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Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World BY KISHORE MAHBUBANI, [New York: Public Affairs/Perseus, 2005. xx + 236 pp. Hardcover: US$ 26]
Mr. Kishore Mahbubani is the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, following a very distinguished career in the Singapore Foreign Service which culminated in two terms as Singapore's Ambassador to the United Nations (New York). He was Permanent secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1993-1998. His latest book, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, lies, at first glance, in the tradition of a seminal American work, first published in 1959.
In that year, the prominent American historian William Appleman Williams (1921-1990) first published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, new ed., (New York/London: Norton, 1988). Its impact was modest at the time of its publication, which also served to limit the controversy it caused. Criticised by some as a Stalinist tract at the time, during the height of McCarthyism, or perhaps worse, as an irrelevance, it is recognised today as the classic work on the economic interpretation of American foreign policy. One of the themes explored by the late Professor Williams was the tragedy of American attempts to make a better place of the world, or at least of individual nations in America's own image. Tragedy because America, with the best of intentions and the highest ideals, had transformed countries like Cuba, for example, from a Spanish colony to an American protectorate, had grown the local sugar industry, fostered representative government and the rule of law, and so on, while remaining at the same time oblivious to the other, more controversial, effects of American policy in other countries.
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy begins by exploring a reality which Americans glimpsed only vaguely, but a reality which nonetheless threatened to impinge on the idealised "consensus" American conception of American power, its use and deployment. From a Cuban viewpoint, America failed to deliver what it promised. It fell to Cuba and Cubans to create for themselves the ideal which had been promised-enjoyment of the right of selfdetermination and a modern and balanced Cuban political economy. In short, America created Castro and the Cuban crisis of 1958 to 1961, and...