Alphen, Netherlands. 12
November. J.K. Galbraith once wrote: “All
of the great leaders have one characteristic in common: the willingness
to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time”. The markedly different body language of Presidents
Obama, Putin and Xi as they strolled together at this week’s Asia-Pacific
Economic Co-operation (APEC) meeting in Beijing revealed three vastly different
anatomies of power. Given his concept of
‘greatness’ how would Galbraith have assessed five of today’s world leaders:
Xi, Obama, Putin, Merkel and Cameron?
President
Xi Jingping: “Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue”. Xi exudes the authority of a man who believes
that all he must do is wait and China will inherit if not the earth, at least
the East Asian part of it. Xi is a man
who has struggled and prevailed in the oft lethal internal power machinations of
the Chinese Communist Party. XI is
tough, believes he has won at home and is winning abroad. Xi’s “new model for great power” relations place
him and China at the centre of world power and replaces Communism with nationalism as the
essential creed of Chinese power and influence. It is a concept of power revealed in all the majesty
of its prejudice in this week’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe.
President
Barrack Obama: “It is a far, far better thing to have
a firm anchor in nonsense…” President
Obama is a leader who desperately wants to see the world he would like, not the
world as it is. Consequently, the “Yes
We Can!” Super-President has become the “No, We Can’t” lame duck president. Wounded at home by the mid-terms and in
retreat abroad President Obama exudes the weakness of a man who believes his
time will soon be up and maybe America’s great age of power with him. He has lost in Washington and is losing much
of his country in an America that respects power but smells weakness. The smell today is pungent. President Obama is drifting and gives
the impression of a leader with no clear idea about either the extent or
utility of American power.
President
Vladimir Putin: “War remains the decisive human failure”. Putin is the gambler. He leads a Russia that is today a one-shot,
wreck of an economy with a too-many-vodka-shots broken society. Faced with the unpalatable reality of strategic
decline Putin has retreated into a Peter the Great
myth of Russian power and nationalism. By conquering parts of Ukraine, embarking on state-bankrupting military modernisation
and by intimidating the people of Russia’s most important trading partners Putin has adopted the strategy of weakness masked in the pretence of
strength. Such a strategy may buy Putin time. It will certainly one day earn him a place in
Russian history as yet another heroic failure so beloved of Russians.
Chancellor
Angela Merkel: “Meetings are indispensable when you
don’t want to do anything”. Merkel is billed
as the “most powerful leader in Europe”.
To mix my metaphors for her such billing is a decidedly poisoned
chalice. Ever the systematic scientist
Merkel knows just how little power she really has and how limited her room for
manoeuvre trapped as she is between what is best for Germany and what is best
for ‘Europe’. To compensate she exudes
that other great quality of a superior intellect to which Galbraith referred –
pessimism. Consequently, she moves from
EU meeting to EU meeting with much of Europe looking to her for the decisive
leadership she knows she cannot offer. Such
leadership would finish her, possibly Germany and quite probably the EU. In reality her choice is a dark one; act now
to save that bit of the Eurozone that can be saved or do nothing and hope
Europe’s eventual demise will not happen on her watch. She has chosen for the latter and waits hopefully for the miracle of entirely unlikely economic growth to fix her dilemma.
Prime
Minister David Cameron: “Politics is the art of the
possible. It consists of choosing
between the disastrous and the unpalatable”.
Britain has ‘achieved’ something quite chilling – none of the leaders of
Britain’s three major political parties actually believe in Britain. Indeed, David Cameron is just about as far
away from a Winston Churchill or a Margaret Thatcher as it is possible for a British
leader to get. His only consolation is
that Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg are even further distant from greatness. Surrounded by advisers that tell him daily
that Britain is finished and that Little
Britain has no future beyond the political wreckage of the the EU Cameron mouths the
mantras of leadership but believes none of it. Cameron is quite simply
incapable of confronting unequivocally the major anxieties of his people in
their time. Instead, Cameron fiddles around
with power substituting politics for strategy and manoeuvre for principle as
holding onto power becomes the essence of his political purpose.
The West of which
Galbraith wrote is in crisis. The current
crop of Western leaders has failed the challenge of power posed by the
twenty-first century. Consequently, the ‘West’
(such as it is) is in rapid retreat across the world leaving power vacuum after
vacuum for the likes of Xi and Putin to fill.
None of them are up to the challenges Galbraith would have understood
and which were both implicit and explicit at the APEC meeting. The real question Galbraith would have posed
today is this; is it any longer possible for North Americans or Europeans to
produce great leaders? It is a vital
question for the answer to it will decide whether this is to be another
American and by extension Western century or a Chinese/Asian century. The nature of geopolitics means it is
unlikely to be both.
If this is indeed to be
another American century new thinking is urgently needed at the very top in both America and indeed
Europe. For as Galbraith once said: “The
conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking”.
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