This report from NPR yesterday brings to the fore a topic that seems, at first, to be almost unmentionable. It was only a few years ago we were reading, from the Bush Administration, the casual claim that our foreign and military policy goal should first and foremost be to remain the unchallenged global hegemonic actor.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Except, really, the decline has been going on for decades. Like so much else in our contemporary life, it can be traced, more or less roughly, to the early 1970's. The Nixon Administration's decision to completely devalue the dollar; the oil shocks; our ignominious retreat from Beirut after the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks there. The list of signs of our decline have been around us. Much of our rhetoric, however, is designed to ignore or deny these signs.
Pres. Obama's trip to south and east Asia highlights our diminished status. Just consider this trivia - by visiting two countries, he paid official respect to one third of the entire population of the planet. Between them, India and Indonesia have around two billion people living within their borders. Had Obama gone to China, he would have moved that total up to half.
While countries like India and Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina, South Africa and South Korea struggled through the height of the Cold War with internal repression, dictatorship, and political instability, these issues have, by and large, resolved themselves. Barring unforeseeable circumstances, I cannot imagine, say, Brazil returning to military dictatorship in the near future. Civil society has become deeply entrenched in these countries; India's continued growth even as the west continues to contract (with the exception of Germany), along with China's, has kept the world economy from complete collapse.
Unfortunately for Pres. Obama, he is reaping the whirlwind of our diminished status as just one among the more powerful nation-states, yet no longer the dominant primer inter pares. The inability to reach a free trade agreement with South Korea, as well as the refusal to budge any of the G20 states toward greater openness (which really would be in everyone's interests), seems to highlight his weakened state in the wake of the mid-term Democratic Party losses in Congress. Any President, however, would face a similar situation. Most would bluster and blubber, denying the reality that we no longer have a singular voice in world governance. Sadly, Obama will pay, I think, a high price domestically for showing his fellow Americans that we are no longer a superpower.
