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America's
Evil Empire
By:
Paul J. Scalise
Chalmers
Johnson is the kind of intellectual economists love to hate. He
is a neo-mercantilist, measuring economic performance in terms of
trade surpluses. He is a protectionist, favoring trade wars and
high tariffs. He is an isolationist, advocating the return of U.S.
troops, institutional investors and multinationals from abroad.
And now, regrettably, he is likely to be a conspiracy theorist:
"In the decade following the end of the Cold War," writes
Mr. Johnson, "the United States . . . resorted much of the
time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation"
in order to pursue its unilateral policy of global hegemony.
Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire is,
as its subtitle suggests, an elaborate diatribe against the excesses
of an alleged "rogue superpower." Mr. Johnson argues that
America's postwar foreign policy has been so ideologically driven
to support anticommunism and then, "globalization," that
the world is now a pressure cooker of resentment just waiting to
explode, or "blowback"—a CIA term for "the unintended
consequences of policies . . . kept secret from the American people."
This blowback may not lead Mr. Johnson to christen America "the
evil empire," as Ronald Reagan did the former Soviet Union.
But harking back to another slogan of the 1980s apropos Mr. Johnson:
Where's the beef?
His thesis is overstated, relying on isolated incidents (e.g., the
1995 Okinawa rape case, the 1998 Italian ski-lift accident) to build
a case against American hubris. The policy prescriptions (e.g.,
adjusting to and supporting the emergence of China on the world
stage) are vague, offering no practical blueprints to the contrary.
And sometimes the argumentation is just too cynical to bear. At
one point Mr. Johnson suggests the Thai Baht Crisis may have been
orchestrated by U.S. officials to facilitate, in part, sex-starved
military personnel in Bangkok looking to get, shall we say, a little
more bang for that U.S. buck.
...Say
what you want about his politics, Mr. Johnson remains a talented
polemicist. He knows exactly how to make all the right
reticulations...
Too bad, really.
Say what you want about his politics, Mr. Johnson remains a talented
polemicist. He knows exactly how to make all the right reticulations.
What are we doing abroad militarily that (a) we can do and (b) that
we must do? His answers are charmingly simple.
With WWII a distant memory, the Cold War over, and the military
strength of China and North Korea largely exaggerated, the reasons
to lodge 100,000 troops in East Asia (i.e., "containing"
or "defending" Japan) are fading. Indeed, Mr. Johnson
adds that the Pentagon's new abstract danger of "instability"
is, in itself, counterproductive. The mounting logistical, criminal
and environmental problems associated with a large, rotating military
presence in a small island chain like Okinawa only contribute to
eventual blowback. These are legitimate policy concerns, regardless
of whether or not one agrees with him.
The problem is that many people will question the judgement of a
respected scholar who resorts to hyperbole to make his points. According
to Mr. Johnson, Japan and South Korea are not democracies, but Soviet-style
"satellites." The United States is not guided by Wilsonian
diplomacy, but rather by "imperialism," "hegemony"
and a "megalomanical attempt to make the rest of the world
adopt American economic institutions and norms."
A well-known Sinologist in the 1960s, Mr. Johnson's real claim to
fame came with his book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982),
a seminal work on Japanese industrial policy. Its provocative conclusion
that Japan represented a viable, if not superior, form of capitalism
led the then-professor of political science at the University of
California, Berkeley, to become a household name of sorts. Business
Week even labeled him the "godfather" of the so-called
"revisionist" movement, while the first Clinton administration
was more than willing to adopt Mr. Johnson's "get tough"
stance with Japan in order to open their markets.
But that's ancient history. With the dust settling after the 1997
Asian financial crisis—not to mention Japan's decade-long
recession—revisionism is all but dead. No one seriously believes
anymore that Japan is a "threat" to American economic
security. Japan's continued structural reforms ranging from financials
to utilities measures the extent to which Tokyo worries more about
its own market health, rather than encroaching on America's.
Still, Mr. Johnson continues to surprise us by laying the blame
for Japan's recession, the Asian "meltdown" and any further
"deindustrialization" at Washington's doorstep. He argues
that self-interested U.S. officials conspired to appreciate the
yen at the 1985 Plaza Accord, only to switch gears again by devaluing
the currency by 60% in the mid-1990s. Mr. Johnson barely mentions
the severe overcapacity problems and ill-conceived lending criteria
of Asian countries that contributed to their economic woes.
Rather, we are asked to believe that America's successful "globalization
campaign significantly reduced the economic power and capitalist
independence of at least some of the United States' tiger competitors."
This instability, in turn, is allegedly stirring up even greater
resentment among foreigners forced to sell off their assets to Anglo-American
institutional investors.
Does this mean America is now No. 1? Mr. Johnson concedes nothing.
"The true costs [of globalization] to the United States,"
he concludes, "should be measured in terms of crime statistics,
ruined inner cities . . . [and] trade deficits." What? The
rising levels of international trade reflect a greater worldwide
specialization of labor. Cheaper imports allow American manufacturing
to contribute over $1.4 trillion in its global performance (or,
roughly one dollar in 30 is generated from the existing 230,000
U.S. manufacturing companies). Unemployment is at a 30-year low.
And as for crime, the total number of violent crimes has fallen
almost 35% nationally since 1993; New York City alone reporting
crimes down 56.5% since 1980. None of this sounds terribly apocalyptic
to me.
These facts are important. But Mr. Johnson brushes them aside in
favor of his own conspiracy theories. Welcome to the economic version
of the "X-Files," even though Mr. Johnson is not as entertaining
as Fox Mulder. 
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Paul J. Scalise. “America’s Evil Empire.” The Asian Wall Street
Journal. May 10, 2000. Pg. 8.
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