From Commodore Perry to the IMF
Asia has been laid low before. It has, in its moments of crisis, been forced to open up to the West before. These openings have been attended by an interesting kaleidoscope of moods, their usual pattern neatly captured in the life of just one man, both hero and antihero of the most dramatic Asian opening of all. His name is Takamori Saigo.
Saigo's story starts in mid-nineteenth century Japan: a Japan that is still a feudal state, divided by caste, virtually devoid of industry. After two and a half centuries of shunning contact with the outside world, Japan's proud isolation is breaking down. Americans and Europeans are pushing into Asia, demanding opportunities to trade, carving up China. In 1853 it is Japan's turn. An American force commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry appears uninvited in Tokyo Bay, demanding that Japan open up also. Saigo and a group of fellow samurai decide that Japan can only survive by being strong; they launch a modernizing revolution now known as the Meiji Restoration. The encrusted caste system is scrapped; a system of modern law is put in place; designs for weapons and industrial machines are procured from America and Europe. After its long hibernation, Japan's doors are suddenly thrown wide. Even today, Japanese still remember the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as the First Opening.
Then, barely a decade on, Saigo has a change of heart. The reforms needed to modernize Japan have destroyed the feudal privileges of his samurai friends. The samurai right to wear swords has been abolished; their public stipends have been cut and then eliminated. This fills Saigo with guilt: forced to choose between foreign modernity and the human bonds of old Japan, a true samurai ought to prefer loyalty. To make amends, Saigo leaves the government and assembles an army of 40,000 rebels, dedicated to the overthrow of the Westernizing state that he had earlier created. A bloody fight ensues; the rebellion fails; Saigo commits ritual suicide.
The rebellion, and the grisly death, took place over a century ago, in 1877. Yet in modern Japan Takamori Saigo is still something of a hero. Museums and statues commemorate him, politicians invoke his name, and since its appearance in 1975, a series of books about him has sold more than eight million copies. This fascination hinges on Saigo's paradoxical career: He understood the need to modernize and copy from the West, yet he sacrificed his life defending Japan's ancient character. The Japanese are captivated by this, because the struggle between these two conflicting instincts is the story of their country. At the Meiji Restoration, and again after the Second World War, and yet again when its economy collapsed in the early 1990s, Japan has responded to weakness by opening up to the West. And yet, each time, it has felt the powerful undertow of nationalism and nostalgia.
For anyone trying to make sense of Asia's current financial mess, Saigo's story is instructive. The humbling of Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea has brought another grand opening to the West, like Japan's earlier openings. Asia is vulnerable, as Japan was in Saigo's time: its system of capitalism has been made to look primitive, its firms are in hock to Western creditors. And Westerners have dispatched to Asia the technocrats of the International Monetary Fund. In its spirit, if not in its details, the IMF's progress through Asia over the past year recalls the long-ago voyage of Commodore Perry.
When Perry visited Japan, he brought exotic gifts: a graph machine, maps, and a miniature steam train. Now the IMF brings credit lines: $17 billion for Thailand, $43 billion for Indonesia, $57 billion for South Korea. Perry brought a trade ultimatum along with his gifts. The IMF brings demands for high interest rates, greater transparency in financial institutions, greater openness to foreign investors, less government involvement in the allocation of credit, less cronyism. In theory, the IMF is a supranational arbiter, with the power to pursue policies independent of America; in practice, it has little more leeway than did Perry when he set sail, entrusted by President Fillmore with "full and discretionary powers" to deal with the Japanese as he saw fit. Nobody doubts that the IMF represents American views. From the start of the Asian crisis, its technocrats have worked hand in glove with Robert Rubin's Treasury Department, a cooperation facilitated by the fact that Rubin's deputy, Lawrence Summers, comes from the IMF's sister organization, the World Bank; while David Lipton, the Treasury's top international man, is a former IMF official.
If the IMF, like Perry, is bent upon asserting American economic ideas, then East Asians, like the Japanese of Perry's time, seem disposed to listen - at least initially. This is especially true in South Korea, where the onslaught of financial turmoil in December 1997 coincided with a presidential election. The voters blamed the country's economic chaos on the president, and therefore snubbed his chosen successor. In his place, they elected Kim Dae Jung, a challenger who had long criticized Korea's un-Western economic system. Kim blames financial turmoil on cronyism, and declares that the corrupt ties between government and business are best dissolved by deeper democracy, Western style. He has welcomed the foreign infiltration of South Korea's economy, taking on those who suspect that if outsiders buy Korean firms, Korea's independence will be compromised. In short, he has made all the arguments that believers in Westernization love to hear. Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Times, declared in February that Kim Dae Jung stands for a "new Korea and a new Asia: political democracy, market-oriented economics."
And yet, like Saigo before him, President Kim cannot escape the undertow of nationalism and nostalgia. Korea, after all, is a fiercely nationalistic place, held together by its citizens' desire to ward off the great powers (Russia, China, and Japan) that have historically threatened its sovereignty. Like Japan, Korea has long made a point of excluding foreign companies from its economy. Like Japan, it has promised Westernizing reforms before and only partially delivered on them. For these reasons, it is risky to talk of a "new Korea and a new Asia." The Westernizing promises of Kim Dae Jung, like those emanating from other Asian seats of power, are made in Takamori Saigo's shadow.
This shadow is already apparent. White-collar workers have protested against the IMF in downtown Seoul; the middle class throughout the region is indignant at the sudden tripling in the cost of consumer imports. Editorialists have attacked arrogant American imperialism. They have muttered about a second Opium War, an allusion to precisely the same humiliation of Asians by Westerners that alarmed the Japanese nationalists of the nineteenth century. In Indonesia, President Suharto has resisted full implementation of the IMF's initial demands for sweeping reforms, growling that any change must conform to his nation's traditional belief in strong communities and families, protected by strong government. The "Berkeley mafia", a group of Indonesian technocrats that in the early stages of financial turmoil seemed to have the upper hand, has declined in influence. Instead, Suharto has installed as his deputy B.J. Habibie, the most prominent of Indonesia's "technologist" school of economic nationalists, who have long struggled for policy dominance with the technocrats.
None of this would surprise the Japanese of Takamori Saigo's time. Like Meiji Japan, Indonesia combines talk of Westernizing reforms needed to grow strong with anti-Western rhetoric. Suharto signed a deal with the IMF in November, and another one in January; but, after this second pact, the press published a photograph that captured the humiliation of the moment, strengthening the tide of anti-IMF resistance. In it, the president sits hunched over his pen; the head of the IMF looks on, glaring sternly, arms folded. As Seth Mydans later reported in the New York Times, this became the defining image of Indonesia's wounded pride. A local newspaper headline demanded angrily, "Who's stronger, the IMF or us?" "Indonesia is a proud country", an Indonesian political scientist told Mydans. "We have been known to choose to go hungry rather than give in to outside pressure." Since the spring, frustration with foreigners and with Suharto's rule has prompted student riots. And so the nationalist undertow has pulled strong, even while the government has continued to work with the IMF, signing a third deal in April. In Indonesia, as in Saigo's Japan, the adoption of Western policies and ideas is not an instantaneous or continuous thing. It pushes ahead, pauses, staggers back a bit before again advancing.
The stop-go spread of Western ideas around the world has an interesting effect on Western intellectuals. Because the gains are always gradual, reversible, ambiguous, there is always room to debate whether they are real at all, or whether, to follow Samuel Huntington, we are in for an extended clash of unreconciled civilizations. At any given time, skeptics of Westernization will be heard, arguing that the backsliding may completely undo recent advance, that the triumph of Western ideas will never happen. At any given time, as well, bolder voices will retort that the tide of history is flowing in the West's favor, and that all setbacks are temporary. In Japan, the ambiguity of the Westernizing advance is reflected in the popular fascination with Saigo's paradoxical career. Americans, meanwhile, have found a personification of the same ambiguity in General Douglas MacArthur.
The Meaning of MacArthur
There is a famous analogue to the newspaper picture of the humbled President Suharto, signing what amounts to a surrender of economic sovereignty. After the Second World War, when MacArthur headed the American occupation government in Japan, he had himself photographed with Emperor Hirohito. In that photo, the general is huge, relaxed, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck; the emperor is tiny, nervous, imprisoned in a starched collar. The picture spoke volumes, and it was meant to. It was taken at the start of the occupation in September 1945, a time the Japanese remember as their Second Opening. The victorious MacArthur had grand ambitions for the triumph of Western ideas. The New Deal technocrats on his staff were drawing up plans to remake Japan's economy and society along Western lines: they drafted new school curricula, throwing out the nationalistic texts used before the war and replacing them with American-style civics lessons; they broke up the big conglomerates that dominated the economy; they legalized trade unions and organized elections. To make way for reform, the nationalist leaders of Japan's wartime regime were purged from public life. Supremely confident in American power and ideas, MacArthur likened Japan to a small boy: backward, immature, but certain to grow up to be like America-the-father.
For a long time after the war, most American writing on Japan accepted MacArthur's image. But, as Japan did grow to match American prosperity, the first doubts surfaced. Mature Japan turned out to resemble America less than many had hoped: its democracy was shallow, its economy was closed to foreigners, its officials were suspicious of America's laisser-faire orthodoxy. Moreover, this different Japan was not always friendly to American interests. Starting in the 1970s, Japan's trade surplus became a bogeyman for Western protectionists. And so, around the same time, a new view of MacArthur arose, focusing less on the success of his Westernizing reforms and more on his failure to implement them fully. The photo of MacArthur, once an image of Western triumph, became instead an image of its hubris.
This adjustment has been accompanied by a revision of MacArthur's view that Japan would grow to resemble America. "Revisionists" urge Americans instead to accept that Japan's economy follows rules unlike those described in Western texts: its bureaucrats will never relinquish their role in guiding the economy, its big firms will always remain brutally focused on exports. The Japanese system, the revisionists go on, has been more successful at producing growth than the American one - so Americans should get used to the idea of Japan as Number One, to Trading Places with the Japanese, in the title words of two typical books espousing this view. And so America should take a tough line in trade negotiations with Japan, resisting the fantasy that Westernization will bring the automatic liberalization of the Japanese economy and with it the harmonization of U.S. and Japanese global interests.
Since the 1980s, the influence of this revisionism has been a good measure of America's mood. After Wall Street's 1987 crash America felt down, so glum revisionist warnings about the invincibility of Japan found a ready audience. From the early 1990s, however, America's fortunes rose and Japan's sunk, and the revisionist influence sunk with them. To the extent that revisionist arguments still carried weight, they did so by extending their argument from Japan to the rest of East Asia, and by citing the region's economic boom as evidence for the power of some composite Asian model. James Fallows did this with his 1994 book, Looking at the Sun, concluding that, "Western societies should concentrate on whether and how to remake themselves."
The Asian crisis, one might think, would reduce revisionist influence still further. Curiously, this does not appear to be happening. Even though America is prosperous, and even though Asia has been laid low, a new version of revisionism is gaining ground. This version resists seeing the IMF in the way that I have done, as a kind of latter-day Commodore Perry. Instead, it disparages the IMF and predicts that it will fail. It suggests, in effect, a parallel between the IMF and MacArthur who, in the revisionist view of the world, was an abject failure.
A Trio of Doubters
Some western doubters are longstanding revisionists, and up to a point their views can be discounted. It is only to be expected, for example, that Chalmers Johnson, the academic father of revisionist writing on Japan, should dispute the idea that Asia's crisis will lead the region to Westernize. After all, Johnson made his name by celebrating the merits of Japan's un-Western industrial policy. Writing in The Nation (February 23, 1998), Johnson insists that it would be disastrous to prescribe Westernization as a cure for Asia's current ills.
In his view, the Asian crisis has nothing to do with the flaws of the region's economic model. In 1994 China devalued its currency by 35 percent. Between April 1995 and April 1997 the yen fell 60 percent against the dollar. According to Johnson, these devaluations, rather than any deeper structural cause, landed the rest of Asia in trouble. Export growth in South Korea and in ASEAN fell from 30 percent in 1995 to zero by mid-1996. Given that the whole region had borrowed lavishly in the expectation of a continued export boom, a temporary liquidity crisis was inevitable. None of this, Johnson goes on, should obscure Asia's strengths. Cooperation between governments and firms, now derided as "crony capitalism", has served Asians well for most of the postwar period. Governments identified which Western technologies to import and apply, and organized consortia of private firms to do the work. This central planning prevented firms from duplicating each other's efforts.
Johnson goes even further than this: he claims that the Asian crisis has actually strengthened the case for some aspects of the Asian model. The economies of Northeast Asia have been hostile to inward investment. The Japanese, with their famously high savings rates, financed their investment from their own cash, while Koreans and Taiwanese tried to emulate this model by cranking up savings rates through a variety of pro-savings policies. As Johnson sees it, the region's current financial crisis shows the virtue of this way of doing things: if you depend on foreigners for capital, you can never tell when they will suddenly rise up and holler for repayment. The lesson is to redouble devotion to the autarky that is central to one version of the Asian way. Greater Western-style economic openness, of the sort the IMF prescribes, would only store up future trouble.
While Johnson's views may not come as a surprise, he is nonetheless in surprising company. For his attack on Western triumphalism finds support from a broad swathe of American conservatives. Trent Lott, the leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, spoke for many in his party when he denounced the IMF's efforts in Asia and called for the removal of its managing director. With a few exceptions, conservative intellectuals have taken the same view. The most prominent economist in this group is Harvard's Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan, that most triumphalist of presidents.
Writing in Foreign Affairs in the spring, and speaking at a recent National Interest dinner, Feldstein has agreed with Johnson that Asia's problems reflect incidental shocks such as Chinese and Japanese devaluation, rather than anything more profound. And he has gone beyond Johnson in painting the IMF as the agent of MacArthurian Western hubris: "A nation's desperate need for short-term financial help does not give the IMF the moral right to substitute its technical judgments for the outcomes of the nation's political process." Rather than trying to restructure Asian economies along American lines, Feldstein would prefer the IMF to restrict itself to demanding sensible budgets and monetary policy. For, like Johnson, he is unpersuaded that the Asian crisis reveals Asia's need to adopt Western ideas. The "current structure of the Korean economy", he contends, "may now well be suited to Korea's stage of economic and political development and to Korean cultural values stressing thrift, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and worker solidarity."
If it is surprising to find Feldstein in this camp, it is even more intriguing to find Francis Fukuyama there. Fukuyama is, famously, the author of "The End of History?", an essay published in these pages in 1989. In that article, he sounded as confident of Western supremacy as MacArthur ever was. "The triumph of the West", he wrote on the article's first page, "is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism." And yet buffed in Fukuyama's robust phrases, there lurked an interesting footnote in which he recalled that Alexandre Kojeve, the French Hegelian who had himself declared the end of history half a century before, later revised his views. "I use the example of Japan with some caution", Fukuyama is forced to confess, "since Kojeve late in his life came to conclude that Japan . . . proved that the universal homogeneous state was not victorious and that history had perhaps not ended."
On the face of it, the Asian crisis gives Fukuyama an opportunity to lay the doubts of this footnote to rest - to build on his earlier confidence, which reflected the collapse of communism, with new pronouncements taking in the humbling of Asia. If the memory of Kojeve's uncertainty were not enough to drive him to this, then contemporary uncertainty about the end of history thesis surely should have been sufficient. For, having enjoyed instantaneous acclaim, Fukuyama's confidence in the triumph of the West was soon challenged by Samuel Huntington's opposing anticipation of a clash of civilizations, an anticipation that drew explicitly on Asia's economic boom. By 2020, Huntington pointed out, Asia would contain four of the world's five largest economies, and would account for more than 40 percent of the world's GDP. This shift of gravity toward Asia would mean, in a geointellectual sense, a shift away from Western laisser-faire and toward the Asian model.
Curiously, Fukuyama shows no appetite for exploiting Asia's troubles to re-open his argument with Huntington. He is prepared to attack Asian triumphalism, but he attacks American triumphalism as well. Writing in Commentary, he deflates the "Asian values" school, recalling that a century ago Confucianism was blamed for Asia's economic sloth, and that Asian growth only became possible after Asia rejected deeply embedded values such as the mandarin disdain for commerce. In equally robust terms, he clobbers the Asian claim that authoritarian government promotes growth, pointing out that it can equally well underpin kleptocracies like Indonesia's. The Asian crisis "will puncture the idea of Asian exceptionalism", Fukuyama writes. It will serve to remind the world that the laws of economics apply in Asia as they do elsewhere, that Asian values do not represent some magic formula for overcoming them.
This is perfectly lucid stuff. But nowhere does Fukuyama take the next step: he breathes not a word about the "unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" that he celebrated in his end of history article. Instead, he sympathizes with those proponents of Asian values who focused on "the effects of excessive individualism in Western societies, and particularly in the United States." Individual freedom breeds innovation and entrepreneurship, to be sure. But it also brings bad things, Fukuyama says, like crime and illegitimacy. Asked why Asia's financial crisis does not prompt him to restate his old confidence in Westernization, Fukuyama speaks with clear distaste of "chest-thumping in America." Nine years ago he was hailed for his clear declaration of faith in the idea of the West. Today, not even Fukuyama is prepared to defend Fukuyama.
One can only marvel at Feldstein and Fukuyama, and at the general reluctance of American conservatives to celebrate the latest evidence from Asia for the superiority of their Western system. For the careers of Takamori Saigo and General MacArthur permit a far more expansive conception of the Western idea, and no amount of historical revisionism should be allowed to conceal this. It is true, certainly, that Japan's openings to the outside world have been followed by nationalist backlash, and Indonesia's bucking of the first two IMF plans suggests that one should not rule out the possibility of backlash this time either. But neither in 1877 nor after 1945 did the nationalist backlash prove lasting. After Saigo's brief rebellion was put down, Japan Westernized and modernized for four glorious decades, falling back into virulent anti-Western nationalism only in the 1930s. Similarly, although MacArthur failed to implement all his reforms, Japan nonetheless dropped emperor-worship, hosted (and later paid for) large American bases on its soil, and replaced military rule with imperfect democracy. Whatever the undertow of nationalism in Japan, it is difficult to argue that the current of the past century and a half has run in anything other than a westerly direction.
There is every reason to believe that the same will prove true in Asia now. For all the bucking, and despite violent student riots, Indonesia is still working with the IMF, while Thailand and South Korea are starting to liberalize then' financial systems in keeping with the IMF's prescriptions. In all these countries, the IMF reforms will not be swallowed whole; there will be much foot-dragging and a few outright reversals. But it is probable that quite a number of its ideas will stick, making Asian economies less state-directed, more transparent, and more open to foreigners: in short, more Western. This is likely not just because the IMF reforms are sensible, though this is largely true. It is likely because, even before the Asian crisis arrived, some of the region's leaders were thinking of Westernizing anyway, and because others who spoke out against Westernization have since softened their tunes tellingly.
Two Blunted Challenges
To appreciate this point, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of Asian challenge to the liberal-capitalist model. The first comes primarily from Northeast Asia - from South Korea and Japan - and consists of an economic style that differs markedly from Western laisser-faire. The second comes primarily from Southeast Asia - notably from Malaysia and Singapore - and consists of a rhetorical assertion of non-Western social values. The first challenge centers on issues like the usefulness of industrial policy, of state-directed lending, and of policies to induce high savings rates. The second challenge is about respect for the group rather than the individual, for state authority as opposed to citizens' rights and freedoms.
It is the first challenge, the one presented by Northeast Asia's economic model, that had started to unravel even before Asia's currencies plunged in 1997. In Japan's case, this was not surprising, for it had already undergone the collapse of its equity and property markets at the start of the decade. As a result of this shock, Japan's technocrats were confronted with the limits of their own competence, and public opinion began to favor greater economic freedoms. For most of this decade, a shifting cast of coalition governments has proposed deregulation plans for retailing, for distribution, and most recently, for financial services. Vested interests have delayed some of these reforms, but the argument in Japan is no longer about whether to dismantle un-Western controls on the economy - it is about how quickly to do so. Intellectually, Japan's economic model is dead.
Less obviously, but more remarkably given the absence of pre-1997 financial shocks, South Korea has also spent much of this decade reconsidering its economic model. Until the market for semiconductors collapsed in 1996, Korea's economy was performing splendidly. Even so, it was impossible to spend half an hour talking to a Korean economist in or out of government without hearing about the need to deregulate, to break up the conglomerates known as chaebol, to create a more Western style of corporate governance by fostering sophisticated banks and equity investors. In the 1990s foreigners were allowed for the first time to buy shares in Korean companies, a handful of Korean firms were allowed to raise capital offshore, and plans were drawn up to reduce the anti-competitive power of the chaebol. In 1996 Korea abolished the Economic Planning Board, which had masterminded the government's industrial policy. When Feldstein argues that Korea's original economic model may still suit the country well, he is expressing a view shared by few Korean economists. The Northeast Asian challenge to the liberal-capitalist model is no longer taken seriously even by the supposed challengers.
This leaves the second Asian challenge to Western confidence in its ideas: the challenge from Southeast Asia. Unlike South Korea and Japan, the economies of this region are not markedly un-Western. They are wide open to foreign investment rather than being hostile to it, and they have no particular faith in industrial policy. It has therefore been hard to cite the region's economic success as a challenge to the laisser-faire ideas of Western economists. Their success has been used to tweak the West in a different way, for that success has been attributed to Southeast Asia's un-Western respect for authority. Firm government, ready to silence bumptious critics, has ensured political and social stability, focusing national resources on growth. Firm parents, ready to discipline their children, have preserved the traditional Confucian respect for education. To be sure, this discipline may have dulled the free-thinking and open criticism that keeps centers of authority honest and accountable. But, according to the proponents of Asian values, this cost was trivial when set against the gains ensured by orderliness.
So long as Southeast Asia continued to grow spectacularly, it was difficult to refute these ideas. Now things are a bit different. The dangers inherent in the repression of criticism, secrecy, and lack of accountability have become rather obvious: unaccountable officials have funneled cash into hopeless schemes that lined the pockets of their families and friends; secrecy has damaged investor confidence, exacerbating the flight of foreign capital. To their considerable credit, most advocates of the Asian way acknowledge these problems. The most telling examples of this candor come from the countries whose leaders once spoke most forcefully on behalf of Asian values.
At the start of the financial crisis last year, Malaysia's nationalist prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, responded in his usual form by denouncing Westerners (particularly Jewish ones) for his country's troubles. But by October he had changed tack, dismissing the contention that the twenty-first century would be the Asian century as "a mirage mired in an incredible swamp of arrogance" (New Straits Times, 10/23/97). Although Mahathir still shrinks from saying that Asians should import Western systems, his putative successor is more forthright. In February Punwar Ibrahim, Malaysia's deputy prime minister, declared that the way out of Asia's economic malaise lay in deregulation, competition, and transparency. "You have to dismantle monopolies . . . of your cronies and family members . . . because they go against the grain of transparency, accountability and good governance," he declared; and he went on to denounce the idea that democracy, freedom, honesty, and accountability are merely "luxuries of the West", incompatible with Asian values (Bangkok Post, 2/8/98).
In March 1998 Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, the foremost champion of Asian values, gave interviews to Time and Fortune. Though he insisted that Asian values - hard work, high savings, an emphasis on education - promoted fast growth, much of what he said sounded remarkably humble. Having spent a good part of the 1990s talking up the supposed link between Confucian values and Asia's miraculous economic growth, he was now prepared to step back. "There are certain weaknesses in Confucianism", he acknowledged. "From time to time in the history of China, whenever there was weak government, Confucianism led to nepotism and favoritism. . . . Unfortunately, quite a few of the countries that have been growing fast have this incestuous system where banks are owned by conglomerates and lend money to another section in the group without proper feasibility studies." When Time's interviewer suggested that curing these ills would involve Asia swallowing Western ideas, Lee seemed undismayed. "If it is the best way of doing business", he replied, "it doesn't matter where it comes from."
America's Peculiar Angst
This, precisely, is the case for the triumph of the West: freedom, private ownership, and individual responsibility are efficient as well as desirable in themselves. It does not matter who understood this first; they comprise "the best way of doing business", as Lee says, so eventually they will be universally adopted. If Lee Kuan Yew, an Asian advocate of Asian ways, can bring himself to talk like this, one might reasonably expect something still more forthright from Western commentators, and especially from conservatives. Instead, one hears polite appreciation of Asia's strengths, and a trembling reluctance to intervene abroad. Conservatives are reluctant to judge rival systems, and to declare the American one superior. They are guilty of precisely that relativism for which they have traditionally excoriated liberals.
A century and a half ago, when Perry succeeded in opening Japan to trade, Americans rejoiced that America's manifest destiny, its mission to spread free trade around the world, had triumphed over Japan's attachment to its feudal order. Walt Whitman was moved to verse: "I chant America, the Mistress / I chant a greater supremacy." One finds flashes of the same exuberance these days from Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman; from members of the Clinton administration, in unguarded moments; from commentators such as Mort Zuckerman, who in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs declares that the next century will belong to America just as surely as the current one. There are a few conservatives among these optimists, to be sure: Lawrence Lindsey, a former governor of the Federal Reserve, declared, "We have shown our system of corporate management to be the best on the planet" (Weekly Standard, 1/12/98). But the striking phenomenon is not the extent of this exuberance, but rather the fact that it is less than universally shared. A surprising number of Republicans - politicians and their intellectual allies - are too afraid of hubris to chant anything much at all. Not for the first time, we are confronted with America's peculiar angst in the twilight of this century.
America enjoys world dominance in diplomacy, warfare, industry, science, media, and the sheer sense of how to live. And yet the old Reaganite confidence in American power and ideas has given way to a new kind of conservatism, one susceptible to the declinism of the revisionist school. The new kind of conservative worries about the loss of values in America, and wonders whether Asian values might teach Americans something. The new conservative notes that many Americans are unwilling to intervene abroad on behalf of American ideas, and caves in to this defeatism. Rather than celebrate Japan's Westernization over the half century since MacArthur's reform, the new conservative is more inclined to focus on what MacArthur failed to accomplish. Rather than celebrate the Westernizing Meiji Restoration that Takamori Saigo helped to bring about, he broods lugubriously on his failed counter-rebellion.
To anyone who has pondered the confusion of the post-Cold War world, none of this may come as a surprise. And yet there is something special about the Asian case, because it presents America with so clear an opportunity to spread its worldview at almost no cost to itself. There is much to be said for the idea that if America cannot persuade allies to back its policy on Cuba or Iraq, then it should shoulder the burden of activism warily, for it will carry a high price in diplomatic capital and treasure. A hegemon should proceed cautiously, by all means. But, in Asia's case, America has the IMF to do Commodore Perry's job. Walt Whitman would have marveled at this good fortune.
Sebastian Mallaby is The Economist's Washington bureau chief and author of that magazine's Lexington column.
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