The new global geometry of power

By Philip Stephens

This week, the US withdrew its aircraft from shooting duty over Libya. And Barack Obama sent out an e-mail saying he would seek re-election in 2012. The timing was probably coincidental. There was, though, a connection.
Mr Obama is not alone in facing an electoral contest next year. Four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council could see a change of leader. Britain’s David Cameron is the odd one out – assuming that his coalition government gets through some severe economic turbulence.
Barring accidents, we know what’s going to happen in China, Xi Jinping has been anointed Hu Jintao’s successor as president. As far as Russia goes, there is only one vote that matters in the race for the Kremlin. We are still waiting to hear how Vladimir Putin intends to cast it. Nicolas Sarkozy’s hold on the Elysée looks distinctly precarious. He badly needs the Libyan mission to turn out well.
The leader of the world’s most powerful nation is taking no chances. The opinion polls have him as the favourite. This week’s e-mail message, along with a video posted on YouTube, launched a “grass-roots” effort to fill a $1bn war-chest. The US president’s genius resides in running hugely expensive political campaigns that look as if they have been put together by a few volunteers around a kitchen table.
History is on Mr Obama’s side. In the US system incumbents have to be pretty awful or unlucky to miss out on a second term. The absence so far of a sizeable field of credible opponents speaks to a suspicion among the Republicans’ brightest and best that they might do better to wait until 2016.
So what about the connection with Libya? It’s the economy, stupid, as the cliché goes. Growth and jobs are the things that are going to matter in the US presidential poll. To the extent that foreign policy gets a look in during the campaign, it is unlikely voters will be clamouring for more wars.
Seen through the prism of election politics, getting rid of Muammer Gaddafi is a distraction – a “nice to have”, as one White House aide has been heard to remark. So the task has been left largely to the French and British. Mr Obama, his advisers forever remind him, promised in 2008 to bring US troops home.
The 2012 contest anyway looks unlikely to rewrite the terms of America’s compact with the rest of the world. (I reserve the right to change my mind and build my own bunker if Sarah Palin were to win.)
More probably, the Republican hopefuls will accuse Mr Obama as being too soft on America’s enemies and careless of its friends. There may be some important arguments about Afghanistan, about the reset relationship with Russia, and about “standing up” to China. Another big terrorist attack could change everything. By-and-large, however, the reach and limits of US power are now understood on both sides of the aisle. The US has lost its appetite for fixing other people’s problems. It’s much harder to be a transformative power in a multipolar world.
At first glance, the choice of leader in Russia looks consequential. Dmitry Medvedev has been applying a gloss of modernity to Russian foreign policy. The president is not forever obsessed about the alleged iniquities of the US and Nato after the fall of the Soviet Union. From time to time he acknowledges that Russia has problems to confront closer to home: an unmodernised economy, a shrinking population, Islamist extremism and the strategic threat to an emptying Siberia.
Mr Obama and other western leaders have invested heavily in Mr Medvedev. The Russian president, however, has been heard to tell foreign visitors that Mr Putin’s is the only vote that matters. If the prime minister wants the Kremlin for himself, he can take it.
If not, a re-elected Mr Medvedev would anyway be severely constrained by Mr Putin’s role as puppetmaster. I suppose it is a question of degree. One thing is for sure. If Mr Putin does step back into his old job, we will soon be listening again to all those broken records about Russian victimhood and western perfidy.
That leaves China – and the change at the top that really does have the capacity to change the geopolitical weather. The most important transfer of power will thus be the least transparent.
We do not know very much about Mr Xi. We do know that the direction in which he decides to lead China in the decade after 2012 will be decisive in determining the design of a new global architecture.
The past couple of years have seen Beijing in assertive mood, especially in east Asia. The result has been a chill in relationships with many of its neighbours and some bruising collisions with Washington. China’s expanding economic ties have thrown up wider strategic interests and vulnerabilities. Competition with the US is inevitable. The important question is how it is managed.
Mr Xi has a reputation as an economic moderniser, has a liking for Hollywood movies and sends his daughter to Harvard. At six feet and a bit tall and with a frame to match, he towers above his peers in the politburo. In an unguarded moment he once observed that he does not much like lectures from “foreigners with full bellies”. Chinese officials, I have noticed, have grown impatient of westerners bearing wisdom.
What we don’t know is whether Mr Xi’s powerful physique will turn out to be a metaphor for his sense of the Middle Kingdom’s place in the world. Thus far, China has prospered under global institutions established by the Pax Americana. Some time in the next few years Beijing will have to decide whether it wants to see those institutions adapted to the new geometry of power or whether it is content to see them wither.
I had almost forgotten France. As a European and a Francophile I like to think medium-sized powers with a global outlook can still count in a multipolar world. So my heart says this is an election to watch. I am not sure how long it will hold the rest of the world’s attention.
The race for the White House will be followed in its every twist and turn. But then my guess is that mapping the mood in Peoria will be a great deal easier than figuring out what China’s Mr Xi really thinks.

philip.stephens@ft.com

 “Financial Times” 

http://www.anixneuseis.gr/