CHAN
AKYA Malign neglect vs aggressive
indifference By Chan Akya
The last of the US presidential debates
confirmed what has been perfectly clear for a
while - whether the incumbent or the challenger is
in the White House next year, US policies aren't
going to change on the economy or foreign policy.
There is no fresh thinking in politics in
general; when it comes to geopolitical matters
this trend has simply become that much more
apparent in recent months. Iran will be bombed,
Pakistan ignored and Russia incensed over the next
four years whoever becomes president. China has
been tickled pink with all the commentaries over
the past few months, secure in the knowledge that
nothing will change.
As I watched in
Europe the various political debates over the
summer up to Monday evening, a couple of
quotations ran through
my mind: "Politics is the
art of achieving power and prestige with the
complete absence of merit", and "The purpose of
psychoanalysis is to go from hysterical misery to
ordinary unhappiness".
If elections in
democratic countries were a form of mass
psychotherapy by putting the misery of past years
up for popular opinion with a perspective of
setting a new course, or else accepting the same
old course of the incumbent, then the question
begs - does the democratic process also deliver a
number of alternatives that allow people the
benefit of real choice?
I looked at a
number of recent elections, as well as mass
protest movements with an evaluation of the
underlying political dynamic with a view to
gauging the answer. No prizes for guessing which
way my thinking goes in this matter - the opening
quote makes that fairly obvious.
Europe
and Middle East fall flat In Europe, we
have seen pretty much every single incumbent
government (or the major political party
underpinning the government) fall by the wayside,
with the public bringing in political change
almost for the sake of change.
If the
experience of the past four years is anything to
go by though, nothing did change in Europe -
arguably no government there has figured out how
to handle its mounting problems. To a large extent
there is a policy continuity that is regularly
interrupted by calls for change whether in matters
of social protests or, less frequently, a
political party that dares to do something
different.
Germany is often blamed for
blocking or stopping all meaningful policy changes
being suggested by the new governments of the day
in France, Spain, and Greece and so on. While this
view may play to national votebanks, it does
nothing to solve the political crisis at the heart
of Europe; it also stands as an explicit admission
of failure by these governments in thinking fresh
ways forward rather than fall back on the
intellectual laziness of Keynesian arguments.
This complete absence of vision, fresh
thinking and backbone are the reasons Europe will
not recover from its current slump (see The
men without qualities, Asia Times Online,
October 29, 2011). Russia chose continuity in the
form of Putin; or more realistically it can be
said simply that Russians had no choice in the
matter. Looking eastward from Europe, we have the
Arab Spring (alright that's more south-east) that
erupted with a lot of promises of regime change;
but it doesn't seem to have affected anything
materially on the ground.
Egypt is the
classic case of a single large falling object
under Hosni Mubarak suddenly threatening to become
a large number of still large falling objects
under the Muslim Brotherhood. Libyans under
Muammar Gaddafi were thinking of giving up
violence against Europe and the US in return for
oil sales; the new mob in charge doesn't seem to
appreciate such niceties as the premeditated
murder of four Americans a few weeks ago showed
clearly. Elsewhere in the Middle East the sands of
time ebb and flow with no change to political
direction.
Choices in the US So
where does that leave the US facing an election
that many pundits call the most important election
of our time?
Even before jumping into any
analysis of what the elections mean for the rest
of the world, it strikes me as fairly opportune
for the wider media - and in particular the US
media - to play up the intensity and closeness of
this particular election.
I say that quite
cynically, from the perspective of how important
political spending is to the bottom line (profits)
of diverse media companies - print, online,
television and radio. This perspective is further
intensified by the weakness in spend by
advertisers over the past few years away from
print and television towards online and radio.
Thus the cynical perspective informs us
that whether or not this election is close or
important in reality, media companies in the US
simply owe it to their survival to call it those
things.
It all looked bleak on the policy
front until a few weeks ago when the challenger,
Governor Mitt Romney, selected as his running mate
and nominee for vice president Paul Ryan. This was
a well-informed choice (see President
Ryan, Asia Times Online, August 18, 2012),
albeit one that is for now focused almost entirely
on domestic issues of the US, in particular the
spending on social welfare that underpins the
structural deficit of the US as well as Europe.
That is good news, but for now Ryan will
not be directly in charge of anything particularly
important. To look at the issues at heart, namely
the handling of the economy and foreign affairs,
one can conclude that the differences between the
two presidential candidates is reminiscent of the
big-endians vs. small-endians in Lilliput; endless
debates and conflicts over matters that are
essentially irrelevant.
I hold the "Bush
tax cuts" along with the unnecessary war in Iraq
as the primary driving forces of the US deficit;
it is unlikely that the idea of tax cuts through
increased debt would be countered any time soon.
Don't get me wrong on the subject though -
I favor low taxes and small governments as all
regular readers are aware; however these should be
aims to arrive at by cutting government waste and
reducing welfare structurally, rather than start
with tax cuts with no specific plans for achieving
smaller government in place. In that event, we
would be in the middle of a distribution debate,
ie the social utility of taxes, not an economic
discussion on what course provides the most
optimal growth scenario for the economy.
US obsession with foreign policy matters
is well known, which is always interesting for
folks in the rest of the world, not the least of
which are worries about whether bombs will start
raining on their heads due to regime change in
Washington.
On that count, Governor Romney
may as well have sent a pale white facsimile of
President Obama into the debate yesterday. There
was nothing new in his responses; and indeed his
vision of the world seemed to hark back to the
type of analysis done by Dick Cheney and Henry
Kissinger rather than rely on any more recent
work.
Obama also failed to explain in any
great length how his sanctions against Iran - a
policy inherited from previous governments -
achieved the end of riots on the streets of Tehran
and a possible internal stop to progress on
nuclear weapons with little or no cost to the
American taxpayers.
With a number of what
look like slightly unhinged people baying for
blood in the general media, my read on the Iranian
situation is unchanged - whoever wins, expect the
carpets to fly around in Tehran soon after. It is
a different matter that such a war will be
foolish, counter-productive and most importantly
play straight into the hands of the real enemies
of America. None of that will matter when the
decision has already been made.
Meanwhile,
neither candidate gave any credible answers on
what is actually the most serious threat facing
Asia, namely the already-nuclear state of
Pakistan, which has gone through more governments
than most people have hot meals. It is not
apparent who if anyone is actually in charge of
the nuclear weapons and how much captive
manufacturing for friendly countries - step
forward, Saudi Arabia - has been achieved in the
past few years.
The level of American
angst against Pakistan has been manifest in
remotely controlled drone attacks targeting
low-level Taliban functionaries operating out of
Pakistan, but it has no semblance of a strategy
around controlling the country's nuclear weapons.
Obama famously failed to identify and act
on the risks from Pakistan (much as his Democratic
predecessor Bill Clinton failed to identify and
act on the risks from al-Qaeda) - that is
troubling enough; but the fact that Romney had
neither the willingness to identify it as a key
risk nor criticize Obama on that front clearly
showed the lack of vision that I found so
troubling among European politicians.
Then
there is Russia, the geopolitical foe of Romney
that Obama seems to have a more benign view of.
Romney appears to have an antiquated understanding
of geopolitical risks, but that's not the trouble.
Neither candidate has any public statements on the
gentle matter of the imploding Russian economy,
which is more than likely to make Russia under
Putin more aggressive and less easy to negotiate
with.
In the matter of China, there is no
substantive difference in policies between the two
candidates other than the gentle nomenclature
change suggested by Romney; that of calling China
a currency manipulator on the first day of his
presidency. Since he failed alongside to provide
the telephone number of the Treasury official who
would be charged with buying back the US$1.8
trillion or so of US government and agency bonds
that China may want to sell on Day 2 of his
presidency, I am not so sure about how real or
effectual his threats will be in practice.
Obama has probably already heard that
threat from China so didn't bother to take up the
gauntlet on the matter instead mouthing
platitudes.
Those watching out of Beijing
will be tickled pink by all the attention the
country received over the past few months, with
all the noise very likely to result in no action
by either candidate. The all-noise-and-no-heat
show will be seen as yet another piece of evidence
that the US will decline to irrelevance even as
China assumes its mantle.
So if one were
to tally up the foreign policy and economic
issues, I cannot realistically see anything that
alters the course of the US. For allies and foes
alike, this will be another four years of
precisely the same stuff as the previous four,
with the choice of either turning the brightness
controls on the television up or down as the case
may be.
As the French like to say, plus
ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Practice
saying that with a Gallic shrug whenever someone
mentions the US elections in the next couple of
weeks.
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