Obama’s Journey to the Future

A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that by 2060 China will produce 28 percent of the planet’s gross domestic product, compared to the 17 percent it produces today. The United States will drop to 16 percent from 23 percent in 2012; India will rise from 7 percent to 18 percent. To get an idea of the world that President Barack Obama is entering on his journey to Southeast Asia, consider that today the combined economies of India and China weigh less than half that of the proud G7 industrial countries. In 2060 (the era of our children and grandchildren) the economies of Beijing and New Delhi will be worth more than one and a half times that of the G7.

These numbers are enough to understand that the dawn of the 21st century really is rising in the East. Historians of Obama’s first term will remember the “turn toward the Pacific” as the central strategic choice. Washington’s vocation in Asia is the same as that of Commodore Perry’s fleet, which in 1854 opened Japan to modernity with the Convention of Kanagawa. This is the destiny of the next generation.

The strength of China, with its new party leadership determined to weigh in militarily — a decision made by outgoing president Hu Jintao — is scaring the neighbors. Vietnam is looking to the U.S. for protection (and the two are already bitter enemies). U.S. marines are stationed in Australia. Japan is coordinating naval and air maneuvers with the Pentagon.

Political leaders are gathering in every Asian capital after the meeting of the Chinese Communist Party. The reformist candidates for the Politburo, Wang Yang and Li Yuanchao, remain on the bench, while conservatives Zhang Dejiang and Liu Yunshan are called in. The other five — Xi Jinping (the future president), Li Keqiang, Zhang Gaoli, Yu Zhengsheng and Wang Qishan — have little in their resumes that indicates how they’re going to be the “Gorbachevs” of Chinese transparency.

It’s the kind of mission that the recently re-elected president likes best, in which risks and opportunities come from the future, not from the past. The world of his origins and childhood — Africa and America, Hawaii and Indonesia — is one in which he feels comfortable in terms of vision and culture. He’s embarrassed and distracted when faced with the ancestral feuds of the Middle East, Israel, Egypt, Palestine and Syria — a region that, in his eyes, is rigidly locked in perpetual revenge, while the future advances from Cambodia to Thailand.

The president will encounter pitfalls and dangers in Asia. For years American students have signed petitions in support of Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who was constrained under house arrest by a Beijing-backed military junta. When the country started cautious reforms and freed Suu Kyi, old fractures resurfaced: In the Rakhine State security forces and Buddhist extremists have rekindled a climate of violence with Muslim victims. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that international organizations such as Doctors Without Borders have been barred from rescuing thousands of refugees. Civil war also ignited in the Kachin State, embarrassing President Thein Sein. Suu Kyi has not yet intervened in the violence, but she will have to respond soon to avoid an awkward silence.

Obama won’t find peace in Thailand, where the king is ill and Yingluck Shinawatra and her brother can’t stop corruption or isolate the Pitak Siam protest movement. In short, Obama’s main allies in Asia seem to be the fear of China and the dream of economic development. Although India and China have boasted tremendous growth rates over the past 20 years, hundreds of millions of their citizens are still struggling to reach a decent standard of living. In 2060 Beijing and New Delhi will be the workshops of the world, but the per capita income in China will be just 59 percent of that in the U.S., and in India a very modest 27 percent.

Innovation is still the most valuable item in Obama’s bag of diplomacy. It’s what makes the U.S. the leader of the present and the future; it is an irreverent country, where nonconformity is encouraged (not marginalized, as in Asia) and where breaking the rules of production and culture can yield rewards, not punishment. A country with institutions like the MIT Media Lab, where only “strange” ideas are accepted and tested — a style that Beijing Politburo engineers don’t just dislike, but even fear.

This is why Obama is in Asia with enthusiasm and a little lump in his throat. He’s happy about his re-election, which was never a guaranteed win. He’s focused on a future that is dear to him and over which he believes he can have some influence, as opposed to his prospects for influence in Europe and in the Middle East, where he’s worried by the Petraeus affair. The affair is part of a subculture of gossip and vulgarity, with ladies who are social climbers, fashionably dressed and sculpted by plastic surgery like clones of the model Kim Kardashian, and middle-aged officials, like depressed Madame Bovarys, with their little stars and uniforms. It’s got the FBI, which doesn’t need an excuse to open the CIA director’s mail, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress who are ready to slander each other over the unhappy outcome of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. The same country that knows it can be the richest in half a century, the one that former enemies look to with hope, the one that boasts unrivaled technological leadership, is lost in intrigue. Not from the courtyards of Tacitus’s “The Annals,” but straight out of the American television series “The Borgias”: sex, corruption, power and lascivious banquets.

Happy to be the world leader, Barack Obama leaves with his head held high, but he’s going to spend hours on dispatches about the Petraeus farce. So many American scandals begin with nonsense and then burn the giants of Washington in their bonfires.