[buttmunch]

By H.D.S. Greenway The Boston Globe
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2005


BOSTON I once had a boss for whom people worked with enthusiasm and admiration. I remember employees hurrying across the parking lot in the morning in anticipation of another eventful day in an enterprise everybody believed in. Sure, the boss had his faults and his blind spots, but you could talk to him and he would listen. If you differed, sometimes your arguments prevailed, but usually you went along with the way he wanted, and it became your way, too.

Then I had another boss for whom people trudged across the parking lot as if on the way to a firing squad. There was no give and take. It was his way or else. He ruled by fear and intimidation, with a dose of incompetence. Little by little his workers found ways to resist, and the enterprise suffered. Before long he was replaced.

I recalled these two opposing approaches to leadership when I read the new book "Taming American Power," by Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor. For although the United States may have a monopoly on power unrivaled since Rome, Walt believes America is unnecessarily hurting itself by adopting the methods of my second boss, and not the first.

For as in all things, leaders who can persuade and convince fare better than those who bully and abuse, and the United States is fast reaching a condition in which most non-Americans fear American power more than they appreciated American leadership.

Walt quotes George W. Bush saying, in 2000, that other nations would be attracted to the United States if we were strong but "humble." But they would be repulsed if the United States were to become arrogant. Bush's instincts were correct, but as Walt says, "He didn't really believe his own prescription."

At times the Bush administration has seemingly gone out of its way to antagonize. Instead of putting the devil in the details, by saying that America had some problems with, say, the Kyoto treaty, but that it would seek to work them out with its allies - which could have killed it by neglect - Bush made himself the devil by telling his allies to go to hell.

Walt is aware that to some degree the "primacy" of the United States will be challenged just because it is the big kid on the block. But in most cases nations will be happy to accept American leadership if they are made part of it instead of being ignored or bullied.

Walt lists the ways in which the less powerful can resist the powerful, even to the extent of building coalitions against them. In the case of the United States, levels of anti-Americanism have risen under this administration to unprecedented heights. Even such close allies as the British are disturbed, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has seemed, at times, to justify the alliance by saying that it is better to maintain access in order to tame the beast than oppose it and lose all influence.

The good news may be that in Bush's second term, some of Walt's thesis may have sunk in. The most egregious of the go-it-aloners have found other employment, and diplomacy is back in favor. But the administration has a long way to go.

Walt is as much for preserving American primacy as is Bush's gang, and he acknowledges that hard power is the key to maintaining it. But the United States should "take care not to squander U.S. power unnecessarily" by fighting unnecessary wars.

"Global hegemony," which Bush seemed to favor in his first term, is clearly unsustainable. Preventive wars, which means attacking countries because they might become a threat rather than because they are a threat, is a policy doomed to failure and has led to the "costly quagmire of Iraq."

"Selective engagement," which Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton employed, has its strengths, according to Walt, but wasn't selective enough.

Better, Walt suggests, would be "offshore balancing," which has been America's traditional grand strategy. It means that you identify areas of critical importance, but you don't need to control them directly. It's not isolationism, but you work with your allies whenever possible, leaving room for humanitarian interventions if you can make a real difference. When real threats arrive, the United States is still free to respond unilaterally if others won't go along, but it is likely that allies will see their interests as your own.

This approach would "husband the uses of military power upon which American primacy rests, and minimizes the fear that U.S. power provokes."

Walt distinguishes between Afghanistan, which was a real threat because of the Taliban's support of Al Qaeda, and Iraq, where there was no direct threat - just an opportunity, in my view, to try out neoconservative theories of social engineering

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