Opinion | Columnists
Challenges the next US president faces
The spectacular rise of China and India is creating new realities across the world. These realities have not yet been fully factored into US foreign policy.
- By Manik Mehta, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:51 August 22, 2008
A "different world" awaits the next US president - be it Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain - who will face the daunting task of grappling with a world order that is different than what any past American president has experienced.
Kishore Mahbubani, a two-term permanent representative of Singapore to the United Nations, and currently Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, explained to me in a recent interview at the Asia Society in New York what the emerging world order would look like.
For one, the spectacular rise of China and India - economically, politically, militarily and culturally - is creating new realities across the world; these realities have not yet been fully factored into American foreign policy.
According to Mahbubani, whom Foreign Policy magazine described in 2005 as "one of the world's top public intellectuals", American policy-makers lack a coherent strategy for engaging with the world's most vibrant economies. He sees a multi-civilisation world replacing the mono-civilisation world, the implicit reference being that the Christian-Judean domination will face equally strong, if not stronger, powers representing other civilisations.
In any case, the next president will operate in a world that is dominated by Asia, with China and India being the key players. Mahbubani, whose latest book is called New Asian Hemisphere - he has previously authored two books called Can Asians Think? and Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World - delivered the judgment that history never moves in a straight line. The two emerging powers, China and India, were, after all, the world's biggest economies in the 18th century. Their present rise to power merely heralds the return to their former glory.
Problems
Even though both countries face challenges - India has problems of widespread poverty, underdevelopment, terrorism and a limp government that is walking on the crutches of coalition partners, not to mention the growing unrest amongst its poorer sections, while China's Communist leadership, aware of its declining powers and relevance for the increasingly wealthy population, has to find a way to organise a smoother transition from the Communist to a democratic form of government - their rise has, apparently, shaken the core US belief that its sole superpower status would allow it to block the aspirations of any other emerging power.
China is performing a tight-rope act. It has carefully avoided a show of its superpower ambitions which could arouse America's instinct to curb it. But China feels it cannot let America have the wide latitude it enjoys as the world's only superpower in a unipolar world since the Cold War ended. China has thus been displaying a "soft opposition", mainly, within the UN Security Council.
While India is aware that the US and Japan are courting it as a credible counterweight to China, it is playing coy to their courtship in deference to China's sensitivities. However, India has its own brand of "soft opposition", implicit in its low-key criticism of China's stand on Arunachal Pradesh, chunks of which are claimed by China as its own territory, illustrates the point.
Besides dealing with China and India, the new American president also faces anti-Americanism in several Muslim countries, where antagonism against America on the Palestinian conflict and, now, also the Iraq war runs high. As US president, John McCain can face a tough task, given his avowed intention "not to run away from Iraq", a euphemism denoting continuation of the American presence in that country.
Mahbubani believes that with president Barack Obama, on the other hand, "half of the world's anti-Americanism would disappear". However, that is a simplistic view, particularly because Obama is now talking in nebulous terms of the world view and has, also, retracted from many of his pre-nomination remarks which stirred a hornets' nest, particularly, among the strong Jewish constituency. Besides, promises and resolutions made in the heat of the election campaign are seldom fulfilled once the incumbent gains power. The new president must also grapple with North Korea, Iran, a belligerent Russia and Pakistan (minus Musharraf).
The American people want "change"; however, as the campaign drags on, the initial excitement of "change", as promised by Obama, could gradually evaporate in favour of other pressing issues.
Americans are now more worried over inflation than the war in Iraq. Home mortgages, healthcare, soaring prices of food, gasoline and other daily requisites, and a host of other mundane questions are more worrying than other issues. As they say here in the US: "It's the economy, stupid!"
Manik Mehta is a commentator on Asian affairs.
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