LONDON: British journalist and think-tank fellow Anatol Lieven wrote his book America Right or Wrong as a wake-up call for the United States to curb its nationalism or face the consequences.
For his trouble, Lieven received hate mail, was derided on internet blogs and, in possibly the cruellest cut of all, was labelled ‘anti-American’ in a review in the New York Times.
“It was actively slanderous,” he fumed almost a year later.
“While America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, it also keeps a family of demons in the cellar,” he writes in the book, published in 2004 and just re-issued in paperback.
“Usually kept under certain restraints, these demons were released by 9/11,” he adds, seeing the attacks as the trigger that unleashed the ‘dark side’ of America.
The Republican Party of President George W. Bush, who has proclaimed the right of the United States to intervene around the world for preventive war and to foster democracy, should rename itself the ‘American Nationalist Party’, Lieven writes.
“That was what you might call a ‘minor provocation’,” he laughed during a recent interview in London.
Lieven, 45, does not hate America. He lives in Washington where he is senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. However, he sees serious problems afflicting the world’s only superpower.
“At the moment America is just overextended and riding for a fall,” he told Reuters.
Lieven hasn’t finished with America. For a book on American strategy, he is teaming up with a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, John Hulsman, whom Lieven describes as ‘the last of the Eisenhower Republicans’.
“I am quite convinced that if (US President Dwight) Eisenhower were to come back today he would have written a review in support of my book,” Lieven joked.
“Eisenhower argued again and again for calm, for restraint, for understanding your enemy, for distinguishing between different kinds of enemies and for not uniting enemies against you,” he said of the former general who served as president in the 1950s.—Reuters
