In Winnie-the-Pooh, there is a significant moment when the bear is asked whether he wants honey or condensed milk with his bread. He replies “both”. You can get away with this sort of thing if you are a much loved character in children’s literature. But it is more problematic when great nations start behaving in a childish fashion. When Americans are asked what they want – lower taxes, more lavish social spending or the world’s best-funded military machine – their collective answer tends to be “all of the above”.

The result is that the US is piling up debt. A budget deficit of about 12 per cent of gross domestic product is understandable as a short-term reaction to a huge financial crisis. What should worry Americans is that, with entitlement spending set to surge, there is no credible plan to bring the budget deficit under control over the medium term.

The US has formidable strengths that will allow its government to be profligate for far longer than other nations could get away with. But if the US keeps running huge deficits, sooner or later the country will start flirting with bankruptcy. Oddly, it might be best if the crisis came sooner rather than later. For a surprising number of countries, running out of money has been the prelude to national renewal.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Ever since 1945, the US has regarded itself as the leader of the “free world”. But the Obama administration is facing an unexpected and unwelcome development in global politics. Four of the biggest and most strategically important democracies in the developing world – Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey – are increasingly at odds with American foreign policy. Rather than siding with the US on the big international issues, they are just as likely to line up with authoritarian powers such as China and Iran.

The US has been slow to pick up on this development, perhaps because it seems so surprising and unnatural. Most Americans assume that fellow democracies will share their values and opinions on international affairs. During the last presidential election campaign, John McCain, the Republican candidate, called for the formation of a global alliance of democracies to push back against authoritarian powers. Some of President Barack Obama’s senior advisers have also written enthusiastically about an international league of democracies.

But the assumption that the world’s democracies will naturally stick together is proving unfounded. The latest example came during the Copenhagen climate summit. On the last day of the talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India – but failed each time. The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

By Mure Dickie, Japan bureau chief

Barack Obama’s critics will no doubt see it as a metaphor. During his recent visit to Tokyo, the US president bowed so low to Japan’s Emperor Akihito that some people wondered if he had spotted a Y100 coin on the Imperial Palace’s immaculately swept porch.

In sharp contrast, Xi Jinping, Chinese vice president and Communist party heir apparent, yesterday merely granted his royal highness the merest of nods.

While Obama’s defenders told critics such as Rush Limbaugh that he was merely showing respect for local customs and – as a notably tall man – seeking to get down to the more diminutive emperor’s level. But when it comes to protocol, Xi – himself a man of impressive height – was closer to the orthodox light-dip-of-head and handshake combo recommended by experts.

Yet maybe Xi would have been better to borrow the Obama approach. Local coverage of the vice president’s visit to Japan has been dominated by controversy over the new Democratic party-led government’s decision to, er, bow to Beijing’s request for the imperial audience even though the Chinese had failed to ask for it the regulation month in advance.

The sense that Beijing was pushing for – and getting – special treatment will be seized on as ammunition by those in Japan and elsewhere who believe the new DPJ government is too keen to snuggle up to its rising neighbour, and by those that think that China is growing too willing to throw its weight around in the region.

Indeed, in a press conference at the Japan Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Monday, Tsai Ing-wen, the visiting leader of feisty Taiwan’s main opposition Democratic Progressive party, warned that Beijing’s insistence on the imperial encounter was just the latest example of its growing willingness to “flex muscles”.

Asian democracies should stand together to manage an increasingly powerful but still authoritarian regime, she said. “China has to learn to respect other people’s sovereignty (and) other people’s protocol and traditions.”

By Victor Mallet, Madrid bureau chief
The Philippines has had a reputation as a violent archipelago ever since Ferdinand Magellan failed to circumnavigate the globe (though some of his sailors did make it all the way round and thus immortalised his name) because he was killed on a beach on the island of Mactan near Cebu in 1521.

Yet the massacre of 46 people on Monday in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in the southern Philippines plumbs new depths of violence and cruelty. It appears that gunmen loyal to a local politician attacked a convoy of his opponents and slaughtered them, as well as 12 accompanying journalists, with M-16 rifles and machetes.

Lapu-Lapu, the chieftain responsible for Magellan’s death, is hailed as an anti-colonial hero in the Philippines. But the unfortunate truth is that Magellan, who went around trying to convert the locals to Christianity, became embroiled in clan rivalries of the sort that persist to this day in Philippine politics and was the victim of his own belligerence and folly.

If it were not for decades of violence, Mindanao’s climate and scenery could make it as popular a tourist destination as Thailand, Bali or Malaysia (or the Philippine island of Boracay).

I once attended a family wedding on an idyllic island off Davao and later climbed with my wife through tropical forest to the frosty summit of Mount Apo, the dormant Mindanao volcano that is country’s highest peak. We were the only visitors at the time to this extraordinarily beautiful place. Perhaps the fact that our guide stumbled into a New People’s Army (communist) guerrilla on the path ahead of us explained the lack of fellow-tourists.

The problems facing Mindanao are reasonably well known – corruption, overpopulation, bad government and separatism fuelled by religious extremism – but the solutions are far from obvious.

On Tuesday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo responded to this week’s atrocity by declaring a state of emergency in parts of the island, but since neither national nor regional governments have proved capable of enforcing the law, it was probably no more than a necessary political gesture. The politics of Mindanao remain as challenging for Philippine leaders today as those of Cebu and Mactan were for Magellan nearly half a millennium ago.

By Geoff Dyer, China bureau chief

Barack Obama has already moved on to the next aspiring Asian superpower - today he meets India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh - but plenty of people are still trying absorb what really happened on his visit to China last week.

The US press has come in for some a bit of a mauling for the highly-critical way it covered the China trip - go to James Fallows at The Atlantic and Howard French at the Columbia Journalism Review. Some of this criticism is a little unfair. The Chinese government did not actually censor the “town hall” meeting in Shanghai, as some of the coverage implied, but they did go to elaborate efforts to limit its audience and to generally ensure that the young, charismatic US president had little chance to win the hearts and minds of young Chinese.

But on another point, the criticism is valid. This was never going to be a trip about quick wins and big breakthroughs, it was about Obama setting out a long-term project to engage China as a partner on some of the most important international issues.

In many cases, it could take several years to see how this plays out, but there is one exception where we might get an early test of Obama’s engagement strategy and that is Iran.

With Tehran giving plenty of indications that it will reject the current proposal over its nuclear programme, Beijing is playing coy about whether it will support tougher sanctions. But if the proposal collapses, China could be forced to make a tough choice. The Iran issue falls directly into the new fault line of Chinese foreign policy. Beijing opposes nuclear proliferation and values good relations with the US as a key priority. But worried about energy security, China is also building up extensive energy ties with Iran and the oil industry is so politically powerful that some analysts even talk of an “oil faction” in the Communist party hierarchy. Iran could provide a fascinating insight into just how much sway Obama now has with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao and into what China’s real foreign policy priorities are.

By Geoff Dyer, FT China bureau chief

Barack Obama made one last final attempt to speak directly to ordinary Chinese people at the end of his three-day visit, giving an interview in Beijing yesterday to Southern Weekend, one of China’s more outspoken newspapers.

Yet even that small gesture seems to have led to some minor skirmishes with the Chinese authorities, which managed to keep Obama on a fairly tight rein during his visit.

When the morning paper was delivered to lots of offices in central Beijing – including several buildings that house many foreign news organizations – it did not contain the section with the interview, even though the full newspaper with interview was available on many newsstands and on the internet here. After a call to the distributor, the section of Southern Weekend with the interview appeared mid-afternoon in the FT’s mail box.

The article itself raised some suspicions because it is relatively small and is almost drowned out by a large advertisement occupying more than half the page, which a source familiar with the matter said was inserted very late in the day. But there are no signs of censorship – the transcript released by the White House is identical to the published Q&A.

Obama did not say anything that would attract the censor’s ire. He called on China to “take on more responsibilities” – one of his main themes for the visit - and said that Washington would review the ban on hi-tech exports to China. And he told the interviewer he wanted to meet Chinese and Houston Rockets basketball star Yao Ming.

By Geoff Dyer, FT China bureau chief

Now that the Obama circus has left town, the biggest sigh of relief comes from the group of people often labelled as China’s “dissidents”: human rights lawyers, serial petitioners and democracy advocates. Even though the US president went out of his way to be diplomatic about human rights issues and did not have any extra-curricular meetings with independent intellectuals, Beijing still detained dozens of people and put others under house arrest.

A lot of the press comment on the Obama China visit has been pretty negative for the president, pointing out how hard he found it to connect with Chinese people and how little he had to show in terms of concrete results. But China’s weaknesses were also fully on display, from the no-question press conference in Beijing to the unwillingness to broadcast Obama’s “townhall” meeting in Shanghai. Chinese confidence may be rising and the Communist party firmly in control, but the ritual locking up of dissidents suggests China’s leaders still look over their shoulders with some anxiety.

In truth, this was the latest in a series of round-ups of the awkward squad over the last 18 months, starting with the Olympics last year, Hillary Clinton’s first visit to Beijing in February, the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet in March and the 20th anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen crackdown. When it came to the October 1 national day this year – which was also the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China – many dissidents did not need to be asked and opted for a quiet holiday in the countryside. 

The interesting question is whether the end of this cycle of sensitive events will lead to a modest relaxation. There were high hopes, for instance, that the Olympics would help loosen up China’s political system a little but it could be that all these high-profile events have strengthened the more conservative elements in the system.  Beijing’s control-freak tendency is still deeply-ingrained.

By Zach Coleman, FT Asia world news editor

Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president, may have looked like he was bulking up ahead of Barack Obama’s first presidential visit to Seoul this week when he sported a sweater under his suit jacket.

In fact, Lee and his cabinet - who joined him adding some layers of protection - were trying to lead by example as they committed the country to cut its carbon emissions in a symbolically under-heated meeting room during a cold snap.

How Seoul will reduce emissions by four per cent from 2005 levels by 2020 has not yet been spelled out. But the track record of other leaders using sartorial gestures to promote energy conservation has been mixed.

Months after becoming US president, Jimmy Carter donned a cardigan to underscore that the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war”. Carter hoped to summon public solidarity to conserve energy and reduce oil imports through steps such as reducing wintertime heating and driving more efficent cars.

But in the heyday of the Pontiac TransAm, his plea for sacrifice didn’t resonate with the American public (how would Hummer owners react now?). Oil imports continued to climb and Carter was eventually sent packing by the sunnier optimism of Ronald Reagan.

Continue reading "How might Obama reduce his carbon footprint in South Korea?"