Leading the world leader | theage.com.au

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion

• Bruce Grant
• September 22, 2008

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

IT'S a strange feeling, while watching the elections
in the United States, to realise that the US is trailing
Australia in important respects. America has been
for so long the fountain of all that is "new" that to
think of it being behind the times, especially as set
on this side of the Pacific, requires a wrench of the
imagination.

But Australia is out of Iraq and has signed the Kyoto
Protocol on climate change, on both of which the
US is still undecided. And this is just the tip of the
iceberg. The next president confronts a lengthy list
of things to do to catch up with the contemporary
world.

He will need to revisit US opposition to the International
Criminal Court, a ban on anti-personnel landmines, a
treaty on bio-diversity and a verification mechanism
for the Biological Weapons Control Treaty. The US is
also yet to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
and persists with an anti-ballistic missile system.

It seems to be still imbued with the old-fashioned
idea that unilateral military power is the way to
get things done and that peace-keeping is for wimps.
It spends as much on defence as the next 10 highest
spending countries. It is rare for armed forces to be
stationed in another country, yet the US has its
forces in about 60 countries. Its air force and navy
patrol the globe and it has the most advanced satellite
technology for gathering intelligence. Moreover, it has
more nuclear weapons than any one else.

The American way of life is not the beacon it once was
for the rest of the world. The US economy is not
coping well with rising fuel costs and home loan mortgages,
let alone the more substantial challenges of climate change
that the national political leadership has not yet tackled.
The double deficits of government spending and import
consumption have turned it into the world's biggest debtor
nation. While we struggle in Australia to improve social
welfare and hospital services, the US, advanced in
technology, has yet to reach our level of access.
It was a novelty when Julia Gillard discovered recently
in New York an innovation in education she would like
to follow.

Even in the category of trivial pursuit, the US has slipped
a little. It came second to China in the Olympic Games.
Bollywood is becoming as outrageous as Hollywood.
The richest person in the world is an Indian. China and
the Gulf states are building the most striking architectural
creations since the Empire State became the tallest building
in the world in the early 1930s.

When the Cold War ended nearly 20 years ago, the US
seemed to have the world at its feet. It chose to interpret
its victory, however, in a way that recently has stressed
the military component of the Cold War, not the ideological
battle for "hearts and minds".

From a military perspective, we can argue about when the
Cold War ended — 1990 when the two sides declared
themselves no longer to be enemies, or 1991, when the
Warsaw Pact was formally disbanded. But for most people
it was on 9 November, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was
breached. The wall was not erected in 1961 in response
to military pressure. It was built to stop East Germans
from escaping to the good life in West Germany. Nor did it
collapse in response to military pressure. It was breached
when it failed to stop East Germans from getting to West
Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

From this perspective, Pope John Paul ll was a catalyst
for the end of the Cold War, as were Lech Walesa,
Vaclav Havel and many others. It was arguably opposition
to the system from within, armed with the authority of
the Helsinki Accords and using human rights to erode state
power, that brought the Soviet Union to an end, rather
than cruise missiles and nuclear warheads.

Globalisation, released by the collapse of the bipolar world
of the Cold War, gave the twin pistons of American supremacy,
democracy and capitalism, a clear run. But it also undermined
the authority of the nation state, ushering in an interactive
era of interdependence. American political leadership has not
yet adjusted to this.

Elections still bring out the old rhetoric of American
"exceptionalism", which sets the US above and apart
from the rest of us. The test of presidential character is
not as global peacemaker but as commander-in-chief of
the armed forces. So far in this election, there has been
no discourse on the outstanding job of political leadership
in the 21st century, which is to make the new global
system work. Indeed, I can think of only one recent
example, when former president Bill Clinton said the US
should use its power to create a global security system,
so that when it was no longer powerful it would still be safe.

Here again Australia is ahead. Much is made of the fact that
the Australian Prime Minister speaks Mandarin. Not enough
is made of his liking for middle power diplomacy, which
contrasts the "realist" view of power politics with an "idealist"
view, as defined by Walter Lippmann: "Ideals are an imaginative
understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible."

Australia's attitude to its friends and neighbours is sometimes
a mystery, even to ourselves. I happened to be at a football
match in Melbourne a few weeks ago when international
teams paraded at halftime. There were cheers for China, India,
Denmark, Sweden, Tonga, the Peace team …everyone. Except
Britain. The old enemy. A robust burst of booing. And New Zealand.
Boo. Then came the United States, late in the parade. What
would be the great Australian reaction. Boo!

Does that mean we have accepted the Americans into our
own world, whatever that is? I think it does. The first task
of the Australian Prime Minister when the Americans decide
their next president will be to take him aside and give him
the benefit of our new way of thinking.

Bruce Grant is an author and former diplomat. He has written
widely on Australian foreign policy and international affairs.