The audacity of failure

I feel sorry for President Obama. He reminds me of Mr Hussain Shaheed Suharwardi, a former PM of Pakistan, who once said, in reply to a question about his helplessness in policy matters that “he was but a tongue between 32 teeth”. President Obama also appears to be a helpless tragic figure who has chosen compromise over principles to survive as a politician. True, politics is the art of the possible but not of appeasement for the sake of retaining power.
Obama made so many promises of change before his election but hardly kept any. Millions of Americans who worked and voted for him feel highly disappointed at his performance. That explains their decision to handover the House of Representatives to the Republicans. Everyone knows that no US president can retain the support and backing of a majority of voters, but should not so frighten him so much that he begins to compromise his very deeply held values and belief. Good judgement and ability to take unpopular decisions, even at the risk of losing an election are the very essence of good leadership.
To give just one example, look at his policy statements on China during his recent visit to Australia. One can understand his desire to maintain the US position as the sole superpower of the world, but not at any cost. It is because of such policies of President Bush that the US has lost almost completely it influence among the nations of the world. He should not simply try to please the hawks whose policies were responsible in the first place for putting the US in its present quagmire. Secondly, how can such an intelligent and well-read person like Obama not understand the basic point, brought out in such great and so convincingly by Paul Kennedy in his book written over 25 years ago that no country can remain a superpower, let alone the sole superpower, without an unassailable economic strength.
If anyone, he should know that the Chinese bird has flown out of the cage and cannot be captured. China has already become world’s second largest economy; it can neither be held back by the direct use of conventional and nuclear weapons as it has developed the capability of retaliation, nor by a policy of containment based on strategic alliances with neighbouring powers. Such a policy might have worked before 9/11, but in the ten years since then, while the Neocons had most foolishly invaded Iraq and got embroiled there, and then in Afghanistan, China had been building its conventional, nuclear military power as well as its economic power so rapidly that it has now gone far beyond the reach of the US.
So what should President Obama do when the US economy is on the verge of near total collapse and the fate of Obama’s re-election bid depends on its rapid recovery which seems impossible? In this situation he can appeal to nationalistic feelings based on anger against China in the belief that most Americans hold it responsible for the present day plight of their country, therefore a policy of anti-Chinese bravado would win him votes and elections. After all, throughout history leaders have used wars and threats of war to distract the people from their real problems for short-term gains. Unfortunately, President Obama seem to be taking the same kind of shortcut by using nationalistic feelings and unfounded anger to win back his popularity and get re-elected.
However, such a policy will not only fail to get him the votes of the hard-line, anti-Chinese Americans, the McCarthyists of today, but would further alienate his young supporters who definitely hate war and the wastage of resources it entails. In this age, wars have lost their sheen and are no longer a means of gaining quick power, prestige and riches. Therefore, President Obama has no choice but to try and resuscitate the US economic lungs as he cannot stop China from emerging as its rival superpower.
But he should not see the rise of China through the lens of the Cold War. China has made it clear that it wants to emerge as one of the new superpowers, but it has given no indication that it again wants to become the Middle Kingdom. Thus neither does it want to nor can it replace the US as the richest, most progressive, liberal and technically most advanced nation in the world. China only wants to protect its own newly-gained economic prosperity, independence and status as a world power.
History is of full of the decline and fall of world powers with an overlapping period of about hundred years. Since nature abhors a vacuum, the fall of one world power is always accompanied by the rise of another. As far as written history is concerned, the chain started with the Egyptians. Some seven thousand years ago, they began to emerge as a civilisation, reached the zenith by 6000 and remained a world power until 4000. But after a glorious history, they began to decline. Then rose the Assyrians and the Persians, who after reigning as world power for about a millennium were finally defeated and destroyed by the Greeks, Alexander the Great, who was followed by the Romans, Muslims, Tsarist Russia and the United Kingdom. Recently, the Soviet empire broke up and now it seems that the USA will soon exit the world stage as a superpower while China will emerge as a new one.
The US is trying to halt this process but wrongly by attempting to prevent the emergence of China as a new rival. A wiser way would be to resuscitate its own strength.

The writer is a former Ambassador of Pakistan