I found this remarkable column in the The New York Times.
INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN
LONDON
(printed in The New York Times on Tuesday, October 5, 2010)One of the characteristics of the uncertain global economic recovery is that it has been accentuating inequality within nations even as it is cutting inequality between them. Wall Street has done better than the American middle class. At the same time, the United States as a whole has seen emergent powers race ahead as it struggles.
Neither of these developments bodes well for America but it could navigate the troubles better if it showed greater receptiveness to a changed world.
Take Latin America. The economies grouped under the BRIC acronym — Brazil, Russian, India and China—have all used the crisis to demonstrate their new resilience as well as their reduced dependency on the American economy. But Brazil has been a standout. Its 11 percent growth rate in the year to March 2010 may not be sustainable but is a reminder of the Lula miracle.
Perhaps any power that has enjoyed a spell of near hegemony and finds itself at war will, ostrich-like, refuse to accept the emergence of another behemoth in its hemisphere. Still, the United States would do well to look south for political as well as economic inspiration. It has failed to do so.
One small example: at a recent meeting of the Washington based Inter-American Development Bank, Brazil and other South American nations sent ministers to attend. China, with a close eye on the mineral wealth of Latin America, sent the president of its Central Bank. All the United States could muster was an assistant secretary.
“To tell you the truth we’re not that unhappy about U.S. distraction,” one senior South American banker told me. “We’re looking instead to China and Asia whose interest in the region is huge. There’s still a U.S. tendency to say, ‘This is what you should do.’ Today nobody listens.”
The fact that United States free-trade deals with Colombia and Panama still stand unratified sends a clear message of American indifference.
On the political front, I thought the contemptuous American dismissal of a Brazilian-Turkish deal with Iran to get low-enriched uranium out the country and so provide a breathing space for dialogue was another mistake. The accord was not perfect but nor was it different in its essence from one the United States proposed earlier, though the Americans complained that Iran had doubled the amount of uranium it enriched and altered the terms of the original deal.
Here was a historic opportunity for America to say it sees the power shifts in the world and appreciates the efforts and emergent sense of responsibility of the developing powers. Instead Big Brother’s curt message was: don’t think for a second you can tackle the big issues. And here we are, locked into another sterile cycle of sanctions on Iran.
I said the “Lula miracle.” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who steps down at the end of December after eight extraordinary years, has demonstrated precisely the popular touch that President Barack Obama has been unable to communicate. Lula is right to declare that “Brazil, Russia, India and China have a fundamental role in creating a new international order.”
America and Obama would do much better to foster that process and so shape it than to be blind to it or dismissive. This will involve a fundamental reorientation of United States foreign policy.
The Lula-Obama contrast is puzzling in some ways. Both are outsiders. Both break the mold. Both were seen as change agents. So why has Lula proved so much more effective?
There was some luck of course: the Brazilian leader rode the commodities boom of the past decade. But perhaps it’s above all because a popular touch has to be rooted in experience. Lula, one of eight children, from the impoverished far north of Brazil, a former steelworker who left school very early, has struggled every step of the way. Obama incarnated hope in a divided America, but in the end he is a man framed by elite schools and institutions as much as by his experience as an African American or community worker. Finding the right tone for a nation trying to dig out from difficulty has eluded him.
The verdict is in. Brazil, long the most divided of societies, has gone some way toward easing inequality as the United States has moved in the opposite direction.
It has also closed the gap on developed-world economies and could well be the world’s fifth largest economy by 2025.
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