"I love you; you love me"...

Well, it’s over. The G-20 have come and gone. To all appearances it was a love-in. Everyone agreed that there should be a recovery plan and signed the same document. (Never mind that tiny little details like who contributes how much bailout money were left diplomatically unclarified.)
Nobody since Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana has left more reporters kvelling and raving the way Michelle Obama did. The queen was so touched she actually did touch Michelle’s back. Michelle got away with hugging the queen back—a breach of protocol that could have cost her her head for most of the history of British monarchy.
I suppose it’s churlish of me, but I keep remembering 1961 when Jackie wowed Paris and Vienna. It became a great feel good summit—but Khrushchev, sensing he had taken the measure of his opposite, went home and built the Berlin wall. When that worked out, he went ahead and put missiles in Cuba—which nearly killed us all. He may have been charmed by Jackie, but he never lost sight of what he wanted to do—and now felt he dared.
I am left with no idea what the Indians, Brazilians, Chinese, et al., really think of Obama. He, like Kennedy, charmed his counterparts—seemingly having the same gift for saying all the right things that he showed in last year’s political campaigns.
You could sum him up, at the moment, as having danced with everyone while stepping on no one’s toes. That’s a talent. No doubt. I—and his defeated political opponents—have the greatest respect for it. There’s no way I could do it. Nor could John McCain.
Since the founding of the Republic, no president has ever gone before a group of foreign leaders and so utterly repudiated a predecessor. I was stunned. What Obama said boiled down to the following: I wasn’t here the last time GWBush met with you. I have no idea what he said to you.
But I am not President Bush. (So erase your last eight year’s worth of notes, and I’ll regive the lecture.) I was literally stunned as I listened to Obama last night. I’m not sure it was really necessary to go that far in order to distance himself.
I cannot be the only one who is thinking, “He left the door open for the next president to repudiate Obama policies.” One thing about American foreign policy from the 1940s to today was the consistency with which each new president carried out the policies of previous administrations. From Truman to Ike, from Ike to Kennedy, from Johnson to Nixon, from Ford/Nixon to Carter and so on. The world could rely on that. Now they can hope for four years, maybe eight of the same policy?
Obama appears to have taken that consistency off the table. He could have limited himself to platitudes like “this is a new day”—“the present calls for new ideas”, etc. To name a predecessor and so explicitly repudiate former American policy also, it seems to me, violates protocol—in a dangerous way.
When Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was nothing like Eisenhower—much nicer and more ingratiating—the consequences were very nearly fatal for most of the planet.
Yes, there are people out there who really, really do not have America’s best interests at heart. Some have historical reasons to resent us—for others it’s just friendly competition, NFL or World Wrestling Federation style. It is safer to have a president who worries them just a bit.
(The Pittsburgh Steelers didn’t win last year’s Super Bowl by promising that they weren’t like the Steelers of the Seventies—who won four rings and had players so intent on winning no team mate dared to sit next to them before a game.)
I agree the the United States has shrunk in influence. This conference surely showed it. But one can accept a reduced role graciously without making such a point of what bad fellows we were in the past when we were more than merely first among equals.
For all the love-ins and hugging in London, there are still some potentially killer issues out there. We are still dependent on China buying our Treasuries for us to afford our bailouts. The Chinese are becoming very skittish about this.
Millions of suddenly unemployed Chinese citizens are putting pressure on their government to stop funding the American recovery when more help is needed at home. (Yes, dictators must ultimately pay attention to the popular will—as Tsar Nicholas, Mussolini and Caesar found out the hard way.) Chinese leaders are running a bit scared right now.
If I were a foreign banker, China’s call for a new international currency to replace the world currency status of the dollar—so dependent on the American economy—would resonate with me. I would certainly tuck it away as a real option. It that ever happens, we’ll feel it!
And, of course, the fundamental issues of this burst bubble recession remain unanswered. How much are those “toxic assets” (now called “legacy assets”—that has to rank with the silliest of euphemisms) actually worth? How much have we lost? No one knows.
The bailout is guaranteeing a pig in a poke. And where is true bottom? Are we there yet—or should we let things drop farther? I’m reminded of ways in which Navy Seals are trained. They tie their hands and feet and dump them into a deep pool.
The only way for the trainee to survive is to sink to the very bottom and use his legs to propel himself to the surface for a gulp of air. Finding that bottom is absolutely crucial.
I’m unimpressed by the fact that the stock market is up a couple thousand points. When it hit 14,000 a year or two ago, it was resting firmly on an economy shot through with oozing black rot. Like a dentist, we’ve got to go down and get the decay out first. Otherwise the finest gold filling in the world will be of very little use.
The G-20 summit did not attempt that. Publicly they didn’t seem to admit the questions even mattered.
But they do.