Global Power at the End of 2010 (Part 2)

The new version of Obama that came with 2010 is the other face of a new landscape of global power. The politician who lit up the world in 2008 with his electoral campaign and his brilliant presidential victory reached the halfway mark of his term in November 2010 in dreadful condition. Obama’s weakness at home parallels his weakness abroad, as well as the new weakness of the United States in the world, which has been incubating for a decade, but came to a head in 2010. Washington’s leadership is in serious crisis, after the unfortunate swan song of the Bush presidency with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One measure of the difficulties Barack Obama is facing, as well as [a measure] of his will, was health care reform, the central element of the presidential platform, meant to provide health coverage to the 32 million citizens who do not have it. It passed in March — with a delay of half a year and at the cost of being heavily diluted — at a time when Obama still had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. But the Republican Party wants to take advantage of their victory in last November’s midterm elections, which left Obama isolated before a Congress controlled by the opposition, to prevent the reforms from being put into practice.

The resounding Democratic defeat in the midterms indicates the slim chance that Obama has to pass immigration reform, education reform and climate change reform. No one on the Republican side wants to help him. Although he was able to pass financial reform, the weakness of an economy that is still not creating jobs weighs on his presidency, and job creation is a politician’s only trump card during a time of crisis. To top it all off, two years after his departure, Bush’s legacy is rearing its head. The United States has pulled its combat troops out of Iraq, but is still fighting in Afghanistan, notwithstanding the president’s 2014 date for withdrawal. Guantanamo is still open. There is no progress in the Middle East. The fragile nuclear accord with Russia is in danger. And numerous parties have no compunction in challenging Washington: close allies like Israel, enemies like North Korea and Iran, friends like Brazil and Turkey, and even a stateless entity like WikiLeaks, with its disclosure of military and diplomatic documents.

Things are not any better for us Europeans. We do not have a tea party, the populist movement that inflames the conservative, religious American heartland against taxes, government intrusion and immigration. But we have similar movements, some of which are worse. The most serious symptom of decline in the West, manifested in the form of political anguish, is a bubbling up of xenophobic parties that win elections, influence governments and mark their agenda with the bogeyman of Islamic immigration, presented as a threat to European identity and a source of unfair competition for European workers.

Power is also shifting in Europe, where the forced reform of the welfare state and the drastic cuts imposed by the crisis are destroying what is left of social democracy. The strikes, social unrest and student demonstrations which began this year across the continent seem to be a mere prelude to what will happen when cuts to social programs really take hold. It is highly likely that the crises of sovereign debt and the euro will unleash first social, and later political crises.

These sparks are flying in the very year when the European Union expected to get comfortable with its new rules. This was the first year of the Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in December 2009, after a long gestation and enormously difficult birth, which was delayed by nearly a decade. The treaty was intended to last for many years, maybe even decades, without the need for more of the painstaking reforms that we have seen over the last 20 years, according to many European leaders. But the debut could not have happened at a worse moment, in the midst of serious difficulties for the euro, which threw into clear relief the weakness of the treaty when it comes to coordinating economic and monetary policy.

The euro, which came into circulation in January 2001 and is about to have its 10th anniversary, easily skated through the entire decade without problems until it bumped up against this economic and financial crisis. The euro’s easy life and the incapacity of the European partners to reform its constitution during the first decade of the century are probably the reasons behind Europe’s current weakness. Now panic about the euro is meeting reform fatigue, complicating the resolution of a crisis which demands more changes to the treaties in order to give Europe the economic government and coordination of fiscal and budgetary policies necessary to keep the monetary union from falling apart.

There is one consolation: At the edge of the abyss and with Euro-skepticism rampant even in the most pro-EU countries, in this year of crisis and pessimism many more steps have been taken toward European economic and monetary governance than during the placid first 10 years of the single currency. It was done out of necessity, clearly, not by choice, nor out of any pro-EU vocation. If this crisis does not kill us, it just might make us stronger. But we will have to know how to take advantage of it. China, which does know, is the only country that is truly doing so.