As I sit here writing this at the kitchen table, I have had
to move the computer screen as the streams in over my shoulder.
Perhaps it’s the spring-like winter we are experiencing here
in Cleveland. It has brought the early return of my backyard cardinals and
bluebirds. But for the second consecutive day I am feeling optimistic.
Yesterday, it was the signs of community collaboration and engagement on the
part of Cleveland’s too-often dormant and disengaged black middle class. Today,
it’s the cumulative effect of the Republican effort to find a suitable
candidate to take on President Obama. I have swung back and forth between
thinking that the Republicans were soaking up all the ink with their relentless
— and generally false — attacks on the President, and then enjoying their
increasingly savage attacks on each other.
In
past election cycles, it’s been Democrats beating on one another while the
Republicans watched and waited for the chance to bomb the Dems for being “soft”
on defense, appeal to the baser racial instincts of the GOP base, and tout
their presumptive superior economic policies.
All
of that is at the moment turned on its head.
Gingrich and Santorum have provided great campaign fodder for Obama’s
re-election effort against Mitt Romney, the likely GOP nominee. And Mitt
himself continues to show how disconnected he is from the masses of Americans.
So
while I never underestimate right-wing willingness to appeal to the fears of
its base, I am for the moment feeling pretty good as conservative overreach has
stirred up women and even working-class Joes, who, if they are unable to
identify with Obama, will nonetheless vote to keep him in office.
Retaining
the president is important not only to prevent a rollback to the loot and steal
policies of the Bush years, but essential to finding a way to navigate an
increasingly complex world. When Bush I proclaimed a “new world order” after
the fall of the Soviet Union, he had the right term but the wrong
understanding. He clearly envisioned a
world in which the United States would be unchallenged militarily and
politically.
The
past twenty years have shown just how wrong Bush I and “Mission Accomplished”
Bush II were in hewing to American military might and the US as the world’s
police force. Both Romney and his main GOP challengers — Gingrich and
Santorum — are even further to the right with their trumpeting of “American
exceptionalism”.
While
the domestic political landscape can change on a dime, what doesn’t change is
the need for the President of the United States to have an understanding of the
rest of the world.
The
pandering of Romney and his rivals to those who long for what is basically a
vision of international white supremacy is increasingly out of date in a world
that is more intricately colored day by day. Nobody talks about this more
clearly than a “colored” American named Fareed Zakaria, about whom I have
written briefly before here.
Here is his open letter to Mitt Romney:
The world has changed, Mr. Romney
“Dear Mitt Romney,
… I’d like to call attention to a line you have used
repeatedly: “This is a president who fundamentally believes that this next
century is the post-American century.” … [L]et me make sure you know what
exactly you are attacking.
… the age of American
unipolarity — which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union — has ended.
For a quarter-century after the collapse of communism, the United States
dominated the world with no real political or economic competitors. Its ideas
and its model — the Washington consensus — became received wisdom everywhere.
Today we are in a different era. In 1990, China represented
2 percent of global gross domestic product. It has quadrupled, to 8 percent,
and is rising. By most estimates, China’s economy will become the world’s
largest between 2016 and 2018.
… It is not just China that is rising. Emerging powers on
every continent have achieved political stability and economic growth and are
becoming active on the global stage. Twenty years ago Turkey was a fragile democracy,
dominated by its army, that had a weak economy constantly in need of Western
bailouts. Today, Turkey has a trillion-dollar economy that grew 6.6 percent
last year. Since April 2009, Turkey has
created 3.4 million jobs — more than the European Union, Russia and
South Africa put together. That might explain Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s confidence and his country’s energetic foreign policy.
Look in this hemisphere: In 1990, Brazil was emerging from
decades of dictatorship and was wracked by inflation rates that reached 3,000
percent. Its president was impeached in 1992. Today, the country is a stable
democracy, steadily growing with foreign-exchange reserves of $350 billion. Its
foreign policy has become extremely active. President Dilma Rousseff is in Cuba
this week, “marking Brazil’s highest-profile bid to transform its growing
economic might into diplomatic leadership in Latin America,” the Wall Street Journal reported
Wednesday. Brazil’s state development bank is financing a $680
million rehabilitation of Cuba’s port at Mariel.
… I could go on.
This is a new world, very different from the America-centric
one we got used to over the last generation. Obama has succeeded in preserving
and even enhancing U.S. influence in this world precisely because he has
recognized these new forces at work. He has traveled to the emerging nations
and spoken admiringly of their rise. He replaced the old Western club and made
the Group of 20 the central decision-making forum for global economic affairs.
By emphasizing multilateral organizations, alliance structures and
international legitimacy, he got results. It was Chinese and Russian
cooperation that produced tougher sanctions against Iran. It was the Arab League’s
formal request last year that made Western intervention in Libya
uncontroversial.
By and large, you have ridiculed this approach to foreign
policy, arguing that you would instead expand the military, act unilaterally
and talk unapologetically. That might appeal to Republican primary voters, but
chest-thumping triumphalism won’t help you secure America’s interests or ideals
in a world populated by powerful new players.
You can call this new century whatever you like, but it
won’t change reality. After all, just because we call it the World Series
doesn’t make it one.” Source
I couldn’t have said it
better. Find the entire column here.
