42.A better title, Shiina quipped privately to Emmott, would have been, ‘The Japanese people’s amazing ability not to be disappointed.’ ‘The Sun Also Rises’, 8 October 2005; Emmott, Rivals, p. 90.
43.During a painful thirty-second handshake, attendants look on nervously. ‘Do you recognize me? Bill Emmott. Lenin! Do you still think I’m a communist?’ ‘No, I never thought that’, Berlusconi reassures him as he moves away. ‘That’s very generous’, Emmott replies. ‘We all have our part to play’, replies the former prime minister. ‘Exactly. Exactly.’ Girlfriend in a Coma (2012). ‘One man has been chiefly responsible for making this old Asia hand so engaged and fascinated by his country. His name is Silvio Berlusconi’. Bill Emmott, Good Italy, Bad Italy: Why Italy Must Conquer Its Demons to Face the Future, New Haven 2012, p. i.
44.LTCM ‘did not borrow more than a typical investment bank … nor was it especially risky’. Hedge funds were fine. ‘They should be welcomed with open arms’: ‘A New Approach to Financial Risk’, 17 October 1998.
45.For surveys by Crook see ‘Trial and Error: The Third World’, 23 September 1989; ‘The IMF and the World Bank’, 12 October 1991; ‘Globalisation and Its Critics’, 29 September 2001. Many other editors helped, including Frances Cairncross, who wrote favourably on globalization’s environmental, technological and managerial dimensions. Her reports for the Economist turned into Costing the Earth (1993) and the Death of Distance (1997).
46.Weisberg, ‘Tweed Jungle’, Vanity Fair, June 1993.
47.It mocked protestors for taking their stand in such a successfully globalized city, ‘home to Microsoft and Boeing, birthplace of global crazes “Frasier” and fancy coffee’: ‘Storm over Globalisation’, 27 November 1999.
48.Environmental regulations, left unspecified, might be needed where ‘greater good’ was involved, but determining when would be ‘tough’: ‘The Real Losers’, 11 December 1999. Covers carrying the image of a poor child with dark skin and raised eyes became a visual trope in pro-globalisation pieces. See ‘The Case for Globalisation’, 23 September 2000.
49.‘Pro Logo: The Case for Brands’, 8 September 2001; Naomi Klein, 15 September 2001. ‘Pro Logo’ argued that brands were a blessing, ensuring quality, convenience, choice and consumer protection and accountability. And people liked them. A letter from Klein appeared the next week. But this was buried in the issue of 15 September 2001. The next time she merited a verbal flogging, she had been demoted to a small column in the business section where the level of threat she now posed was indicated by the title, ‘Face Value: Why Naomi Klein Needs to Grow Up’, 9 November 2002.
50.‘Americans without Bank Accounts: Into the Fold’, 6 May 2006. El Banco de Nuestra Comunidad ‘seemed to be getting it right’, Emmott wrote in 2006. As a result of the crisis, it collapsed. By 2012, only one bank had survived, Mitchell Bank in Wisconsin, and this had a strength rating of D and a troubled asset ratio of 72, when the national average was 12: Weiss Research, ‘The X List: Strongest and Weakest Banks and Thrifts in the US’, March 2012; Investigative Reporting Workshop: ‘How Healthy Is This Bank?’ banktracker.investigativereportingworkshop.org.
51.Bill Emmott, ‘Crisis, What Crisis? Enough Kerfuffle, It’s Just a Slowdown’, The Guardian, 12 August 2008; Emmott’s missed predictions in 2008 were also partly due, he said, to having ‘spent too much time thinking about Japan’. Bill Emmott, ‘I Wasn’t Right. But That’s OK’, The Guardian, 3 January 2009.
52.Emmott, Japan’s Global Reach, pp. 208–9, 199.
53.The greatest challenge for the West, Emmott argued, was ‘fighting the domestic backlash against globalisation’. Not everyone on the commission agreed. Paul Wolfowitz predicted that without hard power ‘the next century could eclipse the twentieth as the bloodiest in human history’ and ‘preponderance is a wasting asset’ – ‘if we don’t make good use of the next ten years, events may begin to spin out of our control’: Emmott et al., Managing the International System, pp. 13, 17–18, 44, 51. David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission.
54.‘Who Will Save Rwanda?’, 25 June 1994.
55.‘First, Catch Your Gunman’, 19 June 1993; ‘To Bosnia’s Rescue?’, 24 April 1993.
56.‘Stumbling into War’, 27 March 1999.
57.‘Victim of Serbia – or NATO?’, 3 April 1999; ‘Defining NATO’s Aims’, 24 April 1999. ‘Making the Best of a Bungled War’, 8 May 1999.
58.‘Never mind the genuine mistakes … any dispassionate accounting of the conflict is almost certain to find the allies guilty of some terrible crimes.’ ‘Messy War, Messy Peace’, 12 June 1999.
59.Kosovo strengthened the US-led Western alliance at a time of drift, given the collapse of the Soviet enemy, while revealing replacements for it: dictators like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and those who procured them weapons. ‘Other People’s Wars’, 31 July 1999. For Emmott’s regret at being too slow to call for intervention in the Balkan wars – ‘We left it for too long. In hindsight, I think it was wrong’ – see his lunch with the Financial Times, 10 March 2006.
60.Peter David, Triumph in the Desert: The Challenge, the Fighting, the Legacy, New York 1991.
61.‘The Day the World Changed’, 15 September 2001; ‘The Battle Ahead’, 22 September 2001; ‘So Far, So Good’, 29 September 2001.
62.‘Propaganda War’, 6 October 2001; ‘A Heart-Rending but Necessary War’, 3 November 2001; ‘Peter David’, 19 May 2012.
63.‘Bush and the Axis of Evil’, 2 February 2002; ‘Case for War’, 3 August 2002; ‘Case for War – Revisited’, 19 July 2003.
64.‘Why War Would be Justified’, 22 February 2003.
65.Rodenbeck, Middle East bureau chief from 2000 to 2015, is the author of a history of Cairo, where his father was a professor of comparative literature: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious, New York 1999. Contributing regularly to the New York Review of Books on Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Islam, and the Arab Spring, he has used its columns to question US policy, if never the good intentions behind them. See ‘The Occupation’, New York Review of Books, 14 August 2003: ‘The messiness is more a result of prewar misconceptions, wartime miscalculations and postwar misrule.’ Unlike some of his colleagues, he has not just taken lessons from neoconservatives but given them some, too. For his disagreement with Bernard Lewis, see ‘The Muslim Past’, New York Times, 25 June 2010. Bill Emmott, interviewed by the author.
66.Bill Emmott, ‘Present at the Creation’, 29 June 2002.
67.Ibid.
68.Ibid.
69.Ibid.
70.Bill Emmott, 20:21 Vision, p. 16.
71.‘Such is the legacy of his misadventure in Iraq, of the continued instability of Afghanistan, of the worldwide decline in the reputation of the United States during his administration, many would rank him as having been the worst American president since Richard Nixon, or Herbert Hoover’, though ‘it has not been for want of ambition’. Emmott, Rivals: How the Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, Orlando 1998, p. 1.
72.Ibid., 255.
73.This, according to a senior editor, was the reason Emmott gave Mallaby for refusing the survey, parts of which ran later in the New Republic. Mallaby, whose father was British ambassador to Berlin and Paris, and is married to the current editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, was hardly a heretic on economics and empire. See his subsequent post–9/11 reflection, ‘The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States and the Case for American Empire’, Foreign Affairs, March 2002.
74.Maggie Brown, ‘Business as Usual’, Guardian, 27 March 2006; Ian Burrell, ‘John Micklethwait: Great Minds Like a Think’, Independent, 8 January 2007.
75.‘The naming of Mr. Micklethwait is an indication of where the Economist expects to find its future growth.’ Katharine Q Seelye, ‘The Economist Names New Editor in Chief’, New York Times, 23 March 2006.
76.Burrell, ‘John Micklethwait’, Independent, January 8, 2007; John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A Future Pe
rfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization, London 2000, p. 314.
77.‘Special Report: American Politics’, 3 January 2004; John Mickleth-wait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Why America Is Different, London 2004.
78.That enthusiasm endured: in 2018, Wooldridge published Capitalism in America, albeit with a new writing partner, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.
79.Micklethwait and Wooldridge, Future Perfect, pp. xxii–xxiii, 232.
80.Ibid., pp. 73, 61, 32, 90, 80, 43.
81.‘Asked where he wants to be in five years, Espinosa [a young engineer at a GE plastics plant in Cartagena, Spain] points at the back of the plant manager and says “in his office”. A quarter of a century ago, another young engineer, when asked a similar question in an evaluation, cockily put “chief executive officer of General Electric”. His name was Jack Welch.’ Ibid., pp. 139, 309.
82.Ibid., p. 97.
83.Ibid., p. 251.
84.Ibid., pp. 258–60.
85.Ibid., pp. 233, 245. It is worth noting that – to judge only from the fulsome examples given by Micklethwait and Wooldridge – this new, rising and broadening class seemed mainly to consist of the so-called older elites’ children.
86.Future Perfect, pp. xxv, 113.
87.‘Fair trade is piffle. In fact, unfair trade is usually an oxymoron.’ The Company, pp. 146–47, 152.
88.Companies ‘gave back’ by hiring people, paying wages, selling them products. ‘Problems in the future may stem less from what companies do to society, than from what society does to companies.’ Ibid., pp. 8, 181, 171, 170, 182.
89.Micklethwait and Wooldridge, Right Nation, pp. 72–73, 314, 345. For context, see ‘An Exchange between Max Beloff and Irving Kristol’, Encounter, June 1987.
90.Micklethwait and Wooldridge, Future Perfect, p. xiii.
91.Right Nation, pp. 396, 294; John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, New York 2009, pp. 31–54.
92.In the Economist, see ‘When Opium Can Be Benign’, 1 February 2007.
93.God is Back, pp. 21, 16, 25, 1–2, 21.
94.Katharine Q. Seelye, ‘The Economist Names New Editor in Chief’, New York Times, 23 March 2006.
95.Burrell, ‘John Micklethwait’, Independent, 8 January 2007; Burrell, ‘John Micklethwait: “Republicans Had the Advantage, but They Wasted It With Sleaze”’, Independent, 3 November 2008.
96.‘Danger Time for America’, 14 January 2006. Wall Street was still burdened by excessive red tape. ‘What’s Wrong with Wall Street’, 25 November 2006. Late in 2007, it saw a possible credit crunch taking shape. But this was after Britain’s Northern Rock received its first bailout. Even then, the problem was a consumer spending slowdown, not a collapse of the banking sector. ‘Getting Worried Downtown’, 17 November 2007.
97.Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, New York 2013, p. 26; John Authers, The Fearful Rise of Markets: Global Bubbles, Synchronized Meltdowns, and How to Prevent Them in the Future, London 2010, pp. 2–3, 18, 95. For the financial, regulatory and geopolitical dynamics of the 2008 crash, see Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, New York 2018.
98.‘Capitalism at Bay’, 16 October 2008.
99.‘I Want Your Money’, 27 September 2008; ‘The Credit Crunch: Saving the System’, ‘Rescuing the Banks: We Have a Plan’, ‘Global Finance: Lifelines’, 9 October 2008.
100.‘Hank to the Rescue’, 13 September 2008. Obama would dispel ‘myths’ about the US just by being president: ‘it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein’; at home, ‘he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wounds left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism’: ‘It’s Time’, 1 November 2008.
101.New Labour had many faults after thirteen years, but the financial crisis was not one of them. ‘Britain was always likely to get mauled in the credit crunch’: ‘Bagehot’, 16 October 2008.
102.See, ‘The Comeback Keynes’, Time, 23 October 2008; ‘The New Big Old Thing in Economics’, Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2009; Martin Wolf, ‘Keynes Offers Us the Best Way to Think about the Financial Crisis’, Financial Times, 23 December 2008.
103.‘Capitalism is the best economic system man has invented yet’: ‘Capitalism at Bay’, 16 October 2008.
104.Governments must bail out, but not exert control over, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the US and Northern Rock in the UK. ‘Inside the Banks’, 24 January 2009; ‘A Short History of Modern Finance: Step by Step’, 16 October 2008.
105.‘The Banks Battle Back’, 29 May 2010; ‘Bare-Knuckle in Basel’, 29 May 2010; ‘Save the City’, 7 January 2012.
106.‘Bailing out Detroit would be a bad use of public money’: ‘Saving Detroit’, 15 November 2008.
107.13 February 2010; 8 May 2010; ‘Sometimes, Austerity Makes Sense’, 20 December 2010; ‘Pick Your Poison’, 17 June 2010.
108.‘Who Should Govern Britain?’ 29 April 2010. ‘Tremble, Leviathan’, World in 2011, 22 November 2010; ‘Reforming the State: The Unlikely Revolutionary’, 12 August 2010.
109.‘Reforming the State: The Unlikely Revolutionary’, 12 August 2010.
110.Humans possessed inherently unequal abilities: some were geniuses who ‘spark a corporate renaissance’, others on welfare, ‘inhabiting a world of concrete events and immediate satisfactions’. Adrian Wooldridge, ‘Stop the War on Wealth, We Need These Rich Few’, Sunday Times, 12 August 2002.
111.‘Freedom Fighter’, 13 April 2013.
112.‘Blood and Oil’, 26 February 2011. Rejecting the ‘racist assertion that Arabs cannot be democratic’, it asserted ‘Arabs are being asked to shed the culture of victimhood, take responsibility for themselves and uncork the creativity of their young’: ‘Crunch Time in Libya’, 23 April 2011.
113.‘No Illusions’, 19 March 2011; ‘Crunch Time in Libya’, 23 April 2011; ‘Going, Going’, 27 August 2011.
114.‘How to Set Syria Free’, 11 February 2012.
115.‘Mr Obama and his allies blinked.’ ‘An American threat, especially over WMD, must count for something; it is hard to see how Mr Obama can eat his words without the superpower losing credibility with the likes of Iran and North Korea’: ‘Hit Him Hard’, 31 August 2013.
116.‘Fight This War, Not the Last’, 7 September 2013. ‘Now every tyrant knows that a red line set by the leader of the free world is really just a threat to ask legislators how they feel about enforcing it’: ‘The Weakened West’, 21 September 2013. A year later, Micklethwait and Wooldridge added that the West needed to reinvent itself at home to see off the threat of autocratic China and Russia – by slashing entitlements, tearing up regulations, tackling corruption and stoking innovation – in The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, New York 2014.
117.‘Surprisingly sensitive about their international reputation’, Russians ought to pay for their misdeeds. No energy deals, travel restrictions, exclusion from OECD, WTO and G8, with NATO extended post–haste to Georgia and Ukraine: ‘Russia Resurgent’, 16 August 2008.
118.‘Putin’s Inferno’, 20 February 2014; ‘Britain, France and the United States have sometimes broken international law. But Mr Putin has emptied the law of significance’: ‘Kidnapped by the Kremlin’, 8 March 2014; ‘Mr Putin has driven a tank over the existing world order’: ‘The New World Order’, 23 March 2014; ‘Insatiable’, 19 April 2014; ‘The Long Game’, 4 September 2014; ‘A Web of Lies’, 1 October 2014.
119.Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West, London 2008, p 7; Edward Lucas, Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West, London 2012, pp. 4–5.
120.Lucas conceded that economic shock therapy in the 1990s had entailed ‘hardship and uncertainty for many’. But this was not the fault of Boris Yeltsin, a flawed ye
t honourable man, still less the IMF or World Bank which had devised restructuring operations for him: ‘the real culprits were Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev’. Putin won praise for, if nothing else, introducing a 13 per cent flat tax on income in 2001: Lucas, New Cold War, pp. 53, 42.
121.Lucas, New Cold War, p. 7; Lucas, Deception, pp. 4–5.
122.Ibid., 16, 279. Lucas, New Cold War, pp. 77, 284, 296, 305. ‘Counter-Attacking the Kremlin’, 26 April 2007. Lucas exchanges letters with ‘prisoners of conscience’ in Russia, and promotes embattled liberal causes in the Economist, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail; see ‘CEPA Stratcom Program’, Center for European Policy Analysis, CEPA.org.
123.Give drone assassinations to the Army, not CIA, and have a ‘secret court’ sign off on them. ‘Flight of the Drones’, ‘Drones and the Law’, 8 October 2011.
124.‘The Right Reaction’, 11 December 2010.
125.‘European governments should not kick up a fuss about American spying’, or offer Snowden asylum: 6 July 2013.
126.Sachs justified shock therapy with the homily, ‘you don’t try to cross a chasm in two jumps’. 13 January 1990.
127.One reason to be optimistic about Latin America was that ‘the involvement of foreign investors in domestic capital markets, which will be a permanent feature of the region, creates a new discipline on governments’. Another was private pensions, as in Chile, though it ‘had the (debatable) luxury of completing the toughest part of its reforms in a non-democratic environment’. In 1995, ‘Venezuela still fails to acknowledge that high-spending populism does not work’: ‘Latin American Finance’, 5 December 1995; ‘Caspian Gamble’, 7 February 1998. Only tweaks to the system were possible. Citing Larry Summers, she called the prospect of designing a new financial architecture with a global capital market, a stable, regulated financial system, and national sovereignty, the ‘impossible trinity’. ‘Global Finance: Time for a Redesign?’, 30 January 1999; ‘Flying on One Engine’, 20 September 2003; ‘The Great Thrift Shift’, 24 September 2005.
128.Ed Lucas, interviewed by the author.
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