Gli antagonisti dell’America/ In Europa, Obama di fronte alla richiesta di regole sulla finanza
ROGER COHEN/ DAVID E. SANGER e MARK LANDLER
● I vertici G20 e Nato segnano entrambi il cambiamento di posizione degli Usa a livello internazionale;
● appare approfondita la frattura tra le richieste americane di maggior stimolo fiscale per la spesa e le richieste di Francia e Germania di maggiore regolamentazione finanziaria:
o ne emergerebbero 2-3 campi: Usa, GB e Giappone pro maggior stimolo immediato e regolatori per il “rischio sistemico” operanti soprattutto a livello nazionale;
o Germania e Francia su posizioni opposte, con appoggio di Cekia.
o Cina e Russia che cercano di sfruttare la divisione per avere un ruolo significativo.
o Presidente USA, e primo ministro GB: le divergenze con F. e G. sono minori di quanto si dice; Brown: non si ripeterà il fallimento del vertice del 1933, il mondo ha imparto quella dura lezione.
● Uno dei principali compiti strategici di Obama è quello di creare un rodine mondiale più equilibrato che promuova gli interessi politico-economici americane, anche al prezzo di una minor preminenza americana.
● Indicatori della vulnerabilità non solo economica degli Usa sono:
o la rivendicazione della Cina di maggior potere nell’FMI è una messa in discussione provocatoria del dollaro come riserva valutaria internazionale
o e la dipendenza di una nazionale debitrice come lo sono gli USA da potenze con forti surplus come Cina, Germania e Giappone.
o Alla Cina gli Usa chiedono essenzialmente di finanziare gran parte del deficit americano di 2000 MD, gli aiuti per Wall Street e il settore auto, e due guerre.
o Obama sembra riconoscere che a lungo termine gli Usa non saranno più il mercato più importante per potenze vecchie od emergenti.
● La vicenda General Motors è emblematica dei sommovimenti tellurici in atto nei rapporti di potenza internazionali.
o Nel 1955 era la prima della lista dei primi 500 gruppi mondiali di Fortune, e fino al 2007 è rimasta tra i primi tre per fatturato. Ora è quasi alla bancarotta.
o Molteplici i motivi della debacle, tra cui il non essere riuscita ad adeguarsi alla domanda di minor emissioni, il declino generale del manifatturiero negli Usa, e la competizione globale.
o GM ha perso mentre l’America cambiava: nel 2007 i consumatori USA hanno speso meno in auto che in intermediazione e consulenza finanziaria.
– La questione fondamentale – al di là della missione militare in Afghanistan, che riflette la trasformazione in corso della Nato, e al di là delle sue relazioni con la Russia, afghana – è come di proietterà la potenza americana nella Nato?
Il recente vertice Nato è definito dal ritorno della Francia nel suo comando militare (un generale francese presiederà il progetto di trasformazione del comando alleato.
– LONDON — Pax Americana, unlovely but effective, has endured for more than 60 years, the consequence of the post-war development of the United States as a European and Asian power. It has averted the worst, but it is safe to say that it is closer to the end than the beginning of its life.
I say this with no enthusiasm. As a beneficiary of America’s far-flung garrisons, and a member of a generation blessed (as the Germans say) with late birth, I have few illusions about what greater disasters might have befallen Europe and Asia without the offsetting presence of U.S. power.
– But, as General Motors has discovered, history moves on.
– G.M., in fact, is not a bad emblem for this moment when the world’s tectonic plates are plainly on the move. No corporation ever symbolized American might with greater vividness. It topped the first “Fortune 500” list in 1955, the year I was born, and was in the top three by revenue every year until 2007. Now it is all but bankrupt.
– There are many reasons for this debacle, including GM’s failure to adapt to the shift to a low-carbon economy, the general decline of manufacturing in the United States, and global competition. G.M. lost out as America changed. Emma Rothschild noted recently in The New York Review of Books that U.S. consumers spent less on new cars in 2007 than on brokerage fees and investment counseling!
– Where that debt-driven American investment binge led is now clear: to financial meltdown, tens of millions of lost jobs and a global hunt for fat-cat scapegoats paying themselves bonuses for failure. Anglo-American capitalism is on trial, the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions exhausted.
– From this wreckage, this ending, the Group of 20 must trace the contours of a 21st century global economy. The task embarked on here in London will be long. As it happens, it has begun in the same week as NATO leaders meet in France and Germany to mark the Atlantic Alliance’s 60th birthday. These gatherings — of an old and a new organization — both mark America’s changing place in the world.
– At the G-20, the power of free markets — the American mantra of recent decades — is in retreat before state intervention, led in many respects by a chastened United States itself that has discovered some merit in the oft-mocked European model.
– More fundamentally, it is clear that the answers do not lie in Washington, where consensus has long been sought, but increasingly in new centers of economic power and new forms of global cooperation. The G-20 itself — with the presence of the likes of China, Brazil, India and South Africa — reflects this reality.
– China’s demand for greater power within the International Monetary Fund, its provocative questioning of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the ultimate dependence of a debtor nation like the United States on changed behavior from the mega-surplus powers of China, Germany and Japan are all indicators of American vulnerability.
– Such vulnerability is not confined to the economic sphere. Its treasure depleted, its dominance eroded, its standing questioned, America cannot forever bankroll the security of the world.
That will be a reality of the 21st century, not perhaps its first couple of decades, but increasingly over time. The NATO summit, however celebratory in towns that symbolize Europe’s American-assisted overcoming of its collective suicide, must begin to grapple with this inevitability.
– For beyond the troubled Afghan mission, itself an eloquent expression of NATO’s ongoing transformation, and beyond the critical question of the alliance’s relations with Russia, lies a still more fundamental issue: what exactly is a post-cold-war NATO for and how will American power be projected within it?
In pondering this, I’m struck by a defining event of this summit: the return of France to the integrated military command of NATO. Poor de Gaulle; he must be turning in his grave. But give President Nicolas Sarkozy credit where it’s due: there was no point in prolonging the quixotic Gallic pursuit of “counterweight” status to the United States when U.S. power itself was dwindling. Why counter an eroding weight?
– One result of Sarkozy’s volte-face is that a French general will preside in Virginia over the Allied Command Transformation project, devoted to blue-sky re-imaginings of the alliance. I like the idea of a Frenchman in the United States rethinking the world: friction stimulates.
My own view, based in the conviction that Pax Americana cannot endure another 60 years in its current form, is that a NATO now tacitly or explicitly working for the defense and expansion of the liberal democratic order — a task with no obvious geographical limit — must in time evolve into an alliance of democracies in which the likes of Japan, India and Australia would logically take their place.
– One of Barack Obama’s central strategic tasks is to forge a more balanced world order that will advance American interests, political and economic, even at the price of diminished American pre-eminence. Fortunately this most cosmopolitan of U.S. presidents is well suited to the task. A guiding intelligence has replaced a guiding anger at the White House.
By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK LANDLER
LONDON — In his first full day in Europe, President Obama conceded Wednesday that the United States had “some accounting to do” for failures that led to the world’s financial crisis, even as he tried to brush past heavy pressure from Germany and France to accept global financial regulations that could reach well inside American borders.
– Speaking on the eve of a summit meeting here to address the financial crisis, Mr. Obama acknowledged that regulatory failures in the United States had a role in the meltdown, but he urged world leaders to focus on solutions rather than on placing blame. He also cautioned that the United States was unlikely to return to its role as a “voracious consumer market,” and he urged other nations to do more to revive growth in their home markets.
– Despite calls for unity from Mr. Obama and the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, the host of the Group of 20 meeting that will formally begin Thursday, a rift intensified over Anglo-American calls for greater fiscal stimulus spending and French and German demands for more intrusive global regulation of financial institutions.
While President Nicolas Sarkozy of France did not repeat an earlier threat to walk out of the conference — “I just got here,” he joked — he made it clear he would reject an agreement that puts off stringent new regulations on banks, tax havens, and hedge funds.
“The decisions need to be taken now, today and tomorrow,” he said. “This has nothing to do with ego. This has nothing to do with temper tantrums. When it comes to historic moments, you can’t circumvent them.”
– Mr. Sarkozy added that tougher regulation — he has called for a “global regulator” that would be able to reach inside the borders of the United States and other large nations to deal with international financial firms — is “nonnegotiable.”
“The compromise has to come from all countries around the world,” he said. Saying he trusted Mr. Obama, Mr. Sarkozy said he did not want to point fingers about the crisis. But then, in a verbal jab he has used before, he added, “The crisis didn’t actually spontaneously erupt in Europe.”
– Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany rejected Mr. Obama’s plea for other nations to follow America’s lead and pledge greater fiscal spending to stimulate their economies. She said more spending was not worth debating. “That is not a bargaining chip,” she said, adding, by contrast, “Regulation is something that is in everyone’s interest.”
– By the time Mr. Obama ended his evening at Buckingham Palace and a working dinner for the leaders assembling here — representing a group as diverse as the established European powers and Japan to Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands — it appeared likely that countries would divide into two or three camps.
o The United States, Britain and Japan will push for more immediate stimulus and “systemic risk” regulators that mostly operate within national borders; Germany and France will push the opposite position, probably with some support from the Czech Republic.
o That leaves China and Russia, among others, to exploit the division to play a significant role, though if tradition holds the major differences are likely to be smoothed out in wording in a final communiqué that each country interprets differently.
– Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown used a joint news conference earlier in the day to emphasize that differences with France and Germany were “vastly overstated.”
– Mr. Brown argued that the world had learned the hard lessons of a similar summit meeting here in 1933, which ended in failure. That outcome will not be repeated, Mr. Brown argued.
– Mr. Obama also met for the first time with President Hu Jintao of China, the nation that is essentially being asked to bankroll much of the upward of $2 trillion in deficits the United States will run up this year to finance its recovery package, bailouts for Wall Street and Detroit, and two wars.
But in a meeting that American officials described as “businesslike” Mr. Hu apparently said nothing about previous Chinese cautions that the country would have to be convinced that the United States had a long-term plan to bring down its deficits before it invested more heavily in American securities.
– In essence, the United States is pressing Europe and other nations to spend more now — when a coordinated stimulus could do the most good. But over the long term, Mr. Obama appeared to be preparing the world for a reshaped global economy in which the United States no longer was the ultimate export market for the world’s established and emerging powers.
Speaking alongside Mr. Brown after the two men met, Mr. Obama warned against returning the United States to the habits of the past decade, and the twin trade and budget deficits they created.
“The United States will do its share,” he said, “but I think that one of the things that Gordon and I spoke about is the fact that in some ways the world has become accustomed to the United States being a voracious consumer market and the engine that drives a lot of economic growth worldwide. And I think that in the wake of this crisis, even as we’re doing stimulus, we have to take into account our own deficits.”
He said he and fellow leaders had an “enormous consensus” on the need to take bold steps to revive growth, and urged them to focus on what they can achieve at home. “If there is going to be renewed growth it can’t just be the United States as the engine, everybody is going to have to pick up the pace,” he said.
– But Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy laid out a different argument: that the United States had only now begun to understand the cost of poorly regulated free-market capitalism, and must now bow to the European model. “The foundation for this new financial architecture must be laid now,” Mrs. Merkel said. “That is why we seem to be so tough.”
The German chancellor, who is scheduled to met Mr. Obama one-on-one this weekend, rejected attempts to link the American and British demands for fiscal stimulus programs to the French and German agenda on regulations. Although Germany did carry out a reasonably large stimulus package this year, it has not agreed to one for 2010.
– Mr. Sarkozy said France had made a gesture to the United States by rejoining the command structure of the NATO alliance, and he implied that the United States needed to make a similar gesture in the regulatory arena.
Helene Cooper reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris. Matthew Saltmarsh contributed reporting from Paris and Julia Werdigier and Mark Landler from London.