Teetering on the edge

Woe is us.  We are entering a presidential election year in the United States, and when it comes to genuine strategic insight and policy recommendations the vast majority of the statements and positions of the various candidates are at best threadbare. Insults and sweeping generalizations have dragged down the quality of discourse. Spurred by the 24/7 media, sensationalism has trumped genuine innovation. Fact has become fiction. And hearsay and innuendo have suddenly become credible and even appear to be beyond reproach. “Reality Politics”—the not-so-distant cousin of Reality TV—has arrived in full force. Perhaps all this should inspire us to revisit Bertrand Russell’s observation 80 years ago: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Worse still is that the content from most of our would-be presidents is focused almost exclusively on the issues of the day.  It is political ADHD—the equivalent of issue ambulance-chasing with a single-minded view to capitalizing on the latest news cycle.  It amounts to strategic planning by triage. 

This would be noxious under any set of circumstances, but it is especially toxic in the context of the United States in the year 2016.  In place of the current parochial debate, what is badly needed is inspirational insight—and not a continuing  diet of transparent pandering, restatements of the obvious, unsubstantiated stories, innuendo, and meaningless generalizations that we are being force fed by an all-too-willing media.  What is needed is a genuine vision of the United States to come—a vision informed by concrete measures and goals in the longer term. 

The stakes are tremendous. There have been many points in American history during which key political decisions would foreordain the path of the country for decades to come, and we have reached one of them now. Why?  Because the country stands at a number of simultaneous inflection points in its development that will mean the difference between stability and prosperity, on the one hand, and decline and uncertainty, on the other. Americans have entered into a Dickensian best-of-times, worst-of-times environment with the country at once facing inspiring possibilities and sobering truths—very few of which have surfaced during the campaign. No matter how vacant the debate in 2016, decisions taken by the next president over the course of his or her first term—2017-2021—will largely condition disproportionally what the country looks like well after the specifics of his/her presidency are relegated to the history books.

The international stakes for the United States are equally significant.  "The whole world," writes Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rahman in the final days of 2015, "is on edge."  He is absolutely right. Rahman points to a condition of "generalized anxiety" that extends these days to all the world’s major powers (with the partial exception of India)—a pronounced departure from an extended period in which at least one power somewhere in the world had been "bullishly optimistic." It used to be Japan in the 1980s. Then, following the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the "hyper-puissance" called the United States. After the turn of the century, it was China. These days, under the current circumstances, it’s hard to detect bullishness anywhere at all.

Just the opposite. At the end of 2015, an unwelcome confluence of toxic risks—geopolitical, political, and economic—explains what Rahman calls the “global gloom” that has descended on us. This is not the kind of happy-talk that most publications inflict on their readers, especially at the turn of the year, but I admire Rahman for calling it as he sees it.

The first is geopolitics. It is stunning how quickly the end of history has come and gone. After a mere quarter century, geopolitical competition is back with a vengeance. Gone are the "unipolar moment" and "Washington Consensus" days—the heady days when we could confidently proclaim the end of history, the absolute and permanent supremacy of liberal democracies, and the systematic renunciation of anything other than market-driven economics. Even the prospect of tactical nuclear warfare is back. A recent report from Mark Cancian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) entitled “Thinking about the Unthinkable” notes that “after two decades of being considered a Cold War anachronism, the tactical use of nuclear weapons is again on the agenda.” He notes that Moscow’s military doctrine envisions escalation to nuclear in order to counter superior conventional forces.

Second, the global economy.  To be sure, an anemic global economy and continued uncertainty are contributing to the state of affairs at the beginning of 2016. But it goes well beyond that. Part of the ennui may be attributable to uncertainties in the nature of the global economy itself. Can we expect the global economy to “snap back” to the pre-Great Recession trajectory of rapid globalization, or have we entered into a post-globalization period marked by renewed geopolitical tensions, the rise of political extremism, and flat-line economic growth? Will the developing economies be able to restore the meteoric growth rates of years past, or are they destined to deal with a pronounced period of lower economic dynamism? Are we all at the precipice of a takeoff of “exponential” technologies, or have we arrived at a protracted period of declining productivity growth? How long will the current commodity slump-cycle persist? How well prepared are governments to deal with future economic and/or financial shocks? These and other big-ticket questions certainly underline the uncertainties we face in the economic sphere.

It all comes down to this.  In a precarious world, marked by both old and new geopolitical, economic and social strains, we need authentic leaders with vision, insight, judgement and innovation on whom we can depend.   As we bring in the new year, let's all toast to leadership with adult supervision.  It's always a good thing, of course but it's especially important now--with a world teetering on the edge.