Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Politics of Niceness

Everyone, and I mean everyone, needs to read this interview in The Atlantic with one of the men in China who manages this country’s investments in the United States.

I can understand why Americans might feel that way. But, talking with my lawyer head once again, it’s not relevant to discuss how Americans “should” think. We should discuss how Americans might think.

This concern is not really about China itself. It could be any country. It could be Japan, or Germany. This generation of Americans is so used to your supremacy. Your being treated nicely by everyone. It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.

And you can’t think as a soldier. You put yourself at the enemy end of everyone. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when people really treated other people like enemies. I grew up in an environment where our friends, our relatives, people I called Uncle or Auntie, could turn around and put a nasty face to me as a small child. One time, Vladimir Lenin told Gorky, after reading Gorky’s autobiography, “Oh my god! You could have become a very nasty person!” Those are exactly the words one of my dear professors told me after hearing what I went through.

But over the years, I believe I learned to be humble. To treat other people nicely. I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because of the difference in social structure.

Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.

Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.

I think that with the collapse of the Cold War, which the West won, there would be an acceptance on the part of the rest of the world of Western hegemony, especially that of the United States.  After WWII there were the War Crimes trials in Germany and Japan, in which there was a clear verdict—they lost, their people knew it, their governments knew it, and so on.  There was a sense of finality.  The defeated parties accepted their defeat, and lived with restrictions placed on their armed forces, with foreign troops garrisoned on their soil, and other aspects of defeat.

With the communist world we never had that.  The USSR collapsed, China abandoned Marxism, Vietnam is liberalizing, and so on.  There never was a finality to the Cold War.  We might view it as the end of a War, they saw it as the loss of a battle.  The Chinese during the Cultural Revolution might have been one of the worst, most oppressive places in the world, but those days are over.  The Chinese look forward to a bright future.  They’ve seen 400,000,000 of their countrymen lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years, more than the population of the United States.  Can you imagine the popularity of a US president who could accomplish something similar?

The communist world doesn’t view itself as having lost anything.  Look at Putin and Medvedev, the former of whom is LOVED by Russians as he builds their authoritarian state once again brick by brick.  China is utilizing the best parts of the free market to turn itself into a superpower, and the way things are going it will be THE superpower sometime during my lifetime.

My point is this:  we in the United States have got to abandon the notion that we are always going to be the top dog by default.  It’s been 60 years since the end of WWII, the world is a vastly different place.  The UN Secrity Council, divided among the victorious powers in WWII, is an anachronism.  As we go forward with globalization, and the economies of the world become more and more intertwined, we have got to take the blinders off and admit that we can’t go it alone.  We need China and we need Japan and we need the other countries of the world, be it economically or militarily or what have you.  There is no reason that the US cannot retain its role as the world’s premiere superpower, but we have got to abandon the idea that we will forever be the ONLY superpower, and that countries like China and India are going to sit by like subservient lapdogs doing our bidding.

In short, if we want to be the leader of the pack, we’re going to have to earn it.  We earned it once by winning the Cold War, but we’ve been riding that victory by default for way too long.  There are a bunch of youngsters nipping at our heels, and unless there is a sea change in attitude in our country we’re going to find ourselves in a place we really don’t want to be in.

Many years ago I read something which struck me.  I don’t remember where I read it or who wrote it, but I still remember it:  “There is no problem in America which couldn’t be fixed by another Great Depression.” While it’s way too early to pronounce the current economic situation as being akin to the Great Depression, we are living in perilous times, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we could end up in another Great Depression.  You’ll never meet a more capitalist oriented, free market, consumerist whore than me, I’ve proudly been that way for most of my adult life.  But I think the changes described in this article are necessary.  Democracies very rarely go to war with each other, that’s been the prevailing wisdom for most of my lifetime anyway.  Well, I think we ned to modify that a bit, since that idea was coined when the world was divided between the capitalist west and the communist east.  What we’re seeing now in India (democratic socialist capitalism) and China (authoritarian socialist capitalism) is that there is not the clear distinction between “us” and “them” that there once was.

The secret to preventing wars is not to make sure that the other country is a democracy.  The secret to preventing wars is to make it so that it’s in the other guys’ best economic interest not to go to war with you, nor to see you go to war with anyone else.  It is in China’s best interest right now to see the US economy recover.  This is the path of the future.  We need to look past the old political labels and begin to viee the world in terms of economics. 

Read the world article.  The words this man speaks need to be read at the highest levels of the Obama Administration.  As we prepare to begin to undo, or at least mitigate the errors of the Bush years, there is lot here to be heeded.