Column

Many unabashed America-cheerleaders in India — and there sure are similar voices in Japan and Europe — have argued in a jesting tone but with a subconscious serious intent that the rest of the world should have a vote in the United States’ presidential election because what the American president does affects the world as such.

Then we have people from the left end of the political spectrum who sincerely believe that the US is the real rogue state, much more than Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Yemen and others.

People may want to entertain the idea of the first group and dismiss the second one. This is so because most people across the world generally love America, for naïve as well as pragmatic reasons even as people hate America from similar motives.

America has to be taken seriously and handled with care because it is a problem for everyone. It can neither be dismissed nor ignored because what it does to itself as much as what it does with the others has large-scale consequences which affect everyone else.

That is why, you have to look at America even if you are not so terribly interested in its Teflon existence and try to get a hang of what it says, what it does and what it thinks.

The pronouncements of the so-called American experts on Islamic fundamentalism, on the Palestinian crisis are as flawed as their reading of the threat of communism during the ColdWar era.

Ideally, what America does with its own economy should have been its own affair. But the fact is that the stupid things that Wall Street bankers and fund managers did with their money pushed the world into a recessionary spin.

Its impact on the world markets is because Americans buy so much from the rest of the world and they invest their dollars in the rest of the world as well. After the financial market mess of 2008 in America, the world eagerly awaits the revival of American domestic economy so that it can sell its goods and services once again in America and to America and it can expect American dollars to flow out again by way of foreign direct investments.

Similarly, America’s ignorant foreign policy positions and measures should not be more than a matter of amusement to the others but its dealings with Islamic fundamentalists has become a problem for many others outside America. American blunders in bludgeoning the terror challenge ever since September 11, 2001 has only prolonged the world’s agony.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are paying the price of a virtual civil war because it is the American dollars that created the jihadis who are now destroying those countries.

When America decides to go its way on the climate change issue as it did at the Kyoto climate summit in 1997 or at Copenhagen in 2009, the rest of the world has to worry as to how to get the Americans into curb-the-green-house-gas-emissions game. What America does or does not do poses a problem to everyone
outside America. So what does one do with America?

The thing to do as of now is to engage the Americans, cajole or hector them as do the NGOs of the world and where possible to arm-twist them as China tries to do where it can.

The other way is to change American opinion within America by appealing to the American people over the heads of American politicians and businessmen, create public opinion that will make American leaders more responsible.

The other long-term option is to wean the world away from America as such. This is a difficult thing to do because in the 20th century America has played an invaluable role in the reconstruction of Europe and Japan immediately after the Second World War in 1945 and in the economic boom of free markets of south-east Asia in the 1960s.

The good deeds of the past linger and American influence will persist long after it has ceased to be beneficial.