Jonathan Todd

I had this on Labour Uncut recently.

Francis Fukuyama is best known for confusing the period between the falls of the Berlin Wall and Lehman Brothers with the end of history. This was to be defined by the global triumph of liberal democracy and market economies. He recently conceded:

“The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy”.

China is neither liberal nor democratic, but its state-directed model of capitalism is reshaping markets across the globe. Nonetheless, everyone from George W. Bush to Will Hutton is confident of the model’s limitations. It is thought that history hasn’t ended yet, but that it will, and on the lines that Fukuyama proclaimed.

“Trade freely with China and time is on our side”, said Bush. These economic freedoms will, ultimately, it is argued, require political freedoms. This is because per capita western incomes depend upon what Hutton calls the “enlightenment infrastructure” – pluralism (multiple centres of political and economic power), capabilities (rights, education, private ownership) and justification (accountability, scrutiny, free expression).

Hutton made this argument in a debate with Meghnad Desai in Prospect just before the credit crunch. Desai scoffed: “For you, there is only one road to capitalism – the Western one – and only one political system – ours”. The crunch must place at least a question mark next to Hutton’s Whiggish confidence.

Perhaps the most important way in which 11 September 2001 changed the world was in making more apparent what few had already perceived: the ambition of Al-Qaeda’s threat to the west. Similarly, the significance of China’s rise wasn’t widely understood before the financial crisis. Now it is more obvious.

Zhu Min, special advisor to the international monetary fund, coined the phrase “three-speed” recovery in the opening debate at Davos this year. This involves emerging economies growing at more than 6 per cent in 2011, the US by 3 per cent and Europe by less than 2 per cent. Negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2010 puts the UK in the slowest of the slow. China is among the quickest of quick. It isn’t a global crisis anymore. It’s a European crisis.

While Fukuyama applauds the efficient rapidity of Chinese decision making, the Eurozone is sluggish to confront its big choices. Not that the UK should be smug. We’ve allowed banks “too big to fail” to morph into banks that increasingly seem “too big to save” – without correcting the causes of these banks becoming too big to fail. We’re also guilty of failing to match lofty rhetoric on climate change with effective policy and of drifting towards dependence on Gazprom in an ever more resource-stretched world. To say nothing of our geriatric-paced policy response to demographic change.

Yes, a plan for growth is essential. But for this to be meaningful it needs to chart a trajectory for the state to stop being a featherbed for bankers and start being a catalyst to a more energy-efficient and innovative economy.

All of this is painfully clear, as is the inability of David Cameron to offer anything like an adequate response. All politicians are in the gutter, but Cameron isn’t staring at the stars. Hu Jintao is. Mark Leonard in Renewal credits him with leading a campaign of “asymmetric warfare” against the west: “finding and exploiting the enemy’s soft spots”.

After international financers, like George Soros, humbled the “Asian tigers” in 1997, Chinese intellectuals, Leonard notes, pondered: “If a lone individual like Soros could unleash so much destruction simply for profit, how much damage could a proud nation like China inflict on the USA with its trillion dollars of foreign reserves”?

China and America’s condition of mutually assured economic destruction means this theoretical proposition is unlikely to be soon tested. It does, however, expose the vulnerability of the west, particularly if the uber-pragmatists of Jintao’s generation are succeeded by a more assertive cadre. That the question is even asked shows that Chinese leaders are capable of doing what our leaders struggle to: coldly assessing strengths and weakness and, given these strengths and weaknesses, ruthlessly pursuing objectives.

Al-Qaeda are world leaders in asymmetric warfare as it is conventionally understood. Guantanamo Bay and Bagram are the weakest parts of the west’s response, because they compromise our defining values. Privatising the upside of banking, while socialising the downside, also rejects the fundamentals of capitalism. Chinese-style, forensic assessment of the West’s strengths and weaknesses would rank our values – the “enlightenment infrastructure” – as our greatest strength and anything that belittles them as corrosive weakness.

Leadership is required for this betrayal to be averted – most pressingly in relation to Egypt. True leadership would also see it as analytically inadequate and careless with the hopes of millions simply to presume that Hutton is right and Desai is wrong. Hutton is right insofar as the “enlightenment infrastructure” is the richest inheritance and the seed of the innovation that can allow the West to prosper in a century in which China will be much more globally consequential than before.

However, in addition to this infrastructure, leadership will be necessary for the west to so prosper. Real leadership isn’t just about rhetoric or grand promises to be fulfilled years hence, but about the policies that will concretely advance these promises: the prose as well as the poetry. In respect of the key challenges that confront them – banking, energy, climate change and ageing – western leaders provide little of either. In particular, they struggle with the prose, which comes so easily to the Chinese. This needs to change if history is, after all, to end.

James Crabtree has written a fascinating and much commented upon Prospect piece on the role that an apology might play in a quick return to Labour government should the Conservatives win the General Election later this year. This has set me thinking about the role of contrition in politics in general and two sorry Tory stories in particular. These sorry stories are: First, seeing (tacit and non-formal) apologies for being slow to make peace with the 1960s and for the excesses of the 1980s as being integral to the rebranding of the Conservatives sought by David Cameron (a project that is now threatened by a sense that the credit crunch and the scale of public debt have caused the Conservatives to renew their marriage vows to Margaret Thatcher and the 1980s); and, second, conceptualising the Republicans as being split between those who see a need for some kind of apology for the years of George W Bush as necessary to their political renewal and those who do not.

Some recent events – the reaction to the attempted Christmas day terrorist bombing in the US; the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts; the tea party protests; the spike in retirements from Democratic Congressmen; and President Obama’s approval rating - would seem to strengthen the position of those who are unapologetic for the Dubya years. But my default sense – which I am increasingly having cause to question - is that in the long-term more contrition than that which the likes of Karl Rove are presently prepared to offer will be required for the Republicans to fully recover. That said; there are signs, which are worrying to a European and (in the American sense of the word) liberal, that an unreconstructed Republican party might return to the White House in 2012. An example of such a sign is that when I departed Dulles airport, just outside DC, 48 hours ago I noted lots of t-shirts on sale like the one below.

Dulles may be in Virginia, but it is hardly in the heart of red state territory; Massachusetts is even less so. I can only fear what they are now thinking in such territory. But let’s return to American politics via a review of the role of an apology (of sorts) in the fortunes of the Conservative Party in recent years.

“There is no such thing as society.” This was one of the most outrageous and defining claims of the Thatcher years. So, for Cameron to repudiate this by saying that ”there is such a thing as society” was for him to grasp towards an apology for the excesses of Thatcherism in the form of a Clause 4-esque moment. In actuality, he failed to fully seize this moment by following this line up with words (“it’s just not the same thing as the state”) that amounted to a Burkian little platoons view of society that is little removed from Thatcher’s notion that “there are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

Notwithstanding this I am with James Crabtree – pace Luke Akehurst – in conceding that lines such as these from Cameron, as well as a focus upon such non-traditional Tory themes as poverty and the environment, amount in tone, at least, to a sustained Tory apology and repositioning.

But that is soo 2005/7. You know, PCC (pre-credit crunch). We are now in a very different era. Philip Stephens has captured well what this meant for the Cameron project:

“The cuddly, environmentally friendly prospectus he offered during his early years as leader has collided with grim economic reality. The Tory leader used to promise to share the proceeds of economic growth between public services and lower taxes. There is nothing left to share. The choice is between what services to cut and what taxes to raise.”

David Goodhart touches upon another aspect of the Cameron project, “after Labour embraced the 1980s (the turn to the free market) the Tories have recently made their peace with the 1960s (race and gender equality, environmentalism and so on).” Part of the ”friendly prospectus” involves an apology for not previously being at ease with the 1960s. While Labour had to adapt to the 1980s to reinvent itself under Tony Blair, the 1997 election constituted, in part, a rejection of the dogmatic firmness of the Tory faith in the free market. Consequently, as well as finally reconciling themselves to the 1960s, Cameron has sought to apologise for the 1980s Thatcherite dogma that lead to 1997. He’s the “heir to Blair”, remember.

This strand of Cameron’s apology – the 1980s strand, if you will – has gone flaky since the need to control public debt (and the implied requirement for restraint in public spending) has become more apparent. This is because the Conservatives have seemed more keen than Labour to address this need. Peter Mandelson tried to increase this flakiness by speaking of the “barely disguised glee” of the Tories at the prospect of spending cuts.

The 1960s strand is also undermined by a Conservative Home survey that reports that reducing Britain’s carbon footprint is the lowest priority of Tory PPCs. Their second highest priority is “cutting red tape”. How 1980s and John Redwood-like is that?!? It’s like the regulatory failures of the credit crunch never happened. Perhaps, only Boy George and “reducing the public deficit” (aka cutting public spending), which was their top priority, could be more 1980s.

All of which supports Mandelson’s argument and gives the suggestion that Cameron may be a somewhat reformed character who wants to rebrand the Conservatives, but the Conservatives themselves do not wish to be so changed and the public are unconvinced that such a change has been completed. Jack Scott, a Labour PPC, has picked up strong evidence on the doorstep for this view being held amongst the public.

Cameron’s attempt to change the Conservatives has certainly been buffeted, most spectacularly by the credit crunch. However, he remains keen that the perception of change, at least, holds; whether he can make this perception stick in the hearts of his party and the minds of voters are different questions, however.

Returning to America, we note one of the most basic and fundamental distinctions between British and American politics. The Republicans have no politician in an office akin to Cameron’s. Whether the Republican leadership wants to apologise for George W Bush, as Cameron has sought to apologise for Thatcher et al, is immaterial, because no office exists from which a leader might thrust such an action upon their (welcoming or otherwise) party. Cameron may have fluffed his Clause 4 moment but this structural distinction between the US and the UK means that there is much less chance of a Republican Clause 4.

The nearest the Republicans have got to such a moment came in the form of a recently published book by Michael Steele, Republican Party Chairman, in which he discusses why the GOP has often lost touch with typical Americans since the Ronald Reagan era and concedes: “We screwed up.” (Notice another difference between the UK and the US: The 1980s are something for which the party of the right is to apologise in the UK and are something for the party of the right to seek to recover in the US).

However, as E. J. Dionne Jr notes, some Republicans remain on the offensive about the period for which Steele is apologetic. These are the kind of Republicans who are doubtful about Michael Steele.

“Much of the contention surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency is simply a continuation of our argument over the effects of George W. Bush’s time in office. That is why Obama, despite his fervent wishes, has been unable to usher in a new period of consensus. Bush’s defenders know that Obama’s election represented a popular reaction against the consequences of the Bush presidency. Because Obama is both the anti-Bush and the leader of the post-Bush cleanup squad, his success would complete the rebuke. So the Bush camp — Karl Rove’s regular contributions to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages are emblematic — must stay on the attack.”

The strand of the Cameronista project that is so determined to underline a sense of change within their party, it seems to me, is motivated by a desire to act upon an insight provided by Danny Finkelstein, one of their most sympathetic commentators: the British electorate is never wrong. Change is required, it is thought, to show that the party has moved on from the past mistakes that kept it out of office. However, the Rove strategy seems based on precisely the opposite view: the Dubya years weren’t missteps at all, but coloured by the right actions, and, in time, the American public will come to realise that they made a mistake in evicting the Republicans from the White House. It’s not so much “don’t blame me, I voted McCain” as “sorry, I’ve seen the error of my ways and wish I’d voted McCain.”

As well as on terrorism and foreign policy, the Republicans are unrepentant on their role in the economic situation. This is also noted by E. J. Dionne Jr:

“It’s striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited. The few exceptions to this rule — Bruce Bartlett and Richard Posner, the authors of two bravely dissident books, come to mind — find themselves excommunicated from the conservative movement.”

Until very recently – the Massachusetts vote, etc – I’d have dismissed this lack of contrition, this pig-headedness, this wilful “we were right and we’re not sorry”, as the surest way for the Republicans to keep themselves out of high office for a long time. As Finkelstein argues, all of this is about the Republicans choosing to listen to themselves, not the electorate, who they are convinced can be very wrong. But if the Democrats can lose in Massachusetts, may be, an unrepentant Republican Party can return to the White House.

As Mandelson and Cameron both understand, the perception that the Conservatives have not changed is a real threat to their return to government. The credit crunch has complicated this rebranding exercise, though this exercise is still of great political significance. I’ve always tended to assume that the same rules apply to the Republicans: They won’t win without independents and they won’t gain the support of such voters without demonstrating that they have listened to them by showing contrition for the things that are perceived to have gone wrong under Dubya.

Yet now I am starting to wonder and worry whether the same rules do actually apply to the Republicans. America is, famously, different. It is the right nation - there are deep reasons why, for example, as touched upon above, Reagan is revered in the US as Thatcher is reviled in the UK – and, perhaps, its slight turn to the left under Obama (always more a rejection of Dubya than a convinced liberalisation) may prove temporary. It gets frighteningly easier and easier to imagine Gideon Rachman’s dystopian dream of a President Palin – the unapologetic pitbull - becoming real 2012.

Where would the world be then? Wishing that it and President Obama had acted differently? If not now, when?

The striking thing about the most powerful person in the world, as he approaches one year in office, is how, err, lacking in power he appears.

Disappointed and, according to Mark Lynas, insulted by the Chinese in Copenhagen.  A Health Care Bill that isn’t yet on the statute; is much delayed on his original timetable; and, by his own admission, is only “nine-tenths of a loaf” - some would say that half a loaf is nearer the mark and it comes with lashings of pork barrel whatever way you look at it. An Afghan strategy that even he doesn’t seem wholly convinced by and the backdrop to which Andrew Sullivan commented upon by saying:

“Obama arrived in China last month as a fiscal supplicant, not the leader of the free world. He cannot corner the Iranian regime without Russian or Chinese support. He cannot even get Israel, a country receiving $3 billion a year in aid and protected by America’s veto at the United Nations, simply to cease its construction of settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank.”

All of which simply serves to illustrate my point: How devoid of power the most powerful can be. That’s not to excuse any disappointments that President Obama may have caused or to defend his record (though, there is much more to defend than the increasingly naysayer conventional wisdom suggests). It is simply to place his presidency in context.

This is a context in which his power is more obviously finite and constrained than has been the case for most modern US presidents. Internationally, this is the consequence of the “unipolar moment”, first proclaimed, I think, by Charles Krauthammer in 1990, waning (or, perhaps, being more obviously exposed as the hubristic delusion it always was). Domestically, this is the bitter fruit of what appears to Paul Krugman to be an increasingly dysfunctional Senate. This is a dysfunctionality that means that the Democrats control the presidency and both Houses but are still held to ransom by (dilute to taste) filibustering, partisan, pork barrel-seeking Republicans.

The international dimensions of this are well illustrated by Philip Bobbitt.

“What if Iran simply agrees to limited inspections, and continues enrichment to the point where weapons-grade nuclear material is created? What then? … Israel has resumed the construction of settlements in the West Bank, and it seems clear that Abbas cannot sustain domestic support in the face of the challenge from Hamas if he goes back to the negotiating table without even a temporary freeze on settlement expansion. Obama has little leverage on this issue—as his predecessors also found—but has committed himself to the proposition that “talks must begin and begin soon.” Or what? … Having previously announced it would not renew talks in the six-party format, North Korea has now indicated to the Chinese that it would re-engage in that forum, provided the US simultaneously opens bilateral talks. The US has insisted, quite sensibly, that regional multilateralism is the best way forward. But what if North Korea continues to refuse?”

The growing worry is that the Iranians, Israelis and North Koreans – not to mention the Chinese, Russians, the Taliban and others – have concluded that “nothing much” is the answer to every “What then?” In other words, as the Economist notes:

“The doubters argue that, however decent and articulate, Mr Obama is gaining a reputation as someone who can be pushed around. This month, after the president pandered to China by refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, China pushed for more by banning questions at his Beijing press conference with Hu Jintao, its president. When Mr Obama demanded that Israel stop all work on its settlements in the occupied territories, Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, defied him and still, staggeringly, won praise from Hillary Clinton.”

It is even said that this praise from Clinton lays the groundwork for her to run against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2012. This argument goes that she will need an issue on which to split with Obama to do so and support for Israel would fit this bill. It is to be hoped that this argument is nonsense. But the mere suggestion that the President does not command the absolute and complete loyalty of all of his team implies weakness in a manner as profound as the swipes and pushed envelopes that have come his way via China, Israel et al.

The counter to this line of argument is also provided by the Economist:

“Mr Obama has pulled off the urgent tasks of starting to withdraw troops from Iraq and resetting America’s dysfunctional relations with Russia. He has boosted the G20 as a new global forum. This week Israel announced a partial settlement freeze. With health-care reform under his belt, he will soon be able to turn to world affairs with his status enhanced. Besides, you could hardly accuse Mr Obama of timidity. In three speeches in Prague, Cairo and Accra, he set out a new foreign policy that rejects the Manichean view of his predecessor. He means to negotiate deep cuts in nuclear weapons, make peace between Arabs and Jews, engage Iran, heal the climate and establish America as the strongest and most upright pole of a multipolar world. Yes, this work lies ahead, but how much can you ask in a year of war and recession?”

Health care reform is, just about, under his belt and it is hard to argue with the view of the Obama camp that this reform needed to be taken on in the first year of his presidency before mid-term elections which are likely to further undermine his ability to impose his will upon Congress. His presidency moves into a new phase with this reform behind him. However, perhaps, there are lessons to be learned for this next phase from the protracted way in which this reform was secured.

While the dysfunctionality of the Senate bemoaned by Krugman may make it all the harder for Obama’s will to prevail, it is important, no matter how great this dysfunctionality, that Obama exerts a will. In other words, he needs to lead. The tactics of how he does so can be debated, but the President does need to show genuine leadership. As Clive Crook writes:

“Mr Obama promised to strive for consensus. On issues such as energy policy, healthcare, education and immigration, there is no reason why moderates on both sides cannot make common cause. That is something many Americans long for. It was the great hope independents had of Mr Obama. In his first year, he rarely even tried. He simply chose not to exercise this kind of leadership.”

I must confess that I am both surprised and disappointed by the absence of such leadership. I anticipated that it would be forged on the radical centre (or center). Crook is right to worry that the absence of leadership that works towards such radicalism threatens “a drubbing in 2010 that will do for Mr Obama’s agenda what the wipe-out of 1994 did for Bill Clinton’s”.

While a drubbing can be averted, it is likely that the mid-terms will weaken the Democrats in Washington. This underlines the importance of strong leadership from the centre, of the kind which Crook described thus:

“On health, on energy, on public spending, independent voters want him to exercise centrist leadership, as he promised he would. Can’t he even pretend? For the sake of his Democratic majorities, he had better show voters he is listening, even if his allies in Congress are not.”

But there are plenty of willing allies for Obama in Congress who want the Democrats to behave in this way. A key example being Mark Warner, excellently profiled in the Washington Post this week. That he defines his philosophy as “radical centrism” should be a massive hint that this is the kind of Democratic Senator that Obama needs to work with and through to build consensus, bi-partisan if at all possible, for his agenda. It may be indicative of where things have gone wrong for the Democrats and Obama in the past year that the sense that Warner feels a little left out in the cold by his party pervades the Washington Post profile. It cites John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of large U.S. companies, saying of him:

“Obviously, in 2008, America voted for change. But they are maybe finding out now that they didn’t want to vote for big government spending that’s unchecked, or government intervention to a very, very low level into the economy. Mark Warner really represents that kind of middle ground that wants government to help solve problems but not so much interfere with all areas of the economy.”

There is nothing that Democratic Senators like Warner would like more than to work with the President on this middle ground to get America’s economy growing as strongly as it can do in 2010, control public debt and to seriously correct the US’ disturbingly high unemployment. These are causes which, if approached in the right way, these Senators are likely to be able to build bi-partisan support for. Moreover, in terms of the Democrats avoiding mid-term meltdown, we really are looking at a case of “it’s the economy, stupid”.

Obama should be Bill Clinton-like in recognising the political centrality of the economy and also take some lessons from another great Democratic pragmatist: LBJ. While we can all join Anthony Painter in hoping that Afghanistan does not see Obama transformed into Barack B Johnson, Obama should seek to be - pace E. J. Dionne Jr - LBJ-like in terms of working Congress and building up support for his policies amongst Congressmen.

So: insofar as his domestic agenda is concerned, the course which I would recommend to President Obama in 2010 is to reach out to the nation and Congress, particularly colleagues like Warner, through centrist leadership, with a strong focus upon improving America’s economic outlook. This will be the best way to be economical with (indeed, grow) his political capital (which is now dangerously low after the ending of his all too brief honeymoon in the White House). Furthermore, the policies of true radicalism are invariably to be found in policies that are that are the stuff of such leadership, rather than the stuff of Democratic or Republican sacred cows. Essentially, independent voters remain the key demographic (and the biggest threat to Obama being a two term President would come if the Republicans selected a candidate more capable of reaching out to them than someone like Sarah Palin) and the policies which appeal most to these voters are also the policies which will do most to change America in the ways that it should change.

Improvement in America’s economic prospects is a key linkage point between his domestic and international agendas. Niall Ferguson claims that noting that “the yawning US current account deficit was increasingly being financed by Asian central banks, with the Chinese moving into pole position, was, for me at least, the eureka moment of the decade”. He’s right to see this as such a moment and to see this as “the decade that tilted east” and away from the supposed uniploar dominance of the USA.

Given that the Chinese are re-cycling the massive trade surplus that they are running against the US to finance the US current account deficit, part of the correction to this – and an end towards which Obama can work with the likes of Warner – is to reduce the Chinese trade surplus by growing American exports. Another part is to control public debt. There are great opportunities for the American (and British) firms that come to satisfy the wants and needs of the rising middle classes of the BRIC economies, who have got rich (or richer) by producing the exports that are the stuff of the trade deficits (and maxed out credit cards, etc) experienced by both the US and the UK.

But the imbalances in the “Chimerica” economy are too substantial to be corrected by the innovations and efforts of American exporters alone. We’ve have all, allegedly, become Keynesians in the past year or so, but while there has been much talk of fiscal stimulus, there has been much less of the deep concern which Keynes had about surplus economies, which lead to the creation of the Bretton Woods system (though, this system did not conform to the plans Keynes actually had).

There is, perhaps, no better indicator of the way the world has changed than that today the relationship between the Chinese economy (running a massive trade surplus) and the American (running a massive trade deficit) directly parallels the relationship between the American (running a massive surplus) and the British (running a massive deficit) at the time in the 1940s when Keynes’ concerns about surplus economies fed into the debate which resulted in Bretton Woods. 

It is no coincidence that what Derek Scott has described as the “re-emergence of genuine capitalism, including large-scale private sector capital flows” has come about in the decades after the demise of Bretton Woods. This development has been broadly welcome, lifting millions of people in places like the BRIC economies out of absolute poverty. But Bretton Woods increasingly seems something that if it doesn’t exist, as is obviously now the case, is in need of (re)invention. What is required, in essence, is some global mechanism to correct for the imbalances between surplus and deficit economies that are the real story of the economic crisis. 

Andrew Sullivan is, of course, right to lament that ”Britain in the late 1950s had a friendly superpower to whom she could surrender global hegemony. America has no such luxury”. In contrast, the future seems one of contested modernities, with values and visions that would please most Americans and Europeans being ever more marginalised. One of the great dangers that I perceive in coming decades is that the ”west” will react to this by lashing out in ever more ill-advised and dramatic ways. It is again hard to argue with Niall Ferguson’s argument that great episodes of violence occur at the end of empires and the end of America’s empire seems much closer than its beginning.

This would seem much more likely if the “right nation” were to swing back to the right under a President Palin or similar in 2012. The alternative to World War III under Palin, given the absence of a friendly superpower, is to now fashion a multilateral world in which it is much more likely than otherwise that American (and European) interests and values will be best served in the decades to come during which the notion of a unipolar world will be as laughable and out-dated as the excesses of the British Empire now seem (or, at least, the notion of an American unipolar moment may be so, but the Chinese Charles Krauthammer may be closer than many would wish).  

The creation of the global institutions that will form this multilateral world and attempt to steer our Chinese century, now a decade old, is one of the great tasks of Obama’s presidency, and will most probably be passed on to the next president, whether they are as under-qualified or ill-prepared to execute this task as Sarah Palin or otherwise. Obama has made a solid start in this regard, not least through the beefed up role of the G20, but there is much more that remains to be done and, given the significance of the imbalances within the “Chimerican” economy to literally almost everything else, I would commend something along the lines of a Bretton Woods Mark II as a prime candidate for the next round of global institutional building.

The window of opportunity for success in such building is rapidly closing. While the Copenhagen conference itself may be the stuff of such a multilateral world, the outcome of this conference suggests that the Chinese are more interested in looking forward to a very different kind of unipolar world from that envisaged by Krauthammer than working in and through multilateral institutions (i.e. one that would be the stuff of the Chinese Krauthammer’s world view). As one developing country foreign minister said to Mark Lynas: “The Athenians had nothing to offer to the Spartans.” The obvious way to change this dynamic is for the Spartans to have more to offer the Athenians, which, to my mind, takes us back again to the importance of strengthening the American economy, and in turn to Obama working productively with the likes of Warner.

It might seem inane and obvious to propose that America seek to strengthen its economy, but Niall Ferguson is also right that this will require a serious plan for the management of public debt, which may very well require the slaying of some spend-and-tax, Democratic sacred cows, meaning that strong centrist support and leadership will be needed to carry through such a plan. Not least as China’s population is more than four times that of the USA, in the longer-term, it also seems likely to require a immigration system that both provides the labour needed by the American economy and commands the broad support of the American electorate. Such a system is again something which centrist leadership is best able to deliver. 

It might also seem inane and obvious to argue - as I do when I argue that the US should seek to improve its economic performance relative to China and the importance of American exports to Chinese growth - that the negotiating position of American is improved by increased American strength and prestige, but this cuts to the core of many of pivital exchanges confronting America. It is as true around the G20 table as it is in the counterinsurgency battle with the Taliban or battles of will with Iran, North Korea or anyone else. 

The way in which these exchanges are likely to play out could be walked through in game theory models (and such models probably exist in the State Department and elsewhere) but, as any game theorist knows, threats are only of consequence if they are credible. It is clear that American strength is declining as compared with the heady days of the alleged unipolar phase and it is also clear that Obama seems less eager to use force than a Palin or a Dubya (which might be what, ultimately, leads us to the nightmare of a President Palin). However, it is equally clear that America is not without force and influence. To bring this to bear in the great exchanges that confront Obama, a willingness to use this force and influence has to be credible. That’s to say real and seen to be real. In other words, as Obama himself put it in a section from one of his speeches citied by the Economist: “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

So: insofar as his international agenda is concerned for 2010, I suggest that President Obama continue to work through and towards the kind of multilateral institutions that will best protect American (and European) interests and values when the world is very much less unipolar than it has been, but without having this faith in multilateral institutions confused with American weakness and seeking to ensure that American strength is brought to bear credibly on all the vital engagements with China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan et al ad infinitum that confront the US.

This is an agenda that Europe should warmly support. However, it has all too sadly been the case that, while Obama is the President that Europe dreamed of, European governments have been far too slow and unwilling to support Obama in material ways.

If Europe really wants the change that Obama promises, this must change. If liberal America (or liberal anywhere) really wants the change that Obama promises, it too must change. It should stop moaning about Obama and start supporting him. Indeed, all with a stake in the change that Obama seeks (i.e. everyone), should come to genuinely be the change that they want to see in the world. After the poetry of his victory, the prose of the presidency can seem a painful hangover, but change never did come easy.

 ”We tend to think”, as Michael Tomasky notes, ”that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks’s act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work.” (That is, of course, by no accident or coincidence the same LBJ that I praised earlier in this blog). “And even then, the civil rights bill didn’t really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.”

Change is tough. But change is already here. “Measured against what different groups of voters thought he had promised – everything they desired – the administration’s performance looks poor”, argues Crook. “Measured against what voters were entitled to expect, it looks much better.” That provides much for liberals to take solace in as they redouble their support for Obama and the Democratic candidates in the mid-terms, but it is what is at stake in terms of the future that should really motivate them in seeking to fortify their President. I am scared of the climatic scenarios painted after the failure of Copenhagen and would be very scared indeed if I came from the Maldives, but the prospect of World War III should scare us all very much more no matter where we come from.

In making recommendations that seek to avert this outcome and bring about the most possible positive change under President Obama, I have probably argued for things which may annoy some liberals or people on the left: “radical centrism”, focusing on the economy, controlling public debt, not being afraid to be prepared to use force to enforce the rules of a multilateral world. I’m sorry if I’ve upset anyone in these ways, but, may be, one lesson of Obama’s first year in office, contrary to what his campaign may have left some people thinking, is that it isn’t possible to please all of the people all of the time.

No one would read Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation and ever think this possible. However, if this classic text were as widely read and understood as it should be, then, possibly, the kind of leadership from Obama and support for this leadership, which I have argued for here, would be more readily forthcoming. Perhaps, this might be a little worthwhile reading for many of us in what remains of the Christmas holidays.

I think I am noticing something of a theme in the Economist of late. On 28 May they noted:

“How times change. When George Bush’s treasury secretaries first visited China, Wall Street was booming, America’s economy was growing and the president’s emissaries routinely lectured their Chinese hosts on the need for freer financial markets and a more flexible yuan. But as Tim Geithner, the current treasury secretary, prepares to make his maiden trip to Beijing on May 31st, Wall Street is synonymous with greed and failure, America’s economy is on its knees and it is the Chinese who have been doing the lecturing. With America’s budget deficit soaring and the Fed’s printing presses running at full speed, China is complaining loudly of the risks that inflation and depreciation pose to its huge stash of dollars, and arguing for an alternative to the greenback as the world’s reserve currency”.

This came after 21 May when the magazine revisited the notion of decoupling: “emerging economies (have) become more resilient to an American recession, thanks to their strong domestic markets and prudent macroeconomic policies”. This was a popular thesis a year ago but lost ground as the global slump hit. However, the Economist argues that the idea may be regaining credibility, with China key to this regained credibility.

“China is exhibit A of this new decoupling: its economy began to accelerate again in the first four months of this year. Fixed investment is growing at its fastest pace since 2006 and consumption is holding up well. Despite debate over the accuracy of China’s GDP figures (see article), most economists agree that output will grow faster than seemed plausible only a few months ago. Growth this year could be close to 8%. Such optimism has fuelled commodity prices which have, in turn, brightened the outlook for Brazil and other commodity exporters”.

Anatole Kaletsky has also noted the significance of economic linkages between China and Brazil, as well as China and South Africa.  

“Commodity-producing countries such as Brazil and South Africa have obviously benefited from China’s overtaking of the US and Europe as the world’s main consumer of raw materials. As long as the Chinese economy keeps growing, Brazil is assured of demand for its iron ore and soya, South Africa for its platinum and coal. Thus the success of the huge fiscal stimulus package announced by the Chinese Government in December has turned out to be much more important for these countries than similar measures in the US or EU”.

So, as Kaletsky puts it, this has meant that America has sneezed but much of the world seems germ-free. The role of China in this trend might suggest that in contrast to decoupling, we are witnessing a coupling of economies to China rather than the US. Kaletsky goes on, however, to make an observation that is more supportive of the decoupling thesis:

“Even more important than the growth of trade with China is that many of the emerging economies, including Brazil and South Africa, have had the financial resources to implement their own independent stimulus packages”.

This capacity of emerging economies to take forward their own stimulus packages appears to be part of a changed world order, with China – twenty years after Tiananmen Square – pivotal to this changed order. Yet, as Martin Jacques, will argue in a new book that he will launch with an event at the RSA on 22 June, “we have barely begun to understand what life will be like when China rules the world”. The blurb on the RSA website about this event goes on to state:

“For well over 200 years, we have lived in a Western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern is inextricably bound up with being Western. The twenty-first century will be different. The rise of China, India and the Asian tiger economies means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively Western. The West will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer.

“The central player in this new world will be China. Continental in size and mentality, China is a ‘civilization-state’ whose characteristics, attitudes and values long predate its existence as a nation-state. Although China is clearly influenced by the West, its extraordinary size and history mean that it will remain highly distinct, and as it exercises its rapidly growing power it will change much more than the world’s geopolitics. The nation-state as we understand it will no longer be globally dominant, and the Westphalian state system will be transformed; ideas of race will be redrawn”.

This is why Jacques argues that we are moving into an era of contested modernity. But Kaletsky still frames the rise of China in somewhat western terms by observing:

“The story of South Africa and Brazil in the past decade (has enabled a) transition successfully to pluralistic, liberal free-market democracies.

“Whether China ever manages a similar transition is, of course, the great historical question of the 21st century. But if it forces China to direct economic development towards the needs of its own citizens, rather than the tastes of US consumers, the financial crisis is likely to accelerate China’s evolution into a pluralistic market economy, rather than slowing it down”.

“Car ownership in China – an important badge of middle-class status – is only 2-3 per cent”, as the Financial Times recently observed. The economic development of China will expand this middle-class, which may lead to the kind of transition that Kaletsky envisages. That said; China has already changed massively in the past twenty years but the grip of the Communist Party upon power in China seems more secure now than it did at the time of Tiananmen Square. Why? 

“As a result of the effective combination of governance reforms and co-opting the rich and the middle class”, the Financial Times explains, ”few analysts believe the party will face a serious threat over the next decade”. These governance reforms mean that the Communist Party is a very different beast from what it was twenty years. Change in China is likely to be such that it will face further calls to evolve in coming years. This will lead, claims the Financial Times, to “pressure to introduce deeper political reforms”. But will these reforms lead to China taking the kind of transition to western democratic norms as foreseen by Kaletsky or will they result in the Chinese producing a governance model that takes the “highly distinct” form anticipated by Jacques?

As well as the internal management of the increased power held by China, there are, of course, questions to be asked about the external use of this power. On the eve of Barack Obama’s much heralded speech to the Muslim world, for example, it is interesting to note that the Economist also recently concluded: “If China is at all serious about joining America as a global leader, this is the time for it to shoulder its responsibility by helping to punish Mr Kim”. Mr Kim, of course, is the leader of North Korea. Things which definitely can’t be decoupled are the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. The ambitions of the later are a key point of context to Obama’s speech. However, the coupling of North Korea and Iran also, in turn, couples together the efforts of the US and China to respond to the ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

This is a profound change to the world order but is to say nothing of the ”neo-colonialist” tendencies that some see in Chinese “land grabs” in Africa. We have grown used to the empire of liberty, as a current Radio 4 series describes the US, dominating a unipolar world order but, perhaps, we should be preparing for another empire, quite possibly with less regard for liberty, as liberty is generally understood in the west, to be a significant player in a multipolar world of contested modernity. Given that we have elections to the European Parliament tomorrow, one wonders what Europe’s role will be in such a world. Sadly, marginalised, I fear, unless we can quickly raise our game very dramatically.