America’s friends around the globe are watching the presidential elections with a mixture of horror and hope. They are dismayed by the expense, the duration and the self-indulgence of an election campaign that does more to entertain and polarize Americans than to enlighten and galvanize them. Despite that, they hope the U.S. once again will confound its critics and produce the leadership and political will to confront a historic pivot point that is as crucial as World War Two’s immediate aftermath.
It is obvious to me, after recent trips to the Middle East and Europe, that despite all the talk about America’s decline, the world’s thought leaders consider the U.S. vote in November to be of great global significance – even though much of that was absent from President Obama and Governor Romney’s first debate last week.
This significance stems partly from the backlog of crucial issues that is growing too large for any U.S. President to easily manage. More important, however, the election coincides with generational shifts – geopolitical, geo-economic, technological and societal – that add up to the biggest change in political and economic influence and power since the revolutions of the 18th century, which produced America’s rise in the first place.
American debt has reached perilous proportions at a time when the ongoing euro zone crisis could turn even nastier. Meanwhile, the threat of violent conflict spreads. In the Middle East alone, America’s commander in chief must confront Iran’s nuclear proliferation, carnage in Syria and the fragility of new democracies in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.
Both candidates favor U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by 2014, but both sweep this issue under the rug for now. Neither has a plan to address the inevitable power vacuum and instability that will result amid the already furious jockeying of the neighboring Iran, China, India and Pakistan.
For all the urgency of those issues, however, what gives this election its historic importance is that Americans will be electing a president who must define their nation’s place in a dramatically changing world. The landscape is driven by factors such as the rapid rise of new powers (in particular, China); individual empowerment – for everyone from terrorists to scientists – of a sort the world has never seen; a growing demand for finite resources like energy, water and food; and demographic shifts that may leave aging societies behind and create ever larger and less manageable megacities.
It was with some hope that the world watched the first presidential debate last week, a refreshing marker in an otherwise desultory campaign. The debate was unusually substantive on economic issues, but it fell far short of addressing the magnitude of the historic moment.
Governor Mitt Romney came closest to referring to such a moment in his closing statement, saying:
I know this is bigger than an election about the two of us as individuals. It’s bigger than our respective parties. It’s an election about the course of America. What kind of America do you want to have for yourself and your children.
Even more compelling had been former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, which has not received the attention it deserves. It captured the urgent need for stronger U.S. leadership and weighed it against the desire of U.S. voters to shed their global burdens following long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq:
And I too know there is a weariness…a sense that we have carried these burdens long enough. But if we are not inspired to lead again, one of two things will happen – no one will lead and that will foster chaos – or others who do not share our values will fill the vacuum.
The president who serves for the next four years will lead as the combined national products of Europe and the United States fall below that of the emerging world. This era will require a different sort of American leadership, one with a deeper and more determined engagement than has been the Obama administration’s preference, but also one that must go far beyond the nostalgia for an unrecoverable past. Governor Romney referred to these roots of history in a major foreign policy address to the Virginia Military Institute this week. In his speech, Romney recalled the period after World War Two, when America contributed to the rebuilding of Europe. He said:
Statesmen like [General George] Marshall rallied our nation to rise to its responsibilities as the leader of the free world. We helped our friends to build and sustain free societies and free markets. We defended our friends and ourselves from our common enemies. We led. We led.
The world still needs and wants American leadership, but of a different, less dominant and more sophisticated variety. In this post-Western world, U.S. leadership will mean not only dealing more effectively with close and trusted friends to preserve a global system shaped by the right values, but at the same time, working more effectively with countries that don’t share our values. We must strive with them to establish common interests.
If the U.S. fails to lead, the outcome is not likely to be its replacement by a similarly well-intentioned power or group of powers, but probably a dangerous power vacuum of uncertain consequences. For the foreseeable future it will be the United States acting, not unilaterally, but rather as the only possible “pivotal power” around which positive historic change can galvanize.
The question is not whether America can pass the global baton, but whether it will be dropped, because for the moment there is no one to pick it up.
PHOTO: Supporters cheer while U.S. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign rally in Fishersville, Virginia October 4, 2012. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
@Gordon2352,
I went to your link and found much intrigue, dishonesty, claims to divine purpose, racism, virtually all of the dark side of humanity. What I did NOT find was any logical support for your obvious hatred of this country.
You say that “…poverty…is where the vast majority of this country’s population have been for most of the 200+ years of this nation’s proud “democracy”. I’m sorry, but that is just plain silly.
The “average American” by any reasonable metric has lived a life of relative luxury when compared to anywhere else at a given point of time. For many, many years, America was the only country in which the “poor” drove!
And, by the way, in every country and society in every time there has been a “wealthy class”. From them have traditionally come the vision, organization, management and funds for necessary development.
In America we don’t envy them, pursue them and chop their heads off. Quite the contrary. We aspire to succeed and join them. We genuinely believe we can. We work, in general, harder, longer and smarter than our peers in other countries. Our productivity, both individual and collectively is very high.
That means, in most years, our economic “pie” is bigger than the year before. Whenn that bigger pie is divided, each seated around “our” table gets more; proof positive that our “system” not only works, but works WELL! It has long been the better, by far, of genuinely available choices. Is it perfect? No.
But some would say perfection is for God, and you and I are but mere humans; as are those around us. It is enough that we can do our personal best.
In Europe and elsewhere one’s upward path was through family lineage and connections, intrigue, betrayal, war…absolutely nothing predictable or admirable. The “best and brightest” did not wind up “running things”. Each “new order” was merely a different hand on the knife carving up the same, unchanged economic “pie”.
You don’t look at the life we live today and arbitrarily dismiss the path of history. The lives and individual productivity of Americans have so consistently outperformed every other contemporary society that nations have sent their “best and brightest” to try and divine what America’s “secret” was.
You ask: “Why hire existing US labor — Black slaves, for example, after the Civil War ended when you can import cheaper labor through a system that creates new slaves to be ground under for “progress”.
Before there was the term” Manifest destiny”, Americans were bringing “cheap labor…black slaves” here from Africa. But ultimately more and more of those slaves
would find freedom in these United States at least for their descendants.
Immigrants from China were brought in, yes, as “cheap labor”, but stayed and have done quite well in their adopted society. So have the Italians and the Irish.
You seem to dismiss the reality that before the arrival of Europeans in America, American Indians made war on each other and took horses, blankets, slaves and brides. In Africa it was blacks who captured and sold blacks into slavery. Europeans have fought and enslaved one another since the Roman Empire and classical Greece, as have the Chinese. It is not America that is thus indicted, but a “fatal flaw” in humanity itself forever awaiting opportunity.
So if the initial price were high, conditions harsh and success elusive or long delayed, in each case these people’s descendants work alongside other Americans, go to the same schools, fight in the same wars, compete for the same jobs, drive the same cars, and shop in the same malls. Their hopes and dreams are the same any American. It is THIS which has been the reality of the American psyche.
I’ll agree that it is time to restore constraints on individual excess; whether it be on “too big to fail” companies, whole industries whose contracts require Americans to forfeit their right to a jury in case of dispute. It should be someone’s :job” to reign in medical monopolies, a privileged political class who give themselves indefensible raises, the union bureaucrat class, as well as union teachers, firefighters, postmen, etc. that have no genuine advocate of “we, the people” across from them at the negotiating tables.
But nobody’s stepping up to “the plate”. I’m not sure how to fix that. But I’m sure it’s possible. Since, in the end, the greatest recurring threat is human nature itself, we can’t “fix” that merely by changing governments.