The World

The theme that everybody seems to have picked up on from President Obama’s speech in Westminster yesterday was his insistence on the continuing power and relevance of the West. But the crucial sentence was interestingly ambiguous.

Speaking of China, India, Brazil and the rest, Obama said – “Perhaps, the argument goes, these nations represent the future and the time for our leadership has passed. That argument is wrong. The time for our leadership is now.”

The thing about that passage is that ideas that are presented as mutually exclusive are, in fact, completely compatible. In other words, it could simultaneously be true that “these nations” represent the future and that “the time for our leadership is now.” What we may be seeing, in fact, is the last phase where western leadership is simply assumed. In the future, things will be different.

The current battle for the leadership of the IMF is a good example. It does look as if the Europeans, backed by the Americans, will manage to push Christine Lagarde into the job. But the groundswell of protest against the idea of a Western fix – and the accompanying commentary highlighting the shift in economic and political power from West to East and from North to South – will probably ensure that this will be the last time that a European appointment can simply be bulldozed through.

So President Obama is right when he insists “the time for leadership is now.” But Madame Lagarde might add – “Apres moi, le deluge.”