AS it goes for his charm of fensives, President Barack Obama has yet to show that there’s anything more to them than just charm and soft diplomacy. The one he delved into earlier this year, with so much fanfare, with regard to the Muslim world very largely remains a non-starter, more than half-a-year later, with Israel’s hard-line Benjamin Netanyahu viciously thumbing his nose at Obama to scuttle any prospects of a new beginning for US policy vis-à-vis the Muslim world.
Obama’s very first charm offensive, i.e. the commitment to close down the notorious Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, has come a cropper, with Obama forced to eat his own words on its promised deadline for closure.
Undaunted by reverses, however, Obama seemed to be diving into yet another one this week in China, which in more senses than one is now the most important country in the world for him and whatever he may deem of making of his turn at the helm of our world’s only reigning superpower in regard to that country.
China’s astounding economic and industrial leap-frog from a piddling economy, which saw millions perishing in Mao’s ‘Great leap Forward,’ just 50 years ago, to an industrial giant and an economic power house of enormous potential, is now making it a cake-walk for economists to predict that in less than twenty years China will have overtaken US as the globe’s pre-eminent economic leader. That one factor alone must be a powerful incentive for Obama to court the country which figures higher any other on the American economic chart.
On its own part, China too has all the economic impulses to stay on the right side of the US, which is such a huge market for its industrial and consumer goods. When the US economy was hit hard last year by recession and the consumers, per se, tightened their purse strings, China saw 20 million jobs going down the drain because of the drying up of its most lucrative market. China has enjoyed a huge advantage in the balance of its trade with US, largely because of the hunger of American consumers for Chinese goods.
China also has other economic compulsions to stay on a healthy course of economic exchanges and interactions with the US. The bulk of its astronomical 2.2 trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves is held in US dollars, which makes it the keenest country in the world to covet a robust recovery of the sinking green-back.
But it has been a complex and tortuous relationship between the two countries during the past six decades since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It has been a relationship defying all archetypal definitions and descriptions that normally explain relations between any two countries. It has been much more than a love-hate relationship, with the US traditionally arrogating to itself the role of a concerned and fretting guru whose erstwhile disciple and protégé may have gone awry. It was this guru or big brother narcissism that Barack Obama seemed acutely conscious of the need to shirk and clearly jettison before he set foot on the Chinese soil.
Obama ventured into China within his first year in the White House, unlike all of his predecessors who thought of doing it much later in their office. That was a bold assertion of his own claim that he’s the ‘first Pacific President’ ( meaning one who is prepared to give precedence to the countries of the Pacific Ocean rather than those on the Atlantic, as did most US Presidents who were thoroughly Euro-centric).
In another marked departure from the practice of his forebears, the US president didn’t beat his chest or bang his fists to demand better human-rights performance by China before being feted by its leaders. So conscious was Obama of the need to not offend the Chinese leaders on this issue that he refused to meet the Dalai Lama who was recently in the US. That must have sent a positive signal to his hosts on the prickly issue of Tibet.
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s father figure, in an interview to Michael Elliott of the Time magazine on the eve of Obama’s visit to Singapore for the APEC Summit, was brutally frank in castigating the western fad that the Chinese people were being starved of democracy. Chiding Elliott, Lee said the Chinese people had no fetish for democracy; instead, they had a clear hankering to improve their standard of living through their own effort the way Singapore Chinese or those in Hong Kong and Taiwan have done so eminently.
Lee Kuan Yew spelled out his prophetic vision about the 21st century. ‘The first half of the 21st century—a large part of it—will still be American,” he told another American television interviewer: “But I believe the second half you’ll have to share top places with China and also India.”
Does Obama understand all this, and conscious of it was he trying, in his charm offensive to lay the foundations of a relationship of equality between an awakened and energetic China and an increasingly vulnerable and debilitating US? The odds, however, look not only daunting but discouraging given the present ground realities in the backdrop of the 21st century to which Lee Kuan Yew was alluding.
The most obvious difference between these two countries is their current agendas for the foreseeable future.
Whatever Barack Obama may intone for the record in reference to the US foreign policy in the world, and howsoever he may use his guile and charm to sell it to the world, the US remains aggressive, expansionist and militarist with an agenda of global domination on the strength of its yet unrivalled fire-power and fearsome capacity to decimate those daring to challenge its dictum.
With the political demise of George W. Bush only the policy ‘face’ of US has changed, with a smiling, charming and soft-selling Obama replacing an irascible and jingoistic Bush addicted to shooting-from-the-hip. The essence of the neocon dream of ruling the world and shaping its 21st century thrust according to Pax Americana hasn’t, really, lost much of its verve and vigour.
Obama went to Beijing to canvass support for tougher measures and sanctions against Iran on the nuclear issue. China matters a lot there because the UN Security Council can’t rubber stamp the western countries’ (US, Britain and France) plans to bamboozle Iran without getting Russia and China on board with them. Obama reached Beijing flushed with success in having twisted the arm of Russian President Medvedev and co-opted him to the western agenda.
However, Hu Jintao didn’t concede ground to Obama on Iran, for obvious reasons. Iran is crucial to China, primarily, as a trusted source of oil for its galloping industrial progress. Secondarily, China, over the past six decades has judiciously pursued a pacifist policy to seek peaceful and negotiated settlement of disputes, shunning the rush to use power.
President Hu Jintao, likewise, refused to buckle under enormous pressure from the US to revalue its currency, vis-à-vis the dollar. The par value of the Chinese Yuan has been a perennial source of friction between the two, with US accusing China of deliberately keeping its Yuan low in order to reap an export bonanza. This forced the mainstream American media to lament that Hu Jintao succeeded in micro-managing the Obama agenda in China.
But what the US media doesn’t mention or allude to is the fundamental difference in the mechanism of policies between China and US.
In all the five millennia of its recorded history, China has never been an aggressive or expansionist power. The only instance of an aggressor venturing out of the extended Chinese landmass was that of the Mongols under Chengiz Khan and Halaku. But even those blood-thirsty Mongols mellowed down to become innocuous pacifists once they put down their roots in mainland China and adapted themselves to its culture.
US, in contrast, has been aggressive and expansionist in all 250 years of its existence, fighting more wars, in all parts of the world, than any of its contemporaries. The China-US twain shall have hardly any room to meet, at any juncture in this century or the centuries to come unless this basic chasm in perception of power changes. The present course of policies from Washington and Beijing doesn’t offer much hope or optimism on this account.
Obama’s very first charm offensive, i.e. the commitment to close down the notorious Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, has come a cropper, with Obama forced to eat his own words on its promised deadline for closure.
Undaunted by reverses, however, Obama seemed to be diving into yet another one this week in China, which in more senses than one is now the most important country in the world for him and whatever he may deem of making of his turn at the helm of our world’s only reigning superpower in regard to that country.
China’s astounding economic and industrial leap-frog from a piddling economy, which saw millions perishing in Mao’s ‘Great leap Forward,’ just 50 years ago, to an industrial giant and an economic power house of enormous potential, is now making it a cake-walk for economists to predict that in less than twenty years China will have overtaken US as the globe’s pre-eminent economic leader. That one factor alone must be a powerful incentive for Obama to court the country which figures higher any other on the American economic chart.
On its own part, China too has all the economic impulses to stay on the right side of the US, which is such a huge market for its industrial and consumer goods. When the US economy was hit hard last year by recession and the consumers, per se, tightened their purse strings, China saw 20 million jobs going down the drain because of the drying up of its most lucrative market. China has enjoyed a huge advantage in the balance of its trade with US, largely because of the hunger of American consumers for Chinese goods.
China also has other economic compulsions to stay on a healthy course of economic exchanges and interactions with the US. The bulk of its astronomical 2.2 trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves is held in US dollars, which makes it the keenest country in the world to covet a robust recovery of the sinking green-back.
But it has been a complex and tortuous relationship between the two countries during the past six decades since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It has been a relationship defying all archetypal definitions and descriptions that normally explain relations between any two countries. It has been much more than a love-hate relationship, with the US traditionally arrogating to itself the role of a concerned and fretting guru whose erstwhile disciple and protégé may have gone awry. It was this guru or big brother narcissism that Barack Obama seemed acutely conscious of the need to shirk and clearly jettison before he set foot on the Chinese soil.
Obama ventured into China within his first year in the White House, unlike all of his predecessors who thought of doing it much later in their office. That was a bold assertion of his own claim that he’s the ‘first Pacific President’ ( meaning one who is prepared to give precedence to the countries of the Pacific Ocean rather than those on the Atlantic, as did most US Presidents who were thoroughly Euro-centric).
In another marked departure from the practice of his forebears, the US president didn’t beat his chest or bang his fists to demand better human-rights performance by China before being feted by its leaders. So conscious was Obama of the need to not offend the Chinese leaders on this issue that he refused to meet the Dalai Lama who was recently in the US. That must have sent a positive signal to his hosts on the prickly issue of Tibet.
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s father figure, in an interview to Michael Elliott of the Time magazine on the eve of Obama’s visit to Singapore for the APEC Summit, was brutally frank in castigating the western fad that the Chinese people were being starved of democracy. Chiding Elliott, Lee said the Chinese people had no fetish for democracy; instead, they had a clear hankering to improve their standard of living through their own effort the way Singapore Chinese or those in Hong Kong and Taiwan have done so eminently.
Lee Kuan Yew spelled out his prophetic vision about the 21st century. ‘The first half of the 21st century—a large part of it—will still be American,” he told another American television interviewer: “But I believe the second half you’ll have to share top places with China and also India.”
Does Obama understand all this, and conscious of it was he trying, in his charm offensive to lay the foundations of a relationship of equality between an awakened and energetic China and an increasingly vulnerable and debilitating US? The odds, however, look not only daunting but discouraging given the present ground realities in the backdrop of the 21st century to which Lee Kuan Yew was alluding.
The most obvious difference between these two countries is their current agendas for the foreseeable future.
Whatever Barack Obama may intone for the record in reference to the US foreign policy in the world, and howsoever he may use his guile and charm to sell it to the world, the US remains aggressive, expansionist and militarist with an agenda of global domination on the strength of its yet unrivalled fire-power and fearsome capacity to decimate those daring to challenge its dictum.
With the political demise of George W. Bush only the policy ‘face’ of US has changed, with a smiling, charming and soft-selling Obama replacing an irascible and jingoistic Bush addicted to shooting-from-the-hip. The essence of the neocon dream of ruling the world and shaping its 21st century thrust according to Pax Americana hasn’t, really, lost much of its verve and vigour.
Obama went to Beijing to canvass support for tougher measures and sanctions against Iran on the nuclear issue. China matters a lot there because the UN Security Council can’t rubber stamp the western countries’ (US, Britain and France) plans to bamboozle Iran without getting Russia and China on board with them. Obama reached Beijing flushed with success in having twisted the arm of Russian President Medvedev and co-opted him to the western agenda.
However, Hu Jintao didn’t concede ground to Obama on Iran, for obvious reasons. Iran is crucial to China, primarily, as a trusted source of oil for its galloping industrial progress. Secondarily, China, over the past six decades has judiciously pursued a pacifist policy to seek peaceful and negotiated settlement of disputes, shunning the rush to use power.
President Hu Jintao, likewise, refused to buckle under enormous pressure from the US to revalue its currency, vis-à-vis the dollar. The par value of the Chinese Yuan has been a perennial source of friction between the two, with US accusing China of deliberately keeping its Yuan low in order to reap an export bonanza. This forced the mainstream American media to lament that Hu Jintao succeeded in micro-managing the Obama agenda in China.
But what the US media doesn’t mention or allude to is the fundamental difference in the mechanism of policies between China and US.
In all the five millennia of its recorded history, China has never been an aggressive or expansionist power. The only instance of an aggressor venturing out of the extended Chinese landmass was that of the Mongols under Chengiz Khan and Halaku. But even those blood-thirsty Mongols mellowed down to become innocuous pacifists once they put down their roots in mainland China and adapted themselves to its culture.
US, in contrast, has been aggressive and expansionist in all 250 years of its existence, fighting more wars, in all parts of the world, than any of its contemporaries. The China-US twain shall have hardly any room to meet, at any juncture in this century or the centuries to come unless this basic chasm in perception of power changes. The present course of policies from Washington and Beijing doesn’t offer much hope or optimism on this account.
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