Economic Failures & the Asia Tour

Obama "gets served" in Asia.

In the wake of blows taken by the Democratic Party in the recent midterm elections, the media has labeled the President’s recent Asia tour a similarly crushing stroke on a global scale.  Where domestically the President “got served” by the Tea Party and Republicans – abroad China, South Korea and Germany delivered a similar treatment – overall displaying the growing weakness of the Obama administration.  This limited presentation of the Asia tour seems accurate only if one believes that economics was the only focus of the tour and that the G20 was somehow going to miraculously resolve the lingering woes of our global economic crises.

Overlooking the President’s activities in India and Indonesia as irrelevant in search for a single striking narrative is illustrative of the larger flaws in the way information is presented to the US populace.  However one may feel about the subjects of democracy promotion, international relations or religious freedom, acting as if these subjects simply weren’t relevant to the tour speaks of either dramatic shortsightedness or a conscious agenda.   Even in the area of economics it seems that a conscious decision has been made to ignore the activities of the administration in India.  The development and deepening of the bilateral relationship between India and the United States cannot be ignored if one is interested in economic policy.

In the area of democracy and international relations, the clashes between the China and the US over the elections in Burma and issues of human rights in the nation necessitate some attention.  The promotion of Indonesia as a thriving Muslim democracy (regardless of realities of religious freedom in Indonesia) deserves the same level of consideration.  The above issues alone would have justified the Asia tour, regardless of the successes of developing economic ties with India.  Yet the evening news supported only the conclusion that the whole of the tour was a waste of time and resources, and a dismal failure of foreign policy.  The only thing I really perceived as a marked failure in the tour was the effort to solve the world’s economic woes through the G20 summit, which I can’t imagine anyone genuinely expected.

China and India

The lead article in this week’s Economist argues that in the long-run, India’s chaotic democratic capitalism is likely to outperform Chain’s authoritarian capitalism for two reasons. First, due to China’s one-child policy, the country’s working-age population is falling, while India’s far younger population means the workforce is going to grow. Second, information flows much more easily and quickly in India compared to China because the former is a democracy and the latter is not. As a result, India has a big advantage over China in taking advantage of the information revolution. The big takeaway point is centralized planning is probably not the best model for sustaining long-term economic growth in today’s world. Rather, democracy in India, chaotic as it is, is a far better environment for sustaining economic development.

Friends without benefits

Trying to track the relationships between the major forces in Afghanistan is making my head spin. Consider:

• ISAF is supporting Karzai’s government against the Taliban.
• Karzai wants to negotiate with the Taliban.
• Pakistan is ISAF’s partner (remember the West Point speech?).
• Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is BFF with the Quetta Shura, the Taliban supreme leadership council, headed by Mullah Omar.
• India (like Pakistan) is an ally of ISAF and the Karzai government.
• Part of the reason Pakistan supports the Taliban in Afghanistan is to get cooperation on fighting India.
• Iran, apparently, supports both Karzai and the Taliban.

How did we let ourselves get dragged into this mess?

New kids on the Kush

One problem with the war in Afghanistan is that its getting increasingly difficult to determine who is on what side.

Rumors of America’s death are exaggerated

Joshua Kurlantzick makes a solid argument for why Asia’s rise and America’s decline has been vastly overstated.

Militarily, no other countries comes close to the US in its ability to project power:

America’s decline has been vastly overstated. To become a global superpower requires economic, political, and military might, and on the last two counts, the United States remains leagues ahead of any Asian rival. Despite boosting defense budgets by 20 percent annually, Asian powers like India, China, or Indonesia will not rival the US military for decades, if ever – only the Pentagon could launch a war in a place like Afghanistan, so far from its homeland. When a tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia five years ago, the region’s nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, and India, had to rely on the US Navy to coordinate relief efforts…

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