Obama’s European challenges
BOSTON — The life preserver President Barack Obama will be wearing when he enters the sea of the G20 industrialized and industrializing countries in London this week will be his own personal popularity. He is still floating on the good will that the world feels after eight years of George W. Bush. But there are sharks in the waters, and the United States is not in as strong a position as it is used to be.
The leader of Europe’s biggest economy, Germany’s Angela Merkel, has signaled her unwillingness to go along with Obama’s super-spending, Russia will be watching warily, the Asians are expecting to further shift the balance of world economic power eastward, and the head of the European Union’s rotating presidency, the Czech Republic’s Mirek Topolanek, has already described Obama’s stimulus plan as the “road to hell.” They all harbor resentments that the United States was responsible for the financial crisis the world is in. Much of this is because of the inheritance George W. Bush bequeathed his successor.
The great mistake the neo-conservatives made when Bush let them into the White House was to believe that, as the sole superpower, the United States had a free hand to more or less do what it wanted in the world — invade countries at will, force democracy on the unenlightened, and if others didn’t like it, too bad for them.
The arrogance didn’t start with the Bush administration. I remember Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser to Obama, when he was guiding the Treasury Department during Bill Clinton’s administration. He told the World Economic Forum in Davos that no power since ancient Rome had been so all-powerful in relation to the rest of the world. It was an oft-used comparison in the Bush years, with scholars who should have known better saying that America should accept the role of imperial power and act accordingly.
Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state during Bush’s second term, tried to undo some of the damage done in the first. She tried to restart diplomacy, which the White House deeply mistrusted.
Today Obama is reaching out to Russians, Iranians, Syrians, Cubans, maybe even Talibs in Pakistan and Afghanistan whom the Bush administration scorned. But the hard truth is that the United States does not have the power and influence it did when Summers spoke in Davos.
Bush’s wars have so stretched the military that potential adversaries know military intervention is no longer an option open to an American president. Who knows whether Russia would have responded to Georgia’s provocation so strongly and effectively if it hadn’t known it had nothing to fear?
What the neo-cons never really understood is that the United States did not emerge from the Cold War with a stronger hand to make the world do its bidding. The fall of the Soviet Union was a seismic shift in international power relationships, but, as Fred Kaplan pointed out in his book “Daydream Believers, How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power,” it made the U.S. “less capable of exerting its will on others,” not more.
During the Cold War, countries gravitated either toward the Soviet Union or the United States out of necessity. In China’s case, it began slipping out of the Soviet orbit and into ours when Richard Nixon met with Mao Zedong. Mao needed the United States because he feared the Soviets more.
But once the threat of Soviet power was lifted, there was no reason to kowtow to the United States. Each country could go its own way.
The United States should have spent the post-Cold War years renovating old alliances and cultivating new ones, but the Bush administration was blind to this, believing alliances cumbersome and itself too powerful to bother.
The bedrock of American power, however, was not its military but its economy.
When the end of a socialist alternative came, capitalism was king. Donald Rumsfeld’s “old Europe,” meaning Western Europe with the exception of Britain, may have clung to its nanny-state, semi-socialist ideas, but the newly freed countries of Europe, and a great deal of the emerging world, embraced the Anglo-American model personified by the Ronald Reagan revolution: Free markets and fewer regulations. Social safety nets be damned, full speed ahead.
Of course much of that is gone now, not so much because Reaganism didn’t have some good ideas that spurred economic growth, but because it became degenerate during the Bush years with little attention paid to the regulations that were already in place.
The worldwide lecturing that the United States did during the last couple of decades about deregulation and free markets looks hollow now. East European countries that embraced the American model suffer today more than their West European counterparts. The Chinese are rethinking their dependency on American dollars as the world’s currency, and the Anglo-American model is being derided in many parts of the world. The crash has degraded America’s prestige as well as its moral and physical authority.
America is in a far weaker position vis-a-vis the rest of the world than at any time in recent memory. Obama can be grateful for any life jacket he may have this week in London.
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