Friends,
A new president and a wake-up call
Financial Times of London
By Philip Stephens
Published: September 11 2008 18:52 | Last updated: September 11 2008 18:52
"Towards the end of next January, the US and Europe are going to wake up with a jolt. A new American president will be told that, for the first time in its history, the US is a nation entering relative decline. Europeans will discover simultaneously that the departure of George W. Bush has deprived them of an alibi." .....
"I say all this is obvious, but it may not seem so to the US voters listening to the two presidential candidates. Mr McCain speaks of using America’s hard power more effectively, combining it with stronger engagement with US allies. His aides promote the (almost certainly doomed) idea of a global league of democracies. Mr Obama promises to rely more on the power of example than on the example of power in asserting US leadership.
Both, though, imagine the world as it appeared after the collapse of communism removed the only serious challenge to US primacy. The assumption is that the mistakes and events of the past eight years can be wiped from the slate. This is not the reality the winner on November 4 will encounter when he steps over the threshold of the White House.'" ....
"The reality is likely to be more fluid – a global environment in which there are indeed new poles, but of power rather than of attraction. This world would see shifting interests and alliances, regional and global, that defy the neat divisions of America’s neo-conservatives." ...
"More likely, we will face a mixed economy of crimped multilateralism, of great power competition and of balancing alliances. The relationship between these elements – between co-operation and competition, strategic stability and instability – will be shaped by decisions made in Washington, Beijing, Moscow and, to the extent that Europe claims a role, London, Paris and Berlin.
If the new US president will discover that the most powerful leader in the world is not quite as powerful as he was, Europe will find the new world disorder equally discomfiting. America’s mistake has been to disdain multilateralism and to overreach itself. Europe’s misjudgment has been to assume the inexorable advance of the rules-based system that it presents as a model to the world." ....
"The conclusion I draw is that the US and Europe have only a small window of opportunity – a year or two after inauguration day, perhaps – to restore the credibility of the multilateral order. If they are to seize it, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic will have to see the world as it is rather than as they would like it to be. Am I optimistic they will do so? Not really."A new president and a wake-up call
FT London
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