certainly remarkable; and economic growth is inevitably accompanied by growing political clout. China has replaced America as the largest source of imports for Europe, Japan and South Korea.
Human-rights activists point to China's abuses at home, its repression of Tibet and its habit of cosying up to nasty regimes in countries such as Iran, Sudan, Burma and Venezuela.
Environmentalists say that, by some measures, China is already the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases.
Neoconservative hawks reckon that China has been supersizing its defence spending over the past decade (and China itself admitted to a budget increase of 18% this year). But the country is so important that the next American president will have no choice but to do business with it.
America's relations with Russia are likely to get even cooler than they are now. The days when people speculated that the twin departures from office of Vladimir Putin and George Bush might help to improve relations have long gone. Mr Putin is determined to hold on to power from whatever post he occupies.
Russia is furious about America's ambitions to extend its missile shield. America is furious about the way that Russia uses the superpower's problems in the Middle East to extend its own influence and forge anti- American alliances. Russia's increasing assertiveness is underwritten by the inflated price of oil and a growing nationalism.
Many foreign-policy analysts argue that the next American president should pay much more attention to Russia and China, as well as to the shift in economic power from the developed to the developing world.
But in practice American politics will continue to be dominated by the greater Middle East. This is because American attention is inevitably concentrated on the regions where its troops are fighting, and sometimes dying; because the consequences of a botched policy in that area are so serious; and because the
American public is deeply divided about what to do about Iraq and beyond.
Mr Obama or Mrs Clinton will be under huge pressure to wash his or her hands of Iraq. The anti-war left has set clear and ambitious goals for bringing its forces home. It wants to redeploy all 160,000 troops in Iraq within 18 months of the next president taking office, though a few might remain in the region to deal with al-Qaeda. But this is a high-risk strategy. American withdrawal might produce a cascade of problems. The precarious Iraqi state might collapse. The civil war could intensify as various sectarian groups smell victory. Iran could step up its involvement and produce a counter-push from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states. The redeployed American forces might be too small to deal with terrorism or prevent a regional conflagration. The outflow of refugees might overwhelm fragile states in the region.
The next president could enjoy more room for dramatic initiatives on two related fronts: Iran and Israel- Palestine. Mr Bush's second administration was marked by an intense battle between hawks and doves over Iran. The hawks, led by Mr Cheney, advocated a military strike to disable Iran's suspected nuclear- weapons programme. The doves, led by Ms Rice, argued for strong multinational sanctions to rein in Iran's regional ambitions and dissuade it from proceeding with building a bomb.
The National Intelligence Estimate published last December (and representing the considered view of 16 intelligence agencies) concluded that Iran, although it had definitely been working on developing a nuclear bomb, had stopped several years ago. This changed the debate on Iran and all but ruled out a military strike. It also put Mr Cheney and his hardline allies on the defensive. Still, it did not let Iran off the hook.
The Israeli and French intelligence services cast doubts on the assessment. American hawks pointed out that the CIA has a pretty dismal record of judging threats, and that Iran's peaceful nuclear programme could put the country just a turn of a screw away from getting a bomb. Many European countries remained keen on maintaining sanctions.
The next administration might well make significant changes in America's policy towards Iran. Mr Obama talks about the
possibility of dealing with the country directly. This, in the best of all possible worlds, could be the basis of a grand bargain in which each side decides to back down a little to avoid an explosive confrontation. The Iranians have sometimes signalled flexibility on Israel, and they deny wanting nuclear weapons. A deal might be possible if America was willing to drop sanctions, forget about
“regime change” and recognise Iran's regional security interests.
Both countries have certain strategic interests in common,
notably preserving a united Iraq under its current Shia-dominated government and maintaining the free flow of Gulf oil to world markets; and both recognise that they have a lot to lose.
Diplomatic overtures to Iran might be linked to a renewed push for progress on the Palestinian question. Mr Bush has been unusually resistant to investing political capital in this particular problem. He has also been unusually sympathetic to Israel, even by American standards. But a meeting in Annapolis in November 2007 laid the foundations for renewed diplomacy in the region, and the next president is likely to devote more energy to the problem than Mr Bush has done.
That said, the odds are still against strategic breakthroughs on either front. The Israel-Palestine question has frustrated would-be peacemakers for as long as it has been around. And Iran's foreign policy has been defined by hostility to America since the 1979 revolution. The country has a long history both of meddling in the wider region and breaking international rules, and the Americans have found it even harder to deal with since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president.
The “war on terror” will remain a principal element of American foreign policy. The September 11th attacks were the most traumatic events on American soil since Pearl Harbour, and it seems clear that al- Qaeda and its allies are determined to strike at the American mainland again. No president can afford to give the impression of being soft on al-Qaeda.
All the same, the Democrats would try to shift the front-line, talking less about “war” and putting more emphasis on non-state actors rather than state sponsors of terrorism. Mr Obama has spoken of “getting out of Iraq and onto the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. He has a great deal of support for such a shift from the American national-security establishment and from the wider world.
Mr McCain continues to talk about a war against “radical Islam” and the “moral monsters” that it is spawning. He still regards Iraq as the central front in that war. But even he would find himself under intense pressure to change America's policies. Most of the intelligence establishment in Washington, DC, thinks that the real front in the fight against al-Qaeda is Pakistan and Afghanistan, not Iraq. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate argues unequivocally that the organisation posing the gravest threat to the United States is al-Qaeda, and that this threat radiates outwards from the organisation's secure hideouts in Pakistan. The Bush administration as a whole is already using a much wider range of
instruments to deal with terrorist threats than its earlier rhetoric implied.
So for all the problems with Russia and China, the 44th president will probably find himself or herself concentrating on much the same range of problems as the 43rd: Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and the broader “war on terror”. The Muslim world is too volatile and the threat from al- Qaeda too immediate for a wholesale shift in the direction of the president's energies.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Power and peril
Mar 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The American eagle is feeling less confident and more vulnerable
FOUR years ago “empire” was the mot du jour in Washington, DC. Dick Cheney's 2003 Christmas card bore the motto: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” One of Mr Bush's senior advisers dismissed criticism from the “reality- based community”. “That's not the way the world really works any more...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Neoconservative intellectuals published articles with titles such as “The Case for American Empire”.
What a difference a bungled war makes. These days the word “imperial” is usually followed by
“overstretch”. The bookshops are full of titles cautioning against the folly of empire (Cullen Murphey's
“Are We Rome?”, Amy Chua's “Day of Empire”). Nobody doubts America's unparalleled ability to project its military power into every corner of the world, but blowing things up is not the same as establishing an
“imperium”.
Enthusiasm for empire has been replaced by worries about exhaustion and vulnerability. Americans are concerned that the army has been stretched to breaking point, and that their country remains a terrorist target. If George Bush wanted to “fight them over there” so that Americans do not have to “fight them over here”, his successor will have to face the possibility that, in fighting them over there, America has overstrained its army while leaving the home front vulnerable.