'OBAMA'S
ECONOMIC TEAM'
[Hoje Macau, Macau]
Semana, Colombia
Obama and the End of 'Gringo Domination'
"The importance of the Obama
presidency is that it will allow North Americans, the West and the rest of the
world to become fully aware and convinced that the era of the United States ... is at an end."
By Alfredo Rangel
Translated By Paula van de
Werken
December 6, 2008
Colombia
- Semana - Original Article (Spanish)
To put things in perspective,
the importance of the Obama presidency is that it will allow North Americans, the
West and the rest of the world to become fully aware and convinced that the era
of the of United States ... is at an end. Then it will be understood that the
debacle of Bush's foreign policy stemmed from the aspiration to impose his
will on the world at a time that it was impossible to do so - because the world had
already radically changed without the United States having noticed.
Indeed, the uni-polar world
and the dominance of the United States that emerged with the fall of the Berlin
Wall is history. This is the proposal of no less than Richard N. Haas,
President of the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States who has
worked for four administrations there, and who put forth this premise in a
recent essay for the magazine Foreign Affairs 
. According to
him, a non-polar world is “a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by
dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power.”
These players include emerging powers on every continent; dozens of global multilateral,
regional and functional organizations; huge companies that dominate energy,
finance and manufacturing; global media and communications outlets; political
parties; religious movements; terrorist organizations, mafias, and
non-governmental organizations with global influence.
The conclusion that
one derives from this shrewd deduction is that in order to implement his plans
on the international stage, Obama will require something more than good proposals
and positive intentions. Because although the United States is undoubtedly the
most powerful country, as Haas says, “Power and
influence are less and less linked in an era of non-polarity.” Power and
influence, rather than being concentrated in one place, are increasingly
distributed.
For Haas, there are many
symptoms of the end of American economic domination. Its share of global
imports has fallen to 15 percent. Its energy dependence and vulnerability has increased.
Enormous investment funds in Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates and
Russia, which now hold a combined total of $3 trillion, are expanding at a rate
of $1 trillion per year and are becoming increasingly important as a source of
liquidity for the world. London is competing with New York to be the
international financial center. The majority of reserves of the world's key central
banks are in currencies other than the dollar. And petroleum could soon be
traded in euros.
[The Star, Canada]
Its enormous military power
is ineffective in confronting the new asymmetric and irregular types of war.
The September 11 attacks, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that in the
new theaters of conflict, military spending is not synonymous with military
capability. And in diplomacy, its powers of persuasion have been reduced. China
has shown more capacity than the United States to influence the North Korean
nuclear program. The U.S. requires Europe's help to pressure Iran, but a lack of
support from China and Russia have brought things to a standstill. Pakistan
seems to ignore the North Americans. Its dominant influence in South America is
over. Emerging powers like India, Brazil and South Africa have growing
regional influence.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
In a non-polar world, these global changes
that naturally tend toward instability and disorder will
- however attractive Obama's personality and charisma - make it very difficult for
him to exert leadership to find collective responses to regional and
global challenges. But perhaps his intelligence and shrewdness will enable him
to overcome what Kishore Mahbubani calls “a deeper structural problem: the West's inability to see
that the world has entered a new era .” In the 21st
century, the United States will no longer be the police, let alone the king of
the world.
Thus, one must turn the logic
of this diagnosis on its head. It's not that the world has entered a new era
with the advent of Obama; it's that he has arrived as the world
enters a new era, the main
characteristic of which is the end of the U.S. as the dominant global power.
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[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
December 9, 7:57pm]
