A pompous and arrogant call for America's self-humiliation by a demonic little Marxist wanker.
Posted on 11/22/2009 10:17:06 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The president’s visit to China was seen as failure, but what if that was just the new standard? Martin Jacques on why the U.S. must get used to decline—and learn humility.
Obama’s visit to China last week was starkly different from previous such occasions. The United States has stumbled into a new era. Just a decade ago it all looked so different. President Bush—in one of history’s great miscalculations—believed that the world stood on the verge of a new American century. In fact, the opposite was the case. The defeat of the Soviet Union flattered only to deceive and mislead. In a world increasingly defined by the rise of the developing countries, most notably China, the United States was, in fact, in relative decline. It took the global financial crisis to begin to convince the U.S. that it could no longer take its global supremacy for granted. This dawning realisation has come desperately late in the day. Even now most of the country remains in denial. Never has a great power been less prepared or equipped to face its own decline.
Fortunately, in Barack Obama the nation has a president that possesses a rare characteristic for that office, humility. He has made it clear from the outset that the U.S. cannot run the world on its own but only in co-operation with others. In Beijing he welcomed China’s rise as a positive and sought a relationship of partnership with it. But as with the U.S. financial crisis, Obama is making it up as he goes along. Like the rest of the ruling elite, he finds himself ambushed by American decline, a situation that his administration was entirely unprepared for. Those who criticized his performance in Beijing as being too weak are not even at the starting line: They refuse to face up to the reality of a fundamental shift in the balance of power with China. In this context, Obama can do no better than, to use one of Deng Xiaoping’s favourite expressions, “cross a river by feeling the stones.”
So what of the Chinese? There was no hand-wringing, point-scoring, or triumphalism, but the Chinese leadership made it abundantly clear that they will do things in their own way and will refuse to be pressured on issues like Tibet, human rights, or the valuation of the renminbi; unlike on previous visits by Clinton and Bush, there were no concessions even in the window-dressing. The good news for the U.S. is that China will continue to place great emphasis on a good working relationship. The Chinese do not view it as a zero-sum game in the manner of the Cold War. There will be no precipitous action such as the selling off of the vast quantities of U.S. debt held by China.
The United States faces two great problems in its relationship with China. While the Chinese have been developing and elaborating their strategy of transformation for over three decades with great skill and patience, the Americans have never seriously entertained the scenario of decline they now find themselves in. In that sense, the relationship is unequal; China knows what it is doing, the U.S. does not. The American establishment has an enormous amount of thinking to do about how to handle China and how to conduct itself in a rapidly changing world. The U.S. also faces another problem, in truth a far bigger one. It does not understand China. Ever since the Nixon-Mao rapprochement, it has operated on the assumption that China will in time end up like the United States, that it would become another Western-style society. It will not. Chinese modernity will share some Western characteristics but it will also remain profoundly different. For modernity is shaped not simply by technology, competition, and markets but equally by history and culture—and Chinese history and culture are extremely distinctive. The United States has long been in denial of this, believing that the end-point of every society must be Western, by virtue of the fact that its own characteristics are universal.
The refusal to recognise that China is different, and will remain very different, is the reason why the United States consistently gets China wrong: that the country would divide after Tiananmen Square and that the Chinese Communist Party would collapse in the manner of the Soviet Communist Party; that market reforms would lead to a free media and a Western-style democracy; that without them China’s growth could not be sustained; that the Chinese did not mean it when they offered Hong Kong ‘one country two systems’; that rise of the market would lead to a steady decline in the role of the state. China, in fact, understands the United States much better than the U.S. understands China. This is because China—like other developing nations—has been obliged to understand the U.S. in order to negotiate its economic growth and modernization. The United States has never been obliged to understand developing societies in this way because it has always enjoyed a relationship of dominance with them. This is no longer the case with China. If not a relationship of equality, China now enjoys real power over the United States, not least as its banker.
The starting point for a new American strategy toward China must be intellectual humility; the recognition that China is and will remain different. The two societies are historically constructed in entirely different ways. To give one example, the role of the state is highly circumscribed and viewed with inherent suspicion by American society; in China the opposite is the case, not just in the communist period but over many centuries, with no obvious boundaries to its power and the state enjoying remarkable legitimacy and deference (even though not a single vote is cast).
But if the United States has barely begun to think about its own decline, it is highly unlikely that it is ready to start thinking about China in an entirely different way. In the new era of relative parity between the two countries, this will leave U.S. presidents at a profound disadvantage. They will find that they are prone to continuously misread and misinterpret their emergent partner, protagonist and rival.
*******
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the U.K. think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
He’s proud of his faux humility. It isn’t humility to suck up to all and sundry in fallacious ways.
A pompous and arrogant call for America's self-humiliation by a demonic little Marxist wanker.
To be honest, given the damage the dems are doing to the nation's economy, I really don't think the US will survive as a single entity. They appear to be implementing the Cloward and Piven strategy, which is designed to crash the economy so they can be in control of the "restart" and shape the nation to their view. The blind spot in such a strategy is that it fails to take into account a balkanization of the nation. Some states will likely try to jump off the sinking ship.
It surprises me not at all that a Brit would know all about national decline and project it onto other countries.
I think that so long as we retain our bill of rights (as in all of it), we need not bow to any foreign power(s). We are free men and we are heavily armed and we can always renege should our “partnership” with China become one of master and slave.
Yes, I can see he’s British. Well, being a marxist apologist from a nation which lost its empire 60 years ago, and is regarded today as a third rate power worldwide, Jacques must be luxuriating in the idea of a China which is more powerful than the US.
Well, I have only this to say: NUTS!
Martin, America has not even begun to fight yet. And we wont let any Chinaman rule the world, your wet dreams notwithstanding. One bad president, thats a setback. But you cant fool an entire nation forever.
I’m sure this Brit Fabian Socialist has our best interests at heart.
But, that's not exactly what our madrassa-trained ruler instinctively does, is it? He seems to reflexively -- instinctively -- kowtow to perceived authority symbols.
So, what could have been a symbol of mutual respect, turns into a bit of humiliation on a national level.
Agreed. The one-sided weakness is humiliating, but mostly for zer0. I don't think *anybody* thinks that "America" is bowing... The One has made everything about himself too much for anybody to think that. This is his own self-destruction.
That deference is actually called "fear," Jacques. And it hasn't enjoyed legitimacy, which was precisely why it was possible for Mao to stir up a revolution. Granted, what he put into place was a tyranny even more draconian and far-reaching than that of the emperors of the past. The Chinese people have accepted both forms of tyranny because they had no choice.
We have here another example of a clueless liberal rejecting natural law and the rights of man.
I wonder how many holes of golf Obama got in while our men and women are bleeding out.
Drivel.
“The U.S. also faces another problem, in truth a far bigger one. It does not understand China. Ever since the Nixon-Mao rapprochement, it has operated on the assumption that China will in time end up like the United States, that it would become another Western-style society. It will not. “
-
The author hits the nail on the head.
We are FOOLS to allow our industrial base to be exported to China.
The result will not be China becoming like America.
The result will not be some magical embrace of freedom.
The result will be exactly what is happening now: American joblessness. American decline. America losing our ability to make things, to invent things.
Worst of all, the end result is an increasing number of unemployed, no-skill Americans whose jobs have been outsourced - VOTE FOR SOCIALISTS.
So called “free trade” is destroying America.
Right before our eyes.
marxist ball gargler.....with a Chinese boyfriend that gives it to him up the __________
Open butt, insert head.
‘...writes a regular column for The Guardian...’ says it all.
Time to read Malcolm Muggeridge who once wrote for The Guardian.
Here’s a atarter
http://www.heritage.org/research/politicalphilosophy/hl229.cfm
I think it’s too soon to count us out.
This is simply false. Authors such as Jacques imagine that they understand the United States from stereotype and the rest of the world from actual knowledge. Neither is true.
American foreign policy has been structured around the concept of a fading prominence since Woodrow Wilson, and not always very successfully. The notion that a set of international rules may be set up under which there is no one vying for dominance is one of which Marxist and other internationalist (and Wilson was certainly that) thinkers are inordinately fond. It runs entirely contrary to actual experience in that field and has found its final, grotesque parody in the United Nations, which organization's members can agree only on one thing - opposition to the United States. This isn't due to any hegemonic abuse on the part of the U.S. (although that too is a largely unexamined tenet of the Left) but simply because were the United States not to exist they'd have had to make one up or the organization would be too obviously without a purpose.
The Chinese have this in common with the Saudis and other Middle East potentates - they have manufactured something for which the U.S. public is willing to part with a nearly unbelievable level of wealth. Both are riding high in terms of international influence because of it. What either does with it will demonstrate both its planners' worth and the abilities of the respective governments to execute those plans. Neither is complete enough at the moment to judge.
Nor is a decline in international prominence necessarily a determinative factor in evincing humility, unless one considers the likes of Vladimir Putin to be humble. Best of luck fitting that one into the overall "inevitability of history" narrative.
Guy’s name ought to be...Obowma.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.