| It's the latter's "innocence", though, that draws Kishore Mahbubani into the arena of post-911 propositions being made to the United States of America, in much the manner of a 'causes of the revolt' essay written four-score and sixty-seven years ago by a Mutiny observer in Delhi. |
| Author of the provocative Can Asians Think?, Mahbubani was born to a partition-scattered Indian family in 1948 and rose to eminence in Singapore, the city-state he once represented at the United Nations and now guides as the dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. |
| To his mind, Beyond the Age Of Innocence says what must be said, not what will find a warm reception. |
| Yet, Mahbubani is a diplomat by instinct, and calibrates his voice in strategic nuance to ensure that he loses the attention of neither the tiger nor the eagle depicted glaring at each other on the cover jacket of the book. |
| The portrayal of America is suitably confetti-laced. It's an America that wants to "liberate rather than subjugate". So the planet's vulnerability to 5 per cent of the world's population sounds like just another shrug-worthy statistic at first, given his claim that "America has done more good for the rest of the world than any other society." |
| The big American idea? Hope. The hope "that one's fate is not determined at birth". |
| So what went wrong? Unlike Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington and the like, Mahbubani does not resort to the tsk-tsk 'patient on the couch' routine, typified by the assumption of an "" ahem "" Oriental failure to come to terms with the 18th century loss of world leadership after a millennium of success. |
| Mahbubani's lifelong multicultural exposure won't let him. Thank goodness. The result: a book free of religious reductionism. |
| The author hints, all the same, of forces at work to keep the civilizational rivalry uneven. Forces that must stop. What America mostly needs to recognize, argues Mahbubani, is the rest of the world's disillusionment with America's sense of justice. |
| Having deployed lofty ideals to strike overseas alliances for the Cold War, America let the more bristly of its allies down once it was over""without even knowing it. |
| Case in point: Afghanistan. |
| "... it is vital that American policymakers first liberate themselves from the belief that they should only be judged by their intentions," he cautions, "not the consequences of their actions." |
| This is not a new framework of analysis either, and it is a valid criticism that America often underestimates the popular value of justice beyond its own geographical borders. |
| In fact, Mahbubani could be accused of being equally map-moulded""in his case, South Asia fixated""in the way he focuses more on Kandahar than Jersuslem as a pre-911 nerve centre of anger evoked by perceptions of American injustice. |
| Feelings have only hardened since, the result of the post-911 War On Terror, and Mahbubani gives this another long sigh and shake of the head. |
| "The delegitimization of the arbitrary use of force was one of America's greatest contributions to the world," he writes, ruefully. |
| The remarkable part is Mahbubani idea of what America ought to do to get out of the mess. In broad terms, he suggests knocking heads together on the issue of justice""as widely seen. |
| In specific terms, he recommends the engagement of China to work things out in the larger world. |
| The Chinese connection begins to explain itself when you reach the part that nearly toppled me off my chair mid-sentence. The almost casual reference to the American spy plane that was shot down by the Chinese in early 2001. |
| It stopped me for a long think-break (over another cup of coffee). And it comes after several rumble-strips (no smooth read, this) on how ideological gaps have waxed and waned globally over the years, and what 911's strategic intent might have been. It's enough to make this book well worth the time. |
| If there's a last-legs or last-gasp signal of distress Mahbubani has detected anywhere, he doesn't say so, preferring not to let idle speculation on eventual scenarios prejudice his present proposition. |
| If there's something he appears to bet on, though, it's the corrective resilience of American policy, specifically in the area of power projection. |
| Even Tom Paine, after all, rallied his 18th century countrymen on the "common sense" of freedom from the arbitrary authority of a clumsy crown crafted by fallible folk far over the horizon. |
| BEYOND THE AGE OF INNOCENCE REBUILDING TRUST BETWEEN AMERICA AND THE WORLD |
| Kishore Mahbubani Public Affairs Pages: xx + 235; Price: $17.50 |
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