America's Power Equation

At the closing plenary session of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2007 in Davos, US Senator (and probable candidate for president) John McCain offered an American perspective on the current global geopolitical situation. He was reacting to critics who refer to "failed American leadership," he said. Americans are sometimes frustrated when North Korea continues to build nuclear weapons, when China fails to act responsibly even when in its own interest, when little action is taken by the international community to put the brakes on Iran's nuclear programme, when UN 'blue helmets' stand idle as defenseless people are ethnically cleansed, when Russia and China vote against a Security Council resolution to highlight Myanmar's continued detention of political dissidents including Aung San Suu Kyi. "Perhaps maybe some of this we have to do alone," said McCain. "We don't do that very often. We understand the importance of multilateral action and there is nothing we wouldn't like better than to join together to stop another genocide. America's first choice will always be to have an alliance of existing like-minded institutions."

The makings of a foreign-policy doctrine for a McCain presidency? Maybe so. But can we wait two years? Read Maureen Dowd's column today (28 January 2007) and perhaps you might agree that two years of the current Bush-Cheney approach may not be such a good thing. We would bet that many of America's allies and friends, particularly in the Middle East, are wondering - in the privacy of their own minds - what more might go wrong before the new president takes office in Washington in January 2009. (Could they be pining for a return of Bill Clinton to the White House on the arms of the new commander-in-chief?)

All this illustrates how important good governance is. We were reminded of a talk Larry Summers gave in Singapore a few months ago at the Raffles Forum, a meeting organized by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Globalization, Summers said, has meant that "the leverage that comes from successful governance is greater today than it has ever been. Prosperity can be created more rapidly than ever before." Successful governance can really help, bad governance can really cause a mess. At the global level, he added, the stakes are high. "Leadership by a large nation, great power, even a hegemony, depends crucially on competence and a perception of competence - and so these questions of global governance loom larger than they have ever before." Summers, one of Bill Clinton's treasury secretaries, smiled wryly as he spoke those words.

(At Davos, it seemed at times that everybody was calling into question the competence of the current occupant of the White House. David Gergen, a former adviser to several presidents, bemoaned the lack of diplomatic efforts to resolve differences between the US and Iran. "Any halfway competent administration," he said, would pursue diplomacy before even floating the idea of military action. He recalled travelling to Syria with President Nixon to talk to Syrian strongman Assad. Competence...Will Americans vote for it in 2008? More to the point, in this age of spin-of-the-day and image-building, can Americans pick the competent leader they need from the inept featherweight who should never be allowed into the Oval Office?)