As promised, Barack Obama really has changed the face of American diplomacy. Anti-capitalist protests notwithstanding, Obama's America is loved at least as much as it is loathed in Europe. And while the strategic upshot of this new era of good feelings isn't clear, it's certainly heartening to see. During the G-20 summit, the president exuded a confidence and command of policy detail that will serve him well in the future. One is reminded of the far less electrifying first President Bush, who also commanded considerable goodwill and respect as the pragmatic successor to another "cowboy president."
For some time now, center-left foreign policy intellectuals have cited George H.W. Bush as a model for the Obama foreign policy, and the parallels are certainly there. Obama's Republican defense secretary, Robert Gates, has reportedly bonded with the president over their shared admiration for Bush. On Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama has taken the H.W. approach of bringing in a bipartisan team of experts, who've crafted a rather conservative plan--in effect, a military and civilian surge aimed at building Afghanistan into a state that can defend itself. And just as the first Bush managed the rocky post-Soviet transition through a humble, deferential stance towards the allies, Obama has embraced the role of team player, eager to broker deals.
But deferential diplomacy can only get you so far. As a number of observers have noted, the end result of the summit meeting--the terribly vague communiqué --was not exactly inspiring. The headline was that France and Germany, laggards in the fiscal stimulus department, would continue to soldier on without a sharp increase in spending, a rebuke to President Obama's hope that Europe's largest economies would join China and the Anglo-Saxon powers in aggressive pump-priming. Though the G-20 leaders presented a united front, the group is divided by demographics.
Aging Europe faces a fiscal meltdown even sooner than we do, and they are right to be wary of spending new billions that will dig them even deeper into debt. China is also aging rapidly, yet as a still-developing economy, the Chinese lack the "automatic stabilizers," which is to say the social welfare protections, that make a downturn more bearable in Europe. And so aggressive stimulus efforts really are a matter of life or death for the regime, the legitimacy of which depends on rising prosperity.
The United States falls somewhere in-between. Unemployment doesn't mean desperation and social death, as it does in China, but it is certainly far less palatable than in Europe, and the prospect of double-digit unemployment already has big-city mayors in a state of panic as many fear the return of the crime and dysfunction that sparked middle-class flight decades ago. America is also an outlier in that we have a relatively robust birthrate, and our openness to immigration has given us a larger population and thus a somewhat more sustainable fiscal picture. Massive spending increases aren't pretty, but they're not as threatening to the United States as they would be to France or Germany.
It's worth noting that this demographic divide also applies, as the political scientist Bruce Berkowitz has observed, to the politics of climate change. The countries that have embraced the most aggressive policies on climate change tend to be those with shrinking populations--simply put, cutting carbon emissions is a lot easier when you have fewer bodies to heat, feed and clothe through energy-intensive industry. Even left-of-center governments in America, Canada and Australia, the demographically vital Anglo-Saxons, have been notably slower to move on the issue than their slow-growing European counterparts.
Can Obama look to George H.W. Bush to build a more effective alliance--not against a petrostate strongman, but against the far thornier threat of economic doom? I doubt it. At the twilight of the Cold War, Bush's Eurocentrism was right and appropriate: Europe was, after all, where the action was as Eastern Europe shattered and as war broke out in the Balkans. Now, however, the relationship that really matters is, as some of the less diplomatic members of the second Bush administration occasionally suggested, is between the United States and the rising powers of Asia. As one wag put it, it's not the G-20 that matters; it's the G-2 of America and China.
Our economic future depends less on a German stimulus package and more on whether the Chinese Communist Party, which was frankly coddled by the first President Bush and forgiven for the most egregious abuses, recognizes that China's future depends on economic and political democratization. For all his virtues, President George H.W. Bush, a foreign policy traditionalist, couldn't see how a more democratic China would contribute to a more stable global economy. Sadly, we are still living with the consequences of that moral and strategic blunder.
As Yasheng Huang argued in his brilliant Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, the origins of China's severe social inequality lies in a turn away from the broad-based, entrepreneurial growth the country experienced in the 1980s to a more statist, elitist, urban model--a turn that was an outgrowth of the authoritarian turn the country took in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown. This new Chinese model discouraged domestic consumption in favor of a heavy emphasis on exports that has in turn exacerbated global economic imbalances. To flourish, the American middle class needs the Chinese middle class needs to flourish. This notion has to be the sine qua non of America's economic diplomacy. And so far, at least, it's not.
At home, President Obama has been rallying his most ardent supporters on behalf of his stimulus package and his budget. Given his global celebrity, one wishes he'd do a similar end-run around the world's unelected leaders on behalf of a new win-win vision of middle-class development. That is, one wishes he'd be more Reagan than Bush.
Reihan Salam is an associate editor at The Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation. The co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, he writes a weekly column for Forbes.
