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 anti-hero
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 newspaperheadline 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 Japanesesystem, 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 long-standing 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 buried 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 geo-intellectual 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 their 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 fromthe 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 Anwar 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.