The Bubble Of American Supremacy: Correcting The Misuse Of American Power - Hardcover

Soros, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586482173 ISBN 13: 9781586482176

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2003

Synopsis

Long known as "the world's only private citizen with a foreign policy," George Soros combines his razor-sharp sense of economic trends with his passionate advocacy for open societies and decency in world politics to come up with a workable, and severely critical, analysis of the Bush administration's overreaching, militaristic foreign policy.

Soros believes that this administration's plans abroad come from the same sort of "bubble" psychology that afflicted our markets in the late 1990s. They have used a real fact, our overwhelming military supremacy, to create a deluded worldview, that might makes right and that "you're either with us or against us," in the same way that the recent boom used a real fact, the growth in technology, to lead to a delusion, the "new economy."

Like the best of the books that have responded quickly to world events, The Bubble of American Supremacy has a clear, intriguing, comprehensive thesis that makes necessary, and compelling, order of our seemingly disordered world.

About this title

About the Author

George Soros heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Open Society, and George Soros on Globalization.

Reviews

George Soros has a heart of gold and resources to match. At the London School of Economics, Karl Popper's vision of the "open society" came to underlie Soros's political thinking. Soros settled in the United States in 1956. His success as a financial speculator of genius included his legendary 1992 bet against the pound sterling, which netted him more than $1 billion in a few weeks. After he amassed a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $7 billion, he turned his attention to a unique philanthropic goal -- promoting open, decent, democratic society throughout the world -- an effort to which he has contributed nearly $5 billion. Wags described him as the only individual with his own foreign policy and suggested during the Clinton era that Soros does what the American government would do if it had the money. By itself, his imaginative role in undermining the Soviet Union and nudging the nascent democracies developing throughout its former empire would qualify him as a secular saint.

In The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros's basic contention is that the Bush administration has deliberately and deceptively exploited the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in order to pursue radical policies "that the American public would not have otherwise tolerated." He views the Bush dream of American supremacy as unobtainable -- and a contradiction of America's traditional principles. Soros passionately believes that Bush's policy "endangers our values as well as our security." And because America is so powerful, he also argues, the Bush agenda also endangers the world.

Soros traces his sensitivity to the language of political extremism to his own background. "I grew up as a Jew in Hungary during World War II. I lived through both German and Soviet occupation and learned at an early age how political systems can affect your very survival. When I hear President Bush say that 'either you are with us or you are with the terrorists' I hear alarm bells." He has a similar reaction when John Ashcroft declares "to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." Soros declares, "this is not the America I chose as my home."

Even though such criticisms score many palpable but conventional hits on administration targets, Soros's positions are often muddled. He urges that the United States should have treated the Sept. 11 attacks not as acts of war but as crimes against humanity and that "crimes require police work, not military action." If language has meaning, this would have ruled out the American attack on Afghanistan. But at another point Soros writes, "the invasion of Afghanistan was justified by its role as the home base of al Qaeda."

Forced analogies do not help. In characterizing the drift of Bush policy-making away from America's normal ideological equilibrium in global diplomacy, Soros compares it to the stock market's boom-and-bust cycle. Use of terms -- such as "reflexivity," "radical fallibility," "the human uncertainty principle" and "fertile fallacies" -- that require an explanatory appendix also does not aid the cause of clarity.

Soros asserts as facts propositions that are debatable. Did the perpetrators behind Sept. 11 want the United States "to react the way we did"? Other "facts" are simply wrong. John Ashcroft has not "banned plea bargaining," as anyone recalling the fate of John Walker Lindh or following prosecution efforts in the Enron scandal would realize. At other times, Soros floats predictions that are almost certainly wrong -- for example, that the president's approval rating "is likely to sink as low as it had been high." Here Soros is stating that before the election Bush's approval rating will go lower than that of any previous president. Last month, Soros forecasted that the economy would hold at least through the elections. This makes his prediction about the president's popularity even more incomprehensible. All too often, Soros finds it sufficient to state his view without any sustained effort to support his position.

It is startling to read a man who considers himself something of a philosopher acknowledging that he was "not even aware of natural rights until I started studying" the neoconservative "view of the world." He believes that "Leo Strauss, who supposedly influenced Paul Wolfowitz and other neocons, cottoned on the first sentence of the declaration [of Independence] and derived, from the idea of self-evident truths the concept of natural rights," a concept that Soros believes "plays an important role in the ideology of American supremacists." He thinks that natural rights are "associated with conservative arguments and papal pronouncements" and that it is appropriate to distinguish between his concept of the open society and natural rights.

As the Columbia Encyclopedia states, "the classic expressions of natural rights are The English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), the First 10 Amendments of the Constitution of the United States (known as the Bill of Rights, 1791), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations (1948)." There is no opposition between the open society as expounded by Soros and the doctrine of natural rights.

Soros does not have either Henry Kissinger's talent for describing the complexities of the political world or Paul Krugman's ability to deploy relentless logic to skewer the Bush administration. Rather, his strength is in grasping the big picture, determining how he can make a difference, and succeeding in improving the world. He has pledged that "I shall do everything I can" to ensure that the president is defeated in this November's election. He has already contributed more than $12 million to that cause. Given Soros's track record, the president should be worried.

Reviewed by Daniel I. Davidson

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Soros has made it his "primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections." This aspiration is immediately clear from the outset of his new book. The founder of Soros Fund Management (and author of The Crisis of Global Capitalism, etc.) gives sweeping critiques of the current administration and shows how its post-9/11 policy has pointed the country in a direction that he believes will lead to ruin. The book's major shortcoming is that it fails to add anything particularly new to this project, and is not always convincing. It's not clear, for instance, why a pact of signatories to the Warsaw Declaration for the development of democracy would be more effective than the U.N. in getting nations to put the common good above national interest. To his credit, Soros accurately presents the important dimensions of the "Bush Doctrine" foreign policy and its vision of America's role in the world. He is able to incorporate his expertise in areas of international finance and to give some interesting and unique insights, such as seeing American supremacy as the boom part of a boom-bust cycle. But neither simple explication nor periodic nuggets of wisdom make this a particularly good read. Overall, the book is clear, but it will do little to persuade an attentive American audience that they should vote Bush out in 2004.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The stream of anti-Bush books has turned into a torrent. But where Alterman and Green's offering covers familiar territory in great detail, Soros' contribution is almost stunning in its simplicity.

Alterman, the author of What Liberal Media? [BKL F 1 03], and Green, a New York City Democrat, offer a critique of both the president and his policies, with one of their main premises being that Bush starts with conclusions and then finds facts with which to frame them. So how does he make decisions? According to the authors, by asking what the religious right wants, what big business wants, and what the neocons want, and then proceeding accordingly. Chapters on the environment, business fraud, civil liberties, race, education, and, of course, foreign policy offer myriad examples of the authors' theories on how Bush misleads. It's all presented in highly readable fashion, but with the awakening economy and the passage of the Medicare bill, some of the information will seem out date. Those familiar with the anti-Bush canon will find this entry closest to David Corn's Lies of George W. Bush [BKL O 1 03], but Alterman has a higher profile and will make a bigger splash on the news shows.

Soros, who has made headlines for donating millions of dollars to stop the reelection of George Bush, is a man who puts his money where his mouth is. With the publication of this book, he may find that his words are also a potent weapon for realizing his goal. The founder of a fund-management group, Soros uses the metaphor of the economic bubble to show that the Bush administration's foreign policy is based on assumptions that are not only incorrect and deceptive but also will eventually burst. Step-by-step, he exposes a foreign policy that he believes contradicts American principles and has no hope of obtaining its goals of supremacy. He pulls no punches: "I contend that the Bush administration has deliberately exploited September 11 in order to pursue policies that the American public would not have otherwise tolerated." Soros offers historical perspective, social theory, and his own keen observational skills to make his points. This may be the one anti-Bush book that reaches an audience beyond the Democratic amen corner. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1586482173
• ISBN 13: 9781586482176
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224