The observation has been made that much more than is normal with presidents of the only superpower, the world’s citizens would appear to have virtually invested their hopes in the future in the incoming President Obama. And it is almost no exaggeration to say, as if in verification of this assertion, that the eyes of these citizens, taking advantage of the revolution in communications that permit it, will stare in one direction on January 20, that is, towards the location of Washington DC.
From time to time the United States has attracted this kind of attention, the Presidency of John F. Kennedy being one example. But as has already been indicated in the process of the nomination, and then election campaigns, Barack Hussein Obama, a son of Africa, and by that inheritance also perceived as in part originating from within the Muslim citizenship of the world, not to speak of representing the African American community at the pinnacle of American domestic power, undoubtedly represents a new phenomenon in the Western world.
As such he embodies all kinds of expectations from communities in diverse parts of the world, expectations which in the normal course of both domestic and international relations, are bound periodically to come into contention with one another. And it is becoming commonplace both in the US and in the world at large, including our Caribbean, to hear it said that he is bound to disappoint his various formal and informal constituents, and therefore it is really folly to assert these expectations.
But even as this kind of conversation has been going on worldwide, the economic and political context in which Barack Obama pursued his campaign for the presidency has dramatically changed, leading the President-elect himself to already indicate that some of the promises made, and therefore expectations, now need to be scaled back. What is referred to as the financial and economic meltdown has focused all American decision-makers on the domestic scene. Mr Obama himself has not been able to leisurely conduct his final run-up to the presidency, but in spite of his own protestations, to begin really to function as the president while he has not yet been inaugurated.
For in domestic economic affairs, and by extension, international economic affairs given the scale of the crisis, United States policy-makers have come against a crisis of performance which has been rapidly transformed into an intellectual crisis, and then a crisis of popular confidence, in respect of their management of the economy. The spectacle of the much-praised Alan Greenspan confessing before the American Senate that he had not himself understood the dynamics of the economic phenomena for which he had management responsibility, is illustrative of this unprecedented occurrence. And the attempt by both Prime Minister Brown and President Sarkozy to virtually seize global policy leadership of the crisis, suggests the political and economic superpower’s loss of global leadership in this sphere, in much the same sense as the war in Iraq has, over time, created a crisis of confidence in American leadership in global political affairs.
The economic crisis has also created a degree of loss of confidence by those who have felt for some time that the so-called emerging economic powers of the globe − in particular the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China and India) – have been becoming less connected to economic trends and processes emanating from the global power, and to that extent a disruption in the latter would not stall the upward trajectory of their economies. What we see instead is a substantial mutuality of dependence that induces the major and emerging powers to take common protective or defensive action to inhibit the worst of the excesses of the US economy from disrupting the BRIC’s own economies. The consequence of this, is an increasing pressure on the up-to-now dominant North Atlantic powers, to move to formally and meaningfully integrate the BRICS into the structure of economic decision-making as it relates to the globe as a whole. For this is an option which these major powers have only up to now half-heartedly begun to accept. To the extent that this should become a reality − and we should get an indication in the manner in which the Doha Round is conducted if it should get off the ground again – then it could be taken as a positive consequence of the current crisis.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party presidential campaign, as led by Mr Obama, had shown a tendency towards a curbing of the extent of liberalization of international trade that the US should accept in the face of the huge movement of American investment and production into the Asian arena in particular, the new President himself having emphasized the protectionist position of the American trade union movement, traditional supporters of the Democrats. This will have given cause for concern in Latin America in particular, as well as in China. But in respect of the former, in particular Brazil, the WTO negotiations will have shown that the United States cannot, in this era, entirely have its way in trade and trade-related negotiations; and in respect of the latter, the very extent of American investment in China, itself related to the extent of American bond holdings, will surely give the US President reason for pause and resistance to domestic pressures.
So the world waits on the evolution of US economic policy-making, and of the US economy. Already the intellectual crisis has induced a change in a problematique that has been at the centre of global economic affairs since the Second World War, and which the Americans had seemed (with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution) to have won: the extent of the role of the state in the construction and growth of liberal capitalist economies.
Those, particularly in Asia, but also in Latin America who remember the force of IMF-World Bank American-induced pressure on the Asian policy-makers after their 1997 crisis, towards a reduction in the role of the state, will feel some degree of satisfaction of a now-partial concession in this regard by present American policy-makers – even those of Republic stripe. Yet the American response on this issue is still to be played out, in which connection we should note the current insistence, by recent Nobel prize- winner, and sometime critic of “Republican economics,” Paul Krugman, that the extent of Obama’s effort in regard to state intervention to induce a recovery from crisis is still insufficient.
In global affairs, President Bush has not been able to sufficiently use the success of “the surge” to diminish the severe loss of confidence which his administration has suffered as a result of its intervention in Iraq. A consequence has been a certain reluctance on the part of the administration to pursue the resolution of other issues in the Middle East. And it is indeed pointedly the case that negotiations towards the resolution of the Palestine issue have hardly progressed from where President Clinton left them ten years ago, with the Israeli intervention in Gaza now creating, without a doubt, an ideological hardening in the Middle East as a whole. In fact, we can say, as we see how things have evolved, that the Bush administration has seemed to be more concerned with establishing for itself, and other Western powers, a favourable position in respect of the future exploitation of Iraqi oil, as a prime objective of its post-Saddam overthrow policy.
President Obama assumes office as the jargon of a “unipolar world” is disappearing from both diplomatic and academic discourse. The world that faces the new President has intimations of a multipolarity, but one different from the cultural-homogeneity-confident North Atlantic powers as they faced a similarly vibrant, but subsequently disintegrating, Soviet Union.
The expectation of President Obama is that he will display a greater sensitivity to the cultural-ideological diversity of the emerging powers and emerging regional arenas. But another sentiment in the United States seems to be that there are issues which the United States will have to seek to settle on the basis of a degree of political consensus at home. Hence the retention, in the new administration, of certain individuals, in particular Secretary of Defence Robert Gates.
Time will tell how significant such non-Democratic, or even the divergent and coalescing (irrespective of party) tendencies in the Congress will be on Obama’s policy-making, and to what extent, in the effort of balancing coalitions to get support for his domestic policy, the President will feel constrained to seek a balance that is not within the current expectations of his wider world citizenry support.