Nice find. It is an interesting read... particularly for the element in the political perspective from the President's erstwhile core support. FWIW, I'd predicted that Obama would win the election well before others had even considered that it could happen... with my left leaning friends in particular being most dismissive. At the same time, I'd also predicted that AS President, Obama would end up adopting virtually all of the Bush Administration's policies... including that related to terrorism, military commissions and Guantanamo, etc.
People not in power can afford to be wrong on the facts... while people in power will be forced, one way or another, to come to grips with realities that their political brothers would prefer to pretend are the fabrications and conspiracies of their political opponents. The world is often a very different place than it is imagined to be by those who've not "been there, done that"...
Reality confronts a lot of that sort of error pretty quickly upon a new President taking office... while some bits might take 6 months or more, at least in terms of crafting the shift in perception required while dragging supporters along...
The Chinese are also not immune to those elements in politics... and are more subject to and less able to be corrected in the myopias they adopt... and they are much less flexible in having no meaningful opposition that can hold them accountable for errors... as is necessary to enable corrections...
The Chinese have made a couple of tactical and strategic errors in the last few years... some of which have been only about making bad decisions... and some of which is a function of bad choices made in politics that have more to do with the leadership pandering to the same form of nationalism in the Chinese people as The Nation claims is unique to knuckle dragging Republicans.
Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican... you cannot afford to surrender control to those who violate others rights, the way that Nazi's and the Japanese, and other colonial powers before them, did in the past... You cannot afford to ignore realities, and throw your allies under the bus... and you cannot ignore that politics is only a minor part of the reality that matters... where power creates its own centers of gravity.
Obama has been a quick study as President, and came into the office with enough exposure to the world outside the U.S. that there was little chance that he'd be the myopic ideologue his supporter are... and want him to be... in things other than the more purely political domestic issues...
As a result, Obama will likely avoid displacing Carter at the bottom of the list of the worst recent Presidents... although that will still depend on things falling his way in a post-withdrawal Iraq, in the evolution of relations with Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and China... and having Europe disintegrate and destabilize on his watch would not be a "feather" in his cap, either... and, more than most, his legacy will be defined by his successors... given the glaring failure to "fix" what the banks have broken in our economy...
Carter made a complete hash of it... in ways Obama has not... which doesn't mean history will care if things just happen to go poorly from here...
Just as Carter gets no credit for the "Carter Doctrine"... when he oversaw the destruction of an Iranian ally on his watch... the things you do right that don't matter because they've not been tested... aren't what will define you.
Obama and Sec of State Clinton have got the policy response re China and its overly aggressive tendencies with its neighbors... almost exactly right.
China cannot behave like the Japanese did in WWII... and expect that people will not think of them like, and treat them like they are the same as the Japanese in WWII... |
