The success of the U.S. economy in this decade has upset a lot of apple carts. The rush of investment to the U.S. has put everyone else, friend and foe alike, under increasing pressure.
It can be difficult to hear the sound of winning, from the other side of any divide, because it often comes off as whining.
Whether we’re talking about the CEO of Exxon-Mobil dismissing climate change, calling everything an engineering problem, or Vladimir Putin lashing out over the FIFA indictments, whining is what we hear when someone else has a losing hand but can’t admit it.
The leadership challenge lies in how you handle this.
The greatness of Barack Obama lies in the gentle way he goes about the business. It’s upsetting to those of us on his side. We want the other side crushed, we want the bad guys to suffer. But if crushing the other side means crushing us as well, he won’t do it. Obama prioritized getting the economy back on track with holding show trials of banksters. He’s prioritizing the maintenance of something like social peace over responding to Exxon or Russia in kind.
It’s what you do when you’re holding the good hand in poker, and this President is a poker player. You keep quiet. You don’t throw a bunch of chips on the table and demand to see the other guy’s hole card. You just keep quiet, take a quiet sip of your drink, and let the pressure build on the other guy.
The danger is what happens after, because life is not a poker game, and Earth is not a poker table. The goal must be to give the other side some face-saving way to back down, to keep them from pulling the temple down around their own ears, because your own people are the collateral damage.
This is true both in terms of economics and in terms of military brinksmanship. Increasingly they’re welded at the hip.
What’s happening in the oil markets is that the Saudis are caught between Iraq and a very hard place indeed. They are learning just what we learned in the last decade, that you can’t bomb your way out of trouble. Kill ‘em all won’t work, either against Iran or against ISIS. Cheneyism fails. But the lesson takes time to settle. Meanwhile the Saudis are selling as much of their own oil, and Iraq’s, as they possibly can. They hope low, low prices will reduce our incentive to deal with Iran, which it won’t. They hope building their own military deterrent will improve our alliance. It won’t, except under a President Cruz.
What’s happening on the peninsula is born of the contradictions welded into the Royal Dictatorship. The merger of an absolutist religion with economic power was tried in the 18th century, in France. No matter how well the middle-class did there, though, they wanted more, more money and more power. By the time the royal family was truly ready to address its problems it was too late. A decade of murder followed, and was replaced not by idealism but by another dictator.
This is what Obama is trying to avoid. It’s a problem that Thomas Jefferson himself could not solve.
While dealing with the French revolution on the one hand, he’s also facing the possibility of a Russian Revolution on the other. Putin’s hand is as bad as the Tsar’s was. The cost of his military adventurism in Ukraine is approaching, in relative terms, the cost of what we did in Iraq, and with less success. Remember how the cost of Iraq broke the U.S. economy in 2008? Well, the Russian system doesn’t have nearly as much slack as ours did. The “poverty” we identified in 2009 is real poverty there, not relative poverty, and the oligarchs there can’t be placated as easily as ours were, by simply printing new money, because the money they print is backed by a worthless oil economy and, therefore, is worthless.
As fun as it might be to watch all this go down in violence, Russia is a nuclear power. A big one. If Putin goes crazier, or someone crazier than Putin comes to power, the result could make World War II look like a garden party, because when it’s “apres moi, le deluge” no amount of deterrence will suffice. We’ve seen that with individual berzerkers here. Mass murder can be the ultimate extroverted suicide.
If that were not enough, there’s China.
China is far more complicated than any American writer has yet described. My son is currently there. And the most important point to note is that China is not all one thing. It is 10,000 things at once. Some places, like Hong Kong, care most about freedom. Other places, like Shanghai, care most about growth. Beijing cares most about the air, and the environment, and maintaining central control. Still others, like Harbin, are worried about starvation.
China is trying to make the leap from an industrial to a post-industrial society, but without risking the accompanying social unrest that comes from allowing minds to open. (Remember the 1960s? They do.) Chinese students are good at agency, they work hard, but they are limited in imagination, which makes free minds tick, and which is necessary to create things that are truly new. They’re imitative, good at the mass production and the mass consumption, but unable to really invent.
They won’t be able to invent until their minds are allowed to roam free, until ideas are allowed to come from anywhere and lead anywhere. But Xi Jinping fears that more than he fears any other force. So he tries to walk a middle ground between Putinism and what might be called Dimonism, a neo-fascism based on finance. Unfortunately he’s surrounded by Madoffism, a get-rich-quick attitude that is strangling his regime from within. Without clear lines between right and wrong, the only way to fight corruption is politically, meaning any move against a thief is seen as a political pay-off to some other faction.
All this is the result of the financial success America has enjoyed under this President. Our enemies have been beaten, but no great people can really be defeated. There’s no such thing as “once and for all,” only new cycles of rebirth, which can entail more violence or less violence.
We’d prefer less, please. But that’s not nearly as gratifying as the “final victory” our own Silly Party seems to want. And time is ticking. The Clinton people have to be handed this hot potato and be given the power to manage it, by an American people who secretly thirst for revenge – against Islam, against “communists,” against “the other.” Engineering Obama’s best future, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, is still something for the future.
It’s not the Pax Americana of the last century, where American arms enforced American hegemony. That way leads only to four more wars. But it can be real peace, if it’s managed correctly.
And that’s what is really going on under the surface in the summer of 2015.
