LONDON (Reuters) - 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 cruelest cut of all, was labeled "anti-American" in a review in the New York Times.
"It was actively slanderous," he fumed almost a year later.
But perhaps not all that surprising.
"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 on Washington and New York in September 2001, as the trigger that unleashed the nationalist, messianic "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.
"It doesn't have the resources, the financial resources, and it can't raise enough men to fulfill its present goals of basically dominating everywhere."
KICKING DOWN THE HILL
How did America, which pushed communism over the brink to extinction and spearheaded the globalization that raised world wealth to record levels, get in the position where, as Lieven sees it, it is "kicking to pieces the hill of which it is king?"
To explain, Lieven goes back to colonial times, the frontier era, and most particularly to America's early 19th-century President Andrew Jackson, whom Lieven says did much to nurture nationalism, and a "messianic" belief America can do no wrong.
Jackson personified a new "folk law" of America, taking precedence over written law, Lieven writes. Along with it came deep suspicion of America's East Coast, its intellectuals and "Yankee" lawyers -- a regional hostility Lieven says persists to this day in the South and in Texas, Bush's home state.
"This picture is a tremendously important part of the self-image of George W. Bush, of Dick Cheney (from Wyoming, another frontier state) and indeed of their administration as a whole, and it has shaped that administration's aggressiveness in international affairs," Lieven writes.
The neo-conservatives in the Bush administration embraced the concept of preventive war to promote America's influence in the world, Lieven says. All it needed was the trigger al Qaeda provided.
Lieven, who has written about the Baltics and Chechnya, could be accused -- and has been -- of being a card-carrying "old worlder" who fails to understand the nuances of American politics and civilization that have helped the country thrive for more than two centuries.
He counters his critics by in effect quoting their words back at them, citing major American historians and political figures, such as the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright, an outspoken foe of the Vietnam war three decades ago.
"He (Fulbright) sets out categorically this argument against a messianic belief that America can tell other nations what to do, even if they don't agree, because we (the United States) have the best system in the world and American power was inevitably good.
"It's in Fulbright; it's not something Anatol Lieven made up," the author said.
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 (U.S. 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.
"What he would have made of the 'neo-cons', God alone knows."
