The Italian prime minister had more than petulant words for the paper. ‘Why Silvio Berlusconi Is Unfit to Lead Italy’ in 2001 – on his legal problems and links to organized crime, which appeared just before the spring elections – sparked a bitter row with the tanned media mogul turned politician. Berlusconi sued for libel, twice, and Il Giornale, a Milan newspaper owned by his brother Paolo, derided ‘The E-Communist’ and compared its goateed editor to Lenin. Away when the decision to run this material was taken, Emmott came to own it – obscuring the fact that Clive Crook chose it, Tim Laxton and David Lane researched it, and Xan Smiley wrote it. Much of Emmott’s career since 2006 has nevertheless been devoted to sparring with Berlusconi, as well as browbeating the country into market reforms: a 2012 documentary, Girlfriend in a Coma, shows Emmott doing his best Michael Moore, accosting Berlusconi in a crowded salon of ‘elites’.43
Finance and Globalization
The Economist did not ignore the financial bubbles that punctuated the New Economy years – in sovereign debt, dotcom stocks and housing – up to 2008, but it minimized them as relatively small bumps on the road to globalized capitalism. Mexico, East Asia and Russia were among the hardest hit by interlinked currency and debt crises. When Moscow defaulted in 1998, triggering the collapse of Long Term Capital Management – the heavily exposed hedge fund that lost $4.6 billion in four months – the paper defended the computer wizards whose models had failed to foresee this: ‘it is pleasant to mock the Nobel Laureates who helped found LTCM, but much of this mockery clouds the truth’, for ‘the question arises whether recent events are ever likely to be repeated.’44 But it also went on the attack against any who used such examples of ‘market failure’ to criticize, question or hold up globalization, with deputy editor Clive Crook leading the charge.45
Crook was thirty-eight in 1993, but looked ‘more like a teenager in the grey flannel slacks, white oxford-cloth shirt, and blue pullover sweater that are his only known costume’.46 ‘Fearsomely brilliant’, ‘arguing for Free Trade in this gruff Lancashire accent’, he was ‘the Manchester School come to life’; others called him the ‘intellectual Godfather’, with Emmott by turns ‘enthralled’ and ‘intimidated’, as editors asked (on points of doctrine), ‘Is Clive ok with this?’ Penning the feistiest articles in favour of trade liberalization, Crook sensed that 1999 was the moment to ‘come out fighting’ at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Holding high the banner of the WTO, the Economist exhorted the national governments gathered there to make a better sales pitch to citizens whose ‘support for free trade is weak at best’. Trade reform ‘was not irreversible’, after all, and the last round in Uruguay in 1994 urgently needed updating to cover farming, services, finance, telecoms, computing and transport. ‘Anti-globo’ protestors, meanwhile – over a hundred thousand of whom took to the streets, from environmentalists to organized labour – should be ashamed.47
One cover showed a nameless Indian girl clutching a blanket, her glistening eyes raised in accusation, under the title ‘The Real Losers from Seattle’. Five billion poor people in the developing world would suffer if greens, trade unions and anarchists got their way. India, ‘home of our cover child’, showed how growth and welfare had improved in tandem after the country rejected ‘decades of socialist anti-globalisation’. To demand that trade agreements include labour standards or child welfare safeguards or environmental protections was totally misguided. These would ‘not give that Indian child a better life’, and ‘tying trade to rules that forbid her from working will not help her either: that way lies greater poverty, not a better education.’48 In a sign of how concerned Crook and other editors were about the growth of anti-globalization sentiment in these years (a fact obscured by what came after), on 11 September 2001 – the day two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan – the Economist on newsstands had nothing to do with Middle Eastern terrorists. In red, white and black, the cover read ‘Pro Logo’, and savaged the Canadian activist Naomi Klein for her ‘utterly wrong-headed’ No Logo (1999), the best-selling ‘bible of the anti-globalisation movement’.49
For his part, Emmott spied untrammelled vistas for financial innovation until the end. In his last signed piece in 2006, he hailed US banks for entering sectors served only by payday lenders and pawnbrokers. Citibank signed an agreement with 7-Eleven to put cash machines in 5,500 stores, while credit card companies ‘targeted the unbanked and under-banked’ – poor minorities and immigrants, who stood to gain from access to cheaper credit. (Banks anticipated culling $9 billion in fees from them, and that was ‘before any cross-selling of other products’.) The subprime mortgage crisis hit the next year. Among the community banks Emmott cited as paragons, just one limped into 2012.50 Yet the crash barely checked his stride. In 2008 ‘Crisis, What Crisis? Enough Kerfuffle, It’s Just a Slowdown’ appeared in the Guardian. Five months went by before a retraction, and as the title suggests, this was no standard mea culpa: ‘I Wasn’t Right. But That’s OK.’ A sense of civic duty had led him to ‘overly optimistic economic predictions’, he explained, in an attempt ‘to argue that we risked talking ourselves into recession’.51
America’s New World Order
Emmott had predicted a ‘golden age’ of peace and prosperity when he took over the Economist soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘US defence spending will fall to 3 percent of GDP’, freeing up $125 billion a year to spend on health, education, debt repayment. ‘American troops will be withdrawn from virtually all overseas bases’, with foreign investment doing the rest – in a ‘world of three billion new capitalists, workers, managers, inventors, investors and traders’.52 A year on, he still saw the Pax Americana as uniquely consensual. Proof of its success, he argued in 1994 before the Trilateral Commission – a ‘discussion forum’ for business and political elites in the US, Europe and Japan, set up in 1973 – was the spread of ‘globalisation, by choice’ based on ‘voluntary decisions of governments.’53 Butter, not guns, was the order of the day.
In the event, Emmott’s editorship witnessed nonstop American interventions abroad, which flew in the face of his forecast, and led to a falling out with his foreign editor Johnny Grimond. Until 1989 Grimond edited the American Survey, as perhaps the strongest and most vocal opponent of Beedham on staff when the latter retired. Grimond was also one of the few journalists with ties to the political party whose history was intertwined with the Economist: his father, Jo Grimond, led the Liberals from 1956 to 1967; his grandmother, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, was president of the Liberal Party; Asquith was a great-grandfather. A graduate of Eton and Oxford, who stood for parliament himself in 1970, Grimond was a careful guardian of the house style, and seemed well attuned to Emmott. In 1993, both signed off on the US mission to Somalia and after some hesitation to Rwanda in 1994.54
But by far the most significant military actions of the period came against the former communist federation of Yugoslavia, as it fractured along ethnic lines; at least at first, the Economist was not just hesitant, but critical of the aerial bombings NATO led in 1993 and 1999, a stance almost without precedent and so far without repetition. In both cases, Grimond wrote the main leaders. Bosnia was not a genocide but a civil war between Muslims, Serbs and Croats, he wrote, on whom outsiders ‘could impose a peace, if at all, only with resources of soldiers and willpower they do not have’. Better to send food and medicine but peacekeepers only ‘where there is peace to keep’. ‘Serbs, brutal as they are, are not exterminating Muslims as Nazis exterminated Jews.’55 Six years later, Grimond doubted the legality as well as strategic sense behind the more intensive bombardment of Serbia, whose rationale was to stop the genocide of Albanians in Kosovo. ‘NATO’s first unambiguous attack on a sovereign state could set an awkward precedent.’56 Did China have the right to attack India to protect Muslims in Janmu or Kashmir? What about Russia, whose rampage in Chechnya was so horrific? ‘So far, the West’s war against Serbia has been a shambles. The humanitarian catastrophe it was de
signed to avert has merely been intensified’ while, ‘dazzled by technology and obsessed with avoiding casualties of their own, the allies seem unable to hurt, let alone destroy, Serbia’s army. Meanwhile, the list of accidents – innocents bombed, aircraft lost – grows longer.’57 Over time, this position softened: ‘the West was not wrong in principle to intervene, whatever the legal position’, reasoned the Economist by April, though it still insisted the bombing was doing more harm than good.58
Emmott had deferred to his more experienced foreign editor during the conflict, but doubts set in soon after, as the glow of victory cast it in a new light – and senior British and American officials pelted the paper with angry letters, stunned by its uncharacteristic criticism. By July, Emmott had reconsidered his foreign policy. ‘The post-communist, post-Kosovo world now taking shape will not be an end-of-history sort of place in which all good democrats can put their feet up. It will be a world of clashing interests and outrageous atrocities, in which democrats will have to get involved.’59 Emmott then demoted Grimond to lead the Britain section, and gave the Bagehot columnist his job. For a world that must be made safe for democracy, Peter David was a better fit: passionate Zionist, whose Lithuanian Jewish parents moved to England from South Africa as critics of apartheid in 1960, Beedham had hired him to cover the Middle East in 1984. David felt so strongly about the part America played in the region, he dedicated a coffee-table book to the glories of the first Gulf War in 1991, Triumph in the Desert, prefaced by General Colin Powell, with photos of smiling marines hugging grateful Kuwaitis.60 It was David who set the tone of foreign coverage after 11 September 2001.
Reacting to the terrorist attacks that day with intense patriotic feeling, Economist covers depicted jets, helicopters, tanks and other military hardware against smoke, sand and billowing flags for the next three weeks, as titles grew larger and more guttural: from 15 September on, ‘The Day the World Changed’, ‘The Battle Ahead’, ‘Closing In’. Articles spoke of ‘lost innocence’, ‘implacable evil’, an attack more infamous than Pearl Harbor, and asked if ‘anything will ever be the same?’ On 22 September it called for war, without yet knowing where, or who, it would strike. ‘It will be long. It will cause anguish and arguments. It will involve more casualties. It is as hard to define the exact objective as to tell whether or when that objective has been achieved.’ The US-led Western alliance would prove its worth beyond doubt by sending ground troops to wherever that ground turned out to be: ‘America’s allies in NATO have proclaimed their willingness to stand up and be counted by invoking for the first time its Article 5 on mutual defence.’ ‘America must demand, and receive, the tangible support it implies.’61
When Afghanistan emerged as the target, the paper ran with apple-cheeked Afghans staring up from headlines, as if the Economist were a charity solemnly asking donors to save the children by blowing them up. It pressed President George W. Bush not to stop at al-Qaeda there, but to bring down the Taliban too, a case of regime change in which ‘permanent obligations need not be incurred’.62 Seventeen years later, the US was still at war in Afghanistan, with no end to its mission in sight, unable to secure the garrisoned capital of Kabul and losing ground to the Pathan rebels outside it. Before Operation Enduring Freedom was even underway, however, the Bush White House had begun planning for the second Gulf War.
The Economist backed each stage of the build-up to it – applauding Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002 as ‘remarkable’ and ‘brave’, stirring up fears that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (‘aggressive, cruel and reckless … remove Mr. Hussein before he gets his bomb’), and then rationalizing the failure to discover any afterwards (‘both at the time, and in retrospect, the decision to go to war rather than to wait was justified’).63 In the newsroom, Crook backed David at meetings and in the editorial process, inserting as much flammable material into articles as possible. Another recalled David referring to ‘classified CIA material’ he had seen – provided by Russia, and claiming Iraqis had supposedly visited Moscow to buy nuclear technology and rocket launchers. ‘It was very convincing stuff.’ Outside St James, these same editors somehow interpreted the millions of anti-war protestors in New York, London and elsewhere as, ‘if anything, even keener on “regime change” than the British or American governments’.64
Emmott denied there had been no debate. He organized special discussions between editors to get disagreements ‘out in the open’ – estimating the overall tally for and against at ‘60–40’, with senior editors Crook, David, Smiley, Micklethwait and Edwina Moreton, diplomatic and deputy foreign editor, in favour of the war; Barbara Smith, Grimond and Max Rodenbeck, Middle East bureau chief, spoke out against. Still, Emmott acknowledged that these debates took place with the expectation the answer ‘was already there’, and that ‘I and Peter and Clive would endorse an invasion’. 65
In fact, Emmott had already vaulted past his subordinates, producing a blanket justification for all imperial actions on the part of the US now and in the future – perhaps in psychological overcompensation for his dereliction during the Balkan wars. Its title a reprise of Dean Acheson’s triumphalist account of his role in constructing the American world order in the launch to the Cold War, ‘Present at the Creation’ was Emmott’s twenty-eight-page survey in June 2002 making the case for a pre-emptive strike in Iraq, in which he reimagined the decade since the end of the Cold War as one of ‘hesitance’, ‘declining interest in foreign affairs’, Americans acting by ‘improvisation, with no clear sense of purpose or coherent strategy, and a rather short attention span’. Then 9/11 intervened, forcing the US to recognize tasks as Herculean as any in 1945: after ‘happy victories in Afghanistan’, there were ‘rogue states developing weapons of mass destruction’, ‘violent militancy in Central Asia’, the need for ‘nation-building in Iraq’, ‘pressure on Iran and Pakistan’, ‘encouraging China to toe the line’, keeping ‘one eye on Indonesia’, ‘training armies and police forces … in the more than 60 countries where al-Qaeda is said to have cells’.66 Instead of bringing home its 250,000 soldiers and closing its 725 overseas bases, the US needed more of both. Since ‘America’s special national interest’ was the ‘closest match to a world interest’, providing ‘more trade, more investment, more security, more democracy’, its continued presence overseas would be welcome. The long arc of globalization still bent towards peace, he believed, even when it looked like it might be taking a detour. Free trade ‘answered the criticisms of country building: it is a way of helping countries help themselves’, while multilateral bodies like an international court of justice ‘can usefully supplement such police actions as well as reduce their costs’.67
Emmott thanked the leading historians of grand strategy and international relations Paul Kennedy, John Lewis Gaddis and Graham Allison for feedback on this manifesto, and listed a bibliography of foreign policy mandarins with ties to the White House and the State Department: Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Walter Russell Meade, Donald Kagan, Richard Haass, Joseph Nye, Adam Joffe, John Bolton, Samantha Power. Emmott outdid his sages, however. Both more optimistic and more ambitious about the potential for America to remake the world in its image, he predicted invading Iraq would yield peace between Israel and Palestine, bring moderates to power in Iran, and give ‘a new start for America with the rest of the Arab world’. A ‘radically warmer relationship with Russia’ was already evident, and in exchange for ‘more western investment in oil and gas’, it would hunt down jihadis, share intelligence, sign arms treaties, back a missile defence shield, and ‘make America’s military access to Central Asia [bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan] permanent’. Moscow was also prepared to help out on the UN Security Council, where the US needed its cooperation on authorization votes and weapons inspectors. In a suitably cynical conclusion to this effusion of goodwill, he admitted this was for show, to speed up the timetable for war. ‘There will be a multilateral process. It will fail. And then America will invade.’68 For thirty-two wee
ks after this, the paper dutifully repeated the demand UN inspectors be given a chance.
If victory in Iraq was even more spectacular than in Afghanistan – the Baathist regime crushed in three weeks of shock and awe – so was the insurgency and civil war that followed. The failure of both invasions to yield secure, stable democracies never caused Emmott to question the fundamental morality of American power – ‘its ultimately self-denying purpose’, its ‘blend of opportunity, knowledge and freedom’.69 Afghanistan and Iraq were success stories. The US was ‘not a true hegemon’, nor ‘a true policeman’. ‘It is like a giant elder brother, a source of reassurance, trust and stability for weaker members of the family, and nervousness and uncertainty for any budding bullies.’70 Only after stepping down did he criticize this sibling, who had turned out to be rather troubled. ‘Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness’, he wrote in 2008 about the man he once put in heroic profile on the cover of the Economist. Even then, Emmott was nostalgic about Bush’s ‘grandest of grand foreign-policy strategies, seeking nothing less than a transformation of the Middle East and Central Asia’, with ‘democracy, or at least accountability, replacing dictatorship. But it collapsed in ruins.’71 For all his hand-wringing, and casting about for new champions of globalization in India or China, however, Emmott saw no alternative: ‘America is the one country from whom an intervention or retaliation would be feared’, he reasoned, now about Asia. ‘Even after the Iraqi disaster, America should be seen as a stabilizing force.’72
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