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.