Obama's Opportunities?

On Bill Moyers' Journal, with of course Bill Moyers being off this week, Deborah Amos was talking to Slate.com's Fred Kaplan (one of my favorite writers), and Elizabeth Rubin of the Council on Foreign Relations and the New York Times Magazine. Ms. Amos asked them a question about the oncoming Financial Crisis, and what it's going to do to the Obama Administration. Both Mr. Kaplan and Ms. Rubin had veeeeery interesting things to say about the opportunities (yes, opportunities) that await the President-Elect:

No postable video, but the link to the interview is right here.

ELIZABETH RUBIN: Yes and no. I mean, you could look at it another way, which is that if the U.S. is not just money bags then it means that other countries realize they actually have to do some work with the U.S. and with whoever is in the region. So in a way it makes the world much more interdependent. Rather than seeing the U.S. as - the U.S. is either going to do its policy for better or for worse 'cause they've got all the money. It doesn't work that way anymore.

FRED KAPLAN: Yeah, you know, the Cold War was actually an anomaly in history. I mean, this idea of two pretty stable blocs that faced off. And each of them controlled its half of the world. And that at one point, one of the sides just went poof. And I think the mistake that the Bush administration made at the end of the Cold War was they said, "We won the Cold War; therefore, we control everything and everybody has to bow down. We are stronger than ever. We are like Rome. Everybody has to do what we want."

But what was really going on, we were actually in some ways weaker than we were before because, in the old days, everybody kind of vaguely on our side, would look over to their shoulder and know that, oh geez, the Russian bear's over there. So, okay, I'll go against my interests to go along with this because the alternatives are too dreadful.

Well, now, the bear's gone. These countries, they can go their own way, pursue their own interests without much attention to what Washington says.

So what the next president has to do is really to adjust to America's reduced place in the world and to - how to advance our interests in a world where we actually control much less. And it's very difficult. But it also provides possibilities because there are ways of reciprocal benefits for both countries. And as Elizabeth was saying, you can create diplomatic situations where other countries feel a stake in the matter, too.