Bio of CLYDE PRESTOWITZ

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ- INTRODUCTION TO GLOBAL REALITIES

Over the past sixty odd years, I have been privileged to have lived and worked around the world with many key global leaders in business, diplomacy, academia, journalism, and politics.

I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and have lived in Honolulu, Tokyo (twice), Rotterdam, The Hague, Philadelphia, Brussels, Connecticut, and Washington D.C. and have traveled extensively through Europe, the Middle East, India, Southeast and East Asia, and Latin America.

I have worked as a newspaper reporter, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, a sales and marketing executive in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, a high- ranking government official in the Reagan Administration where I led trade negotiations with Japan, Korea, and China as well as the first U.S. trade mission to China in 1982. I was seconded to the staff of then Vice President George H.W. Bush to help with his mission to Japan, became a Director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and Vice Chairman of President Clinton’s special Commission on Trade and Investment in the Asia-Pacific Region. I was also privileged to serve as an advisor to President Obama.

I founded the Economic Strategy Institute as a think tank to focus on international trade and competitiveness issues in 1988 and have written eight books on these topics. The latest, published in January 2021 is The World Turned Upside Down: America, China and the Struggle for Global Leadership.

I have also served on several corporate boards of directors and have been privileged to have been a friend of, among others, Intel’s Andy Grove, Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca, and AIG’s Maurice (Hank) Greenberg.

Throughout my career, I have wrestled with an immense problem – the ignorance of many of our leading economists, foreign policy scholars, high political office holders, CEOs, and journalists of the realities of globalization, of the true sources of wealth and well- being, and of the causes of conflict and misunderstanding among nations. I have also been immensely and increasingly concerned with the outsized political power of American global corporations in the United States while they are also hugely vulnerable to capture by authoritarian governments like that of China. In effect, companies like Apple become effectively more Chinese than American. Similarly, it has been widely preached that rising global trade will lead to increasingly peaceful relations among nations when, in fact, (as we are presently seeing in the case of Ukraine) substantial dependence by one country on other countries with significantly different values can be quite dangerous and costly.

Let me cite an example. For the past thirty years it has been common for the leaders of democratic countries to say that they: “Wish China to become a responsible stakeholder in the liberal, rules based, global order.” This presumed that China wanted to and could become such a stakeholder. In fact, we are recently learning that it did not and could not.

I hope through this column to enable readers to avoid such costly confusion and to see through the propaganda, false analyses, and biased statements to the hard truths of the world in which we and our children will live.