Maurice Greenberg on China & America.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist - Interview

The National Interest's editor Jacob Heilbrunn recently spoke with Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman and CEO of AIG, chairman and CEO of STARR Insurance Holdings, Inc., and chairman of the Center for the National Interest. What follows is a lightly edited version of their conversation.

Jacob Heilbrunn: If you look at your career and life as a businessman--as a soldier who fought in Normandy and helped liberate Dachau concentration camp--it does exemplify America at its peak. We've had this whole era with America as a superpower. When you look back, do you feel that America today has absorbed the lessons that we learned in World War II and afterward, or have we peaked as a superpower?

Maurice R. Greenberg: Well, we've changed. There's no question about that. When I came back from World War II, along with ten million other Americans, I had to finish high school. I didn't want to go to college. I could have gone to West Point. But I didn't want to stay in the military. I was nineteen years old when I came back. I stayed in the reserves because I needed the money, and I was going to school. So when the Korean War broke out, right after I finished law school, I was recalled, and I spent over a year in Korea. But America's changed, there's no question about it.

JH: What do you think specifically has changed and why?

MG: We had some principles we stood for and believed in, and we were respected around the world for those principles. Enemy and friend alike may not like us, but they respected us and what we believed in. I don't sense that anymore. I think we've backed away from being a world leader, for whatever reason.

JH: Do you think it's a loss of confidence and willpower or an actual diminution of American strength?

MG: I think we have the strength potential to do whatever we want as a country. One of our strengths has been the diversity of our population. The immigrants that came to this country were Eastern Europeans. And they had a different work ethic. They'd never go on welfare; my God, they'd rather slit their throats than do that. We have a different population today, and we've become entitlement-bound. And it's not considered improper to get entitlements, for whatever reason. They don't feel any degradation in their own self, as an individual. That's a change. Is it going to go back and change again?

JH: It's interesting that England is doing relatively well economically now, even though its leaders pushed through some pretty...