just one more bit of evidence that this unease has yet to diminish.
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
by Clyde Prestowitz
New York, Perseus, 2003.
