Obama and the End of American Dominance

Putting things in perspective, the great relevance of Obama’s presidency is that it will allow for North Americans, the West and the rest of the world to convince themselves and be completely aware of the fact that the era of the United States…has come to an end. Then the debacle of Bush’s international politics will be understood to have originated in the pretext of imposing his will on a world where it was already impossible to do so because it had already changed so dramatically, without the United States having realized it.

In effect, the United States’ dominance of a unipolar world, having surged with the fall of the Berlin wall, is now history. This is the claim of no one less than Richard N. Haas, president of the United States Council on Foreign Relations, who has worked for four [American] administrations, in one of his recent articles published in Foreign Affairs magazine (Vol. 8, No. 3, 2008). According to him, non-polarity is “a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power.” These actors include emerging powers on all continents; dozens of multilateral global, regional, and functional organizations; large companies that dominate energy, finance, and manufacturing; global means of communication; political parties; religious movements; terrorist organizations, mafia, and nongovernmental organizations of global influence.

From this sharp claim, one can reach the conclusion that Obama, to fulfill his objectives on the international front, will require more than good purposes and good intentions. Because the United States is, without a doubt, the most powerful country but, has Haas points out, “power and influence are less and less related in an era of nonpolarity.” Because, instead of becoming more concentrated, power and influence are becoming more and more dispersed.

For Haas, the end of U.S. economic dominance has many symptoms. Its participation in global imports has decreased by 15%. Its energy dependence and vulnerability have increased. Enormous inversion funds have surfaced in Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, which have at their disposal US$3 billion, they grow at about one billion a year, and are more and more important as a liquidity source for the entire world. London competes with New York as the international finance center. The majority of reserves of primary central banks of the world are in currencies other than the dollar. Petroleum could begin trading in Euros in the not-so-distant future.

Its enormous military power is not effective when confronting new asymmetric and irregular wars. The 11-S, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have shown that in the new theaters of conflict, military expense is not the same as military capability. And in diplomacy, its persuasion capabilities have also decreased. China has shown more capacity than the United States to influence North Korea’s nuclear program. It requires Europe to pressure Iran, but lacks the support of China, and Russia paralyzes it. Pakistan appears to ignore North Americans. Its dominant influence in South America has ended. Emerging powers such as India, Brazil, and South Africa have more and more regional influence.

All of these global changes in a nonpolar system, which naturally leans toward instability and disorder, will make it very difficult for Obama, despite his attractive personality and charisma, to exercise his leadership to search for collective answers to regional and global challenges. But perhaps his intelligence and sagacity will permit him to overcome what Kishore Mahbubani (Foreign Affairs, opus cit.) calls “a deeper structural problem: the West’s inability to see that the world has entered a new era.” In the 21st century, the United States will no longer be the police, much less the king, of the world.

And so, it is necessary to reverse the diagnostic terms: it is not that the world has entered into a new era with Obama’s arrival; it is Obama that has arrived in the moment that the world is transitioning into a new era that started several years ago, and whose primary characteristic is the end of the United States as a dominant global force.