Alice Amsden argues that American policy toward the developing countries has shifted from a benign indifference about the specifics of internal development choices to a malign effort to impose a uniform set of development choices. Under what she calls the “First American Empire,” developing countries were in “Heaven.” They grew quickly using local knowledge to promote import substitution as a foundation for later exports. Under the “Second American Empire”—what everyone else calls neoliberalism—developing countries entered “Hell.” Growth stalled as America inflexibly imposed neoliberalism everywhere possible. The great exceptions, China and India, were powerful enough to resist America's inflexible ideology. Escape from Empire thus presents an external complement to Amsden's justifiably well-regarded analyses of the domestic determinants of growth in Asia's Next Giant (1989) and The Rise of the Rest (2001).

Sadly, the current book is not at the same level of the earlier, best-in-class works. Its empirical basis is doubly weak, both with respect to growth trends in developing countries and U.S. policy, providing neither consistent nor adequate evidence. The book provides neither an explanation for the connection between U.S. policy choices and development outcomes nor a justification of the narrow focus on OPEC and Vietnam as sources of U.S. imperial decline. Finally, no obvious policy conclusions flow from the author's findings, given that we do not know why U.S. policy changed and thus cannot know how to change it back to heavenly indifference.

Amsden's major theoretical and empirical claim is that the developing countries grew fastest when left to their own devices in the post–World War II period from 1945 to 1979, and then dramatically slowed after the rise of U.S. neoliberalism. Aggregate developing country growth did slow from roughly 10.2% per year to 6.8% per year (comparing growth from 1950 to 1979 against 1979 to 2004, using purchasing power parity adjusted in Geary-Khamis 1990 dollars, which strips out the effects of exchange rate volatility). But the slowdown in developed country growth was even larger, absolutely and relatively, from about 7.9% to 3.6% per year. Amsden is narrowly correct about the growth slowdown. But the developed countries would surely prefer this circle of Hell to their own. These averages also conceal considerable divergence among developing countries in both periods. But she does not explain why uniform U.S. policy in the Hell period produced this local variation in outcome. If U.S. policy were decisive, we would expect to see less variation among developing country outcomes than we observe.

In any case, Amsden's assertion that the United States allowed countries to go their own way in the first period is also problematic. In the Heavenly period, the United States intervened massively and directly in many countries, including, and most especially, development winners like Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and Mexico. Those interventions look just as uniform with respect to intent as do interventions in the second period. In particular, the United States fairly consistently promoted land reform to preempt peasant-based communist revolutions. What differed was not U.S intent but local implementation, given that America did not have infinite resources or the same level of influence over all local elites. U.S. success in promoting land reform was greatest where local elites' reliance on a U.S. presence for day-to-day survival gave America considerable leverage (e.g., Korea and Taiwan); less so for somewhat more secure elites (e.g., the Philippines and Malaysia); nil for elites with their own proven capacity for rural repression (e.g., El Salvador, Brazil). Amsden argues that land reform was an important precondition for development, suggesting that countries during the Heavenly period needed more, not less, U.S. intervention to establish those preconditions. Similarly, the local development banks that she lauds, like Mexico's Nafinsa and Brazil's BNDES, often owed their existence and personnel to U.S. training efforts and direction in the pre- and postwar period.

Amsden never really explains why U.S. policy changed from the first period to the second. She sees U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War, the oil shocks, and the arrival of cheap credit as terminating the First American Empire (p. 1). Here, her lack of a compelling explanation for the roots of U.S. policy leads her to mistake tactical issues for strategic ones. The war with Vietnam was no victory. Yet the same strategic goals and operational art secured Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines for the United States. In any case, it is not clear how Vietnam mattered for foreign economic policy. Surely, it mattered more that the U.S. share of the global economy was declining relative to Europe and Japan. In this respect, the oil shocks did relatively more damage to the Japanese and European rate of growth. Meanwhile, the recycling of petro-revenues into dollar assets secured the dollar's position as the global reserve currency. Finally, real and nominal interest rates were hardly low from the 1970s through roughly 2001. The shift in U.S. policy surely has domestic roots that relate to the exhaustion of the automobile and assembly line industries as the engine of U.S. domestic growth.

What made Asia's Next Giant and Rise of the Rest great was the close connection between theoretical claims about the relationship among conditional state aid to industry, the creation and organization of managerial talent, and production knowledge, on the one side, and a detailed excavation of evidence from successful developing countries supporting those claims, on the other side. Escape from Empire presents neither a well-grounded set of theoretical claims nor much evidence. It is a polemic against neoliberal policy and the Washington consensus. But the current global financial crisis has cooked both neoliberalism's goose and the possibility for the kind of export-led growth strategies that catapulted Korea into the global middle class, and China out of abject poverty. What we need now—what Amsden is surely capable of producing—is a guide to stable domestic-led growth in Asia and the United States.