Last week, while the Bush administration announced its bailout plan for the airline industry, New York Comptroller Alan Hevesi announced that the city's US$80 billion pension fund planned to buy US$800 million in US stocks. Public retirement funds elsewhere around the country are doing the same thing -- "to show confidence," as a Hevesi spokesman put it.
Now I ask you: Is there something about all this that is familiar and odd at the same time? Manipulating the share market with public funds, throwing money at companies without restructuring plans (and possibly taking a government stake in them), letting debt-ridden corporations accumulate stock to keep the market up: All this time I thought I was an American and it turns out I'm Japanese.
The irrefutable reality is that Washington is adopting -- re-adopting, actually -- many of same polices it has asserted for years would be Asia's doom. Suddenly, it finds strength where it once saw weakness.
Don't you know there's a war on, as they used to ask. Well, no, I don't. Washington has yet to define its war on terrorism in anything like politically neutral terms. So far, it seems to mean that everyone is to join in as the US goes after its enemies.
The concern in all this is not war -- not on the economic side. The dramatic turn in policy is intended to counter the abrupt arrival of a severe recession in a society that carries vastly too much private-sector debt on both the household and corporate sides.
Equally, we can't talk usefully about lasting principles because there were so few of them. Open markets and globalism in the US version have never meant much more than the advance of US corporate interests abroad -- with government assistance when needed, of course.
That way of approaching the world may not end. But the ideological cover more or less has to. Globalism as we've known it, like unilateralism, is passing into history. The US model, never what it claimed to be, now stands discredited.
The international implications -- again, in Asia and elsewhere -- are substantial. The moment has arrived to begin redefining the globalist enterprise in an image other than the US' -- let's say, just arbitrarily, in a global image.
We can finally contemplate a global era in which diversity of policy and practice is not merely allowed but assumed to be a starting point.
Asians are ready for this. At every level -- from bureaucrats, politicians, and corporate executives on down -- many have for some time sought to articulate an alternative to the one size fits all prescriptions emanating from Washington and Wall Street. Now's the time. In future columns, we will look at what another way forward might look like.
Patrick Smith is a former correspondent in Asia and the author of Japan: A Reinterpretation. The opinions expressed are his own.
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