Thinking Global

America deserves better.

If only this year’s presidential candidates were as focused on global competitiveness as are America’s business leaders, the world’s most important economy and democracy would already have become the “Comeback Kid,” portrayed on this week’s Economist cover as a muscle-bound Uncle Sam.

We are witnessing the most expensive and one of the most negative presidential contests in U.S. history. Thus far it is serving little purpose aside from enriching  the advertising industry.

With global economic growth waning, the euro zone imploding and America approaching a fiscal cliff, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney remain on the low road of ad hominem attacks that badly serve Americans and the world.

The most crucial question for American centrists, who are likely to decide this November’s elections (and I count myself as a card-carrying member), is whether Obama or Romney can reverse the dangerous signs of eroding U.S. competitiveness and shore up the beginnings of an economic resurgence.

It is a question of historic significance.

Just as the best candidate during the four decades of the Cold War era was the one who most clearly understood how to tap America’s dynamism and stare down a very real Soviet threat (Ronald Reagan fit that bill), today’s most effective president will be the one who can best navigate a similarly extended period that is shaping up to be an era of global competition.

In this new age, great-power military conflict of the U.S.-Soviet variety is all but unthinkable, yet smaller rivalries proliferate where there are economic gains to be had. It is an age in which the battlefield has been transformed by communication technologies and the addition over the past two decades of a billion people to the global workforce in emerging nations. They are not only manufacturing shirts and toys but also, empowered by the Internet, competing against America’s highly skilled computer engineers, lab technicians and architects with their outsourced labor.

The good news is that America is uniquely qualified to do well in this less dangerous yet more complex era, given the scale of its market, its agile private sector, its youthful demographics (compared with other advanced economies) and the fact that, unlike Europe, it acted more quickly and decisively to address its financial rot and remake its banks. America leads the world in exploiting shale gas, and its export sector is thriving. The U.S. has a fighting chance to meet President Obama’s goal, stated in his 2011 State of the Union address, of doubling exports in five years. Exports to China alone have grown by 65 percent since 2007, making the country the third-largest American export market.

The bad news, captured Tuesday in Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s bleak testimony to the Senate Banking Committee and in this month’s IMF annual report on the U.S. economy, is that the threats to this potential rebound are immediate. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde called the U.S. economic recovery “tepid,” predicting the U.S. will have just 2 percent growth through the rest of the year. The downside risks that could reduce growth further include the euro zone crisis, the slowing growth of emerging markets and Washington’s political dysfunction.

Although the American business environment remains one of the world’s most attractive, a recent survey by Harvard Business School shows that 70 percent of its alumni expect American competitiveness to decline over the next three years. During 2011 alone, more than 1,700 respondents were personally involved in decisions about whether to place business activities in the U.S. or elsewhere, and in two-thirds of the cases they decided against the U.S.

The respondents pinpointed weaknesses that the candidates should be addressing, but are not. Among them: America’s cumbersome tax code, its failing elementary education, its overregulation, its aging infrastructure, its inadequate workforce skills and, yes, its political gridlock.

In analyzing the findings, Michael E. Porter and Jan W. Rivkin wrote:

Many see jobs as the goal, when in fact it is only through restoring American competitiveness that good jobs can be created and sustained. Many see income inequality as the central problem, when in fact inequality is the outcome of underlying problems in skills, opportunities and other fundamentals that must be addressed if inequality is to fall.

In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama dramatically spoke of “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” comparing the new global competitiveness challenge to what Dwight D. Eisenhower faced following the Soviet launch of the first orbiting satellite. The outcome was a national mobilization that resulted in the birth of NASA, the education of a new generation of engineers and, ultimately, victory in the space race.

The problem is that Obama and Romney now are acting more as politicians out to win the next turn of the news cycle rather than as statesmen providing a roadmap for this new era of global competition. The Obama campaign’s portrayal of Romney as a rapacious capitalist is as unhelpful as the Romney campaign’s attacks on Obama as a closet Marxist.

The American private sector is doing much to rise to the challenge. It’s time for the two men vying for the Oval Office to stop playing gotcha and provide leadership for this new generational challenge.

They may have to channel Eisenhower.

PHOTO: Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain (center L-R) , President Barack Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and others, including French President François Hollande (seated R), watch the overtime shootout of the Chelsea vs. Bayern Munich Champions League final in the Laurel Cabin conference room during the G8 Summit at Camp David, Maryland, May 19, 2012. REUTERS/White House/ Pete Souza/POOL

CHICAGO — As measured from President Obama’s re-election campaign perspective – the White House’s litmus test for foreign policy issues through November – last weekend’s G-8 and NATO Summits were bell ringers.  Obama campaign strategists couldn’t have scripted their outcomes better – perhaps because they did script them.

Given the potential for dissent, President Obama could be satisfied that his guests adhered (mostly) to the desired story line. At Camp David, President Obama was the jobs-and-growth champion. In hometown Chicago, with leaders of some 60 countries arrayed around him, he was the president who would wind down an unpopular war. (That his Chicago White Sox trounced the Cubs during NATO Night at Wrigley Field, in a game that opened with an honor guard carrying flags from the 50 countries engaged in Afghanistan, was an added benefit.)

The only problem with this pretty picture is that getting the campaign message right is a long way from getting the world right. What really connected the G-8 and NATO meetings was a growing realization that the biggest threat to the alliance – and, for that matter, to Obama’s re-election hopes – is the euro zone crisis. That risk comes at a time when U.S. debt and political dysfunction makes the West far less resilient. So for all the talk in Chicago about common purpose in Afghanistan, NATO’s most existential danger now comes from within, and its root causes are economic.

When NATO strategists weigh the many threats facing them, they tend to focus first on their founding treaty’s Article 5, which requires all members to defend a single ally against an external security threat. Insiders also often discuss Article 4, which allows for a member country like Turkey to seek urgent alliance consultations when it foresees new dangers, as was the case during the Iraq war and is now again the case concerning Syria.

Yet it’s time for NATO to dust off its long-forgotten Article 2, known at the treaty’s writing in 1949 as “the Canadian article,” because of that ally’s early insistence that military strength couldn’t be separated from economic health. It committed all NATO members to “strengthening their free institutions” and “promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any and all of them.”

That article was put forward by then-Canadian Foreign Minister Lester Pearson, and was enthusiastically supported by the U.S., because both countries feared NATO would become too much of a military assistance program without sufficient economic cooperation or benefit. Under the logic of Article 2, ambitious free trade and investment agreements – of the sort the Obama administration is currently postponing with Europe – are as strategically important as defense programs.

Some have argued that NATO need not consider such matters, since they have become the domain of the European Union. Indeed, as part of NATO’s recent reforms, it got rid of its economic directorate altogether. Yet now that the EU itself is under threat, it’s time for the alliance to consider the security implications of financial and economic shifts – and how they could alter the strategic balance of power.

According to Article 2, it is also a NATO matter whether Greece leaves the euro zone, given its European, transatlantic and global repercussions. How France and Germany settle their dispute over the policies of growth versus austerity, again, is an issue of deepest concern to the alliance. The growing divide that the euro crisis is creating between the north and south of Europe has significant implications for the future solidarity of NATO members that goes far beyond, but also includes, the sharp decline of defense budgets.

The wider implications of the euro crisis go right to the heart of the geopolitical and security issues that concern NATO. The problems stem both from the European Union’s flagging energy for external engagement and its eroding attractiveness to the outside world as the model of prosperity and stability – to be emulated and, when possible, joined.

A weak, introverted Europe and a debt-laden and distracted United States are encouraging Russia to reassert its influence, in part through its new Eurasian Union, which would be far less attractive were it not for the EU’s troubles. In the Balkans, recent Serbian elections that favored a more nationalist candidate, who represents an anti-EU party, were influenced by the euro crisis. Across the Middle East and North Africa, a battle for hearts and minds is under way: Less attractive influences emerge when the U.S. and Europe are no-shows.

“As more crises may develop, the danger is that we will be so introspective we won’t address them,” says Michael Clarke, director general of the Royal United Services Institute in London. “Europe is losing the ability to be an actor even in its own continent, let alone in world politics.”

NATO leaders can rightly congratulate themselves for coming away from Chicago with a good amount of agreement on the three major agenda items: ending combat engagement in Afghanistan by 2014, pooling more defense capabilities in the face of austerity, and deepening relationships with their most capable partners.

Yet they didn’t begin to address this far more fundamental threat. It’s time for the North Atlantic Council of allied leaders to convene, as provided for under Article 2, to address economic issues that have become matters of strategic consequence.

PHOTO: President Barack Obama holds a news conference on the second day of the NATO Summit in Chicago, May 21, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Young

Imagine that an American intelligence agency organizes an “exercise,” as one occasionally does, on how to manage an unwanted but inescapable Washington role in a Chinese leadership struggle. Throw in the following scene-setting facts:

• With the Chinese Communist Party confronting a decisive leadership transition, a provincial police chief takes refuge in a U.S. consulate and spills the beans on a corruption and murder story swirling around Bo Xilai, whose populist, Maoist campaign threatens the establishment.
• Just a week before the visit to Washington of Vice-President Xi Jianping, who is in line to become paramount leader this autumn, President Obama takes sides. Although Bo’s forces are circling the consulate, the U.S. releases the police chief to Beijing’s leaders.
• With that crisis solved and Chinese leaders indebted to Obama, a blind human rights activist dramatically escapes house arrest and takes refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. With Secretary Hillary Clinton arriving for a high-level Sino-U.S. summit, both sides enter crisis management mode.

It’s no wonder that the intellectual salons of Washington have grown a bit bored with the ongoing U.S. election campaign and have shifted their interest instead to Chinese domestic politics. The reasons are obvious: The details are juicier, the drama is more immediate and the historic stakes are considerably more significant.

That’s because any U.S. president, whether named Obama or Romney, will operate within a well-established constitutional framework and democratic habits. While the U.S. has managed 43 peaceful transitions of power over the past 223 years, Communist-led China has managed a smooth handoff only once since its 1949 revolution, and that was in 2002, when Deng Xiaoping engineered the rise of the current premier, Hu Jintao.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft believes China has entered its most decisive domestic political period since the weeks preceding the government crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which resulted in the arrest and purge of Deng Xiaoping’s presumptive heir, Zhao Ziyang, along with a large-scale removal of other officials sympathetic to the protesters. Tiananmen’s immediate aftermath strengthened the hand of hardliners, until Deng, with difficulty, reasserted himself and market reforms in 1992.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley regards the current split within the Chinese leadership to be the most severe since 1971. It was then that Defense Minister Lin Biao, in an apparent attempt to defect to the Soviet Union, died in a plane crash in Mongolia while trying to flee the country after a failed attempt to assassinate Mao Tse Tung. The Communist Party branded him a traitor posthumously.

The global stakes, however, are far greater now than either in 1971 or 1989.

China remains the world’s most important engine for economic growth, it has become the biggest owner of U.S. debt, and it has vastly expanded its global reach through investments and trade. China is likely to surpass the U.S. in the next decade as the world’s largest economy – and its political influence and military capabilities grow apace. Domestic uncertainties now make China the most crucial wild card for the global future.

Beyond that, the country’s leaders in the coming years will face a set of new strains that defy easy solution: Growth will inevitably slow, a rising middle class will make increased political demands, growing wages will make export markets more difficult to win, and the demographics of an aging society and its single-child policy will produce new social and financial pressures.

Thus, the fifth generation of Communist leaders, who will be installed at the 18th Party Congress this autumn, will inherit a China whose unreformed political structure isn’t equipped to manage the demands of its increasingly complex, modern state. They also will face a public angered by widening reports of official corruption amid growing gaps in income.

The seven new individuals who this autumn will be appointed to the nine-member Central Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, the country’s highest decision-making authority, have been bred during the country’s meteoric economic rise. If the current scandal has revealed anything, it is a seething unrest among party leaders over how to manage a country that has moved so far beyond communist ideology.

The conventional wisdom is that the battle lines have been drawn between those who advocate liberal constitutional and political reforms – most prominently represented by Premier Wen Jiabao – that would bring greater pluralism and more powerful rule-of-law, versus those who favor greater state and party controls. Yet lines are far messier and opaque than that: China’s factions, personal rivalries and underlying ideologies defy Western categories.

To sort out the plot, watch closely to see which shoes drop next. That may indicate how much support Bo had at senior leadership levels both for himself and his populist approach, which was laced with Maoist nostalgia and “red culture,” emphasizing large public works, state company ownership and a brutal (if ultimately hypocritical) crime and corruption crackdown.

The standing committee removed Bo, but it’s not yet clear what party disciplinary or criminal actions he will face – or how transparent they will be for the public. In particular, how might party leaders handle the powerful Chinese interior minister Zhou Yangkang, a Bo ally, whose seat on the standing committee is the one Bo had sought? Will military heads roll, as it is rumored that Bo has enjoyed a following as well among uniformed brass.

Most analysts still believe the party congress will produce its forecast personnel outcome: the elevation of Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping. Indeed, the Bo scandal may have guaranteed that outcome as leaders circle their wagons. But watch as well who takes the other leadership seats, in particular Wang Yang of Guangdong province, the leading next-generation reformist leader, who had been Bo’s predecessor in Chongqing.

China’s leaders seem to agree that the status quo is unsustainable. What’s at stake is who will change it – and in which direction.

For President Obama, this exercise provides just one policy course: Do no harm, avoid providing hardliners a scapegoat, and pray for the best.

PHOTO: China’s former Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai (L) and former Deputy Mayor of Chongqing Wang Lijun (R) attend a session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) of the Chongqing Municipal Committee, in Chongqing municipality, January 7, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer