During Asia's economic crisis, U.S. policy toward Japan is based on disdain for its overweening bureaucrats. Butiapan is hardly unique. Bureaucracies dominate most countries it is the United States that is the exception. Such elites can hold power for decades, despite repeated blunders, because even developed countries fear social disintegration without their leadership.

Somehow the Americans went from claiming they did not have a dog in ¿the Bosnia fight to redrawing the map of the Balkans over Scotch with the ruthless Slobodan Milosevic. But the Dayton Accord that ended Bosnia's war has been oversold. It is the product not of Wilsonian idealism but of a reluctant realpolitik. Had Washington intervened in 1993 as Bill Clinton promised to lives could have been saved.