The president-elect of the United States of America, Barack Obama, inherits the inbox from hell, but an all-points crisis like the present one also creates opportunities for radical change that do not exist in more normal times. As Rahm Emanuel, his newly appointed chief of staff, put it: “Never waste a crisis.” Is Obama clever, and radical, enough to seize those opportunities? For example, he has promised to shut down the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. While he’s at it, why not hand the whole US military base at Guantánamo back to the Cubans?
Guantánamo has absolutely no military purpose; Washington has only hung on to it to annoy the Cuban regime. If the US wanted to bomb Cuba, it would do it from Florida. If it wanted to invade, it would land Marines on beaches elsewhere, not march them into the teeth of the Cuban defences around Guantánamo. Besides, the goal should not be to fight the Cuban communist regime, but to smother it with love. After half a century in power, the Castro brothers are nearing the end of the road. What better way to signal the end of the confrontation with the US that has kept the communists in power for so long than to evacuate the only foreign military base on Cuban territory?
Another example. Obama plans to cancel most of George W. Bush’s executive orders, including the one that overruled California’s decision to impose stricter emissions standards on automobiles. Why not accompany that with a federal commitment to an even higher standard — and make it a condition of the forthcoming bail-out of the Big Three US auto-makers that they meet that standard in all the cars they produce within three years?
The recession will only feel like a crisis for a few more months: people eventually get used to almost anything. So Obama should do as much of the controversial stuff as he can while the public is still willing to accept the destruction of shibboleths that have hung around since forever. And he deserves his fun, because the rest of his agenda will be no fun at all.
Gentle decline
The century-long pre-eminence of the US as the economic superpower was bound to decline gradually as the Asian giants industrialized, but the financial collapse risks turning that into a steep and irreversible fall. Even the US dollar could lose its place as the global reserve currency. To limit the damage, Obama has to play a poor hand very well. He has implicit permission from the financial gurus to run even bigger deficits over the next couple of years than the Bush administration did. That will let him do some repair work on the American social fabric as well as just bailing out failing businesses and jobless people. But rebuilding America’s reputation abroad will take more than money.
Current developments in Iraq allow Obama an easy and early exit from that country, but his statements on Afghanistan and Pakistan suggest that he is still trapped in the “war on terror” paradigm. In truth, US military domination of the Middle East is finished, but the hardest thing is just to walk away and accept that changes will occur in that region.
If he can untie that albatross from around America’s neck, however, he stands a fair chance of gaining a real leadership role in international affairs. Paradoxically, by turning into a financial morass, the US has regained its centrality in world affairs, and Obama can use that to do big things elsewhere. The obvious place to begin is in the area where the US has done the most damage by its obstructionist policies under Bush: climate change.
If he takes leadership on that issue, avoids disaster in the Middle East, and restores faith in the US financial system, Obama can put the country back on its previous glide-path of gentle and purely relative decline in the great-power pecking order.
