A Pacific President for a Pacific Century?

That could have been the title for my op-ed this week in papers of the GPD syndicate. Obama has called himself America's first Pacific president, and much of what goes on in the world in the coming decades will be determined by what the U.S. and China do, and how much of it they manage to do together. Instead, however, we came up with something about Obama keeping alive America's China dreams. The idea was for a historical perspective on the U.S.-China relationship, so I talk about U.S. expectations with regard to China since the "Open Door" notes around 1900. Meanwhile the future of America's 20th century China expectations is here, and it's not clear if Americans are happy about the way things have come out. China has become quite powerful (really the second of only two powers with a genuinely global foreign policy) whereas the U.S. has lost ground. The piece naturally ends with President Obama's recent visit. Given his own troubles and China's ascent, he was wise to play it cautiously. The Chinese leadership has its hands full at home, not least because it's a dictatorship. Part of America's expectations of China has been that the country would become more like the U.S.; in the realm of basic freedoms, that continues to be an aspiration of a lot of Chinese. Hence our title: America can indeed keep its China dreams alive; hence also the wisdom of Obama's caution, because there is little that would anger the Beijing dictators more than by being challenged politically at home by a foreing power like the U.S. And an angry China is something the U.S. can afford less than ever before. Read all about it, in Dutch, in today's Eindhovens Dagblad.

November Morning Sun?

I know there is such a thing as a harvest moon, the way the full moon looks at the end of the summer or early in the fall. When I lived in New Mexico I fully became aware of that one night when I rode home to White Rock, the suburb without a city, from my job at the lab in Los Alamos. I was headed east on Pajarito Rd when just before diving down the one-mile hill that's part of it (and where I once saw 57 m/h indicated on my computer--still my all-time speed record) I looked up to see this huge, bright yellow moon climb out from behind the Sangre de Christo mountains on the other side of the wide, Rio Grande valley. It was a stunning sight, one I looked for every time there was a full moon the remainder of my year there, but in vain. I was on the same bike yesterday morning as on that Friday evening in October 1994--my 1992 yellow Trek 2300: carbon for the main triangle, aluminum front and rear forks, still going strong--when I had a somewhat similar experience, but this time with the rising sun. It had been a wet and windy week. Wednesday it got so wild that even though I had braved the wind in the morning, I didn't feel like dealing with an even stronger wind on the way home, also because in the course of the day it had started to rain. Plus I would have had to get through it all after dark. Instead, I walked to the train, and came back to the city the next day using public transportation also. Thursday was a little calmer, and by the end of the day it had started to clear. Friday morning was plain bright, and it was light well before the sun had come up. So I wasn't thinking of the sun, the way I often do on a clear morning, probably also because there was no orange glow where I normally look for it leaving town. But approaching my turn-off onto the Diemen-Bussum highway, about 2.5 miles into my ride I just happened to glance over to the east, in part because that's where I was about to go. And there it was: a gigantic pinkish sun, only about one-fifth above the tree line between the Ankeveense plassen and the Ankeveense molen. I can't remember ever seeing the sun this wide, or this pink. There were only a few minutes before my route headed west again, along the Vecht toward Weesp. But in the meantime I was able to see it rise almost fully above the horizon, and it was a sight to behold. Partly to get another look I continued along the Vecht toward Muiden past Weesp, because on that section I'd have some easy glances eastward again. By that time, about ten minutes later, the sun was well clear above the horizon and quite a bit smaller, but it was still fairly easy to look at--not very bright at all, in spite of the clear morning. It's not something you expect to see, this time of year in Holland. But I did, and so it was a good week on the bike after all.

Agonizing over Aghanistan

Two weeks back I did an op-ed arguing that it's inconceivable that the U.S. will not play a central role in Afghanistan and next-door Pakistan in the coming years. It was in response to reports from Washington that quite a few people (also in the military) were getting impatient with the president's decisionmaking process which has been ongoing since word leaked last September (I think it was) of General McChrystal's recommendation that in order to pursue a new strategy the U.S. send up to 40,000 extra troops. And the president still hasn't made a decision. In fact, last week he held what was reported to be his eight major session with his national security team on the issue, where originally just a handful were planned. From the reports on it, one could conclude that the president is particularly concerned about having a viable exit strategy, or even that ultimately the strategy will be an exit strategy (with the U.S. mostly handing things over to whatever Afghan partners within a few years). The meeting came on the heels of word that the U.S. ambassador in Kabul does not believe there's any point in sending more troops until the Karzai government cleans up its act. This is indeed a vital point, although I continue to wonder whether the Obama team considers bypassing the man and his cronies to be an option--along the lines of how in Iraq after 2006 we worked with local groups to get a handle on the Sunni insurgency and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In any case, it's obvious that Obama is taking this issue more than a little seriously--that he's not "dithering," in other words--not least because U.S. and other soldiers (along with Afghan soldiers and civilians) will continue to be killed, regardless of which way he decides. That he's very aware of this aspect of the matter (just one of many, mind you, although perhaps the most burdening) you can see in a story on his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week. Apparently, the photo at the beginning here was taken that day.

Down and Up in Early November

What's different about November is that it's really fall, as in: wind, rain, and low temperatures. I had a rough time commuting last week thanks to these conditions combining a lot of the time. I got rained on twice (fortunately both days on the way home), had to battle gusty winds, and really needed the winter shoes, the jacket, and my gloves--not to mention my lights at the end of the day. I remember writing back in April and May how the commutes were getting so easy that they hardly felt like the real thing any more. Well, this past week I met the real thing again and I'm still adjusting psychologically. I'm still seeing a few other backpack-racing bike-commuters, but sightings are getting to be few and far between. Riding to work is going to be a long, hard slog on most days. Not always, as became clear this morning, on the Sunday ride. The weather had begun to calm down late yesterday afternoon, and last night was calm, clear, and cool. There was some fog around this morning, but in a lot of places the skies were blue. My Whisper Power group has switched to mountain bikes, but I'm dissenting and sticking to the (winter) road bike. It's not that I hate dirt riding so much (although I'd be perfectly happy never to mess with it), it's more that the route follows paths where you run into a lot of (dog) walkers, runners, and such. Meanwhile, we're rumbling through at a speed that's considerably higher than what the other people are doing, and this makes for interactions that from the walkers' side are grudgingly polite at best, and which often cross over into plain resentment and sometimes willful obstruction. Fast cyclists, road or dirt, are not popular in this country, and one can see why. In many places there just isn't enough room. Some racing types nonetheless act as if they're in the middle of some kind of very important race. But even if you're well-behaved you can easily scare people. Yesterday I read about a conflict over a planned bike path outside of Haarlem, where the walker/hiking community objects for exactly these reasons: cyclists ruin it for the rest of us in these pretty areas. It's the same on the road on nice weekend afternoons: you really can't expect to go for a careless, fast training ride at those times--too many other people on the bike paths and roads. On those days, it's best to be done with your ride by 11am or so. It's not that by riding the road bike where my friends take to the trails that I think I can fix this, or even that I think cyclists do not belong on these trails. As one of the members of the group said during our coffee stop (where I did meet up with the rest): we're mostly on bike paths, so we should not feel guilty or anything. It's that I just don't need this tension when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself, supposed to be riding around relatively carelessly. So I rode the biggest part of today's ride by myself, roughly tracing the off-road route on the perimeter on paved roads. It certainly was a good day for a road ride, in spite of the 2 degrees Celsius I saw indicated somewhere. Let's hope these kinds of days come around from time to time during the week also, because I'm not in the true hard-man mindset yet.