America and Korea

Waning moral strength erodes global US leadership

Misfortunes didn’t come singly for U.S. President Barack Obama. A day after his Democratic Party suffered its worst election defeat in seven decades, Obama had to surrender his status as the world’s most powerful person to Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Few will think that the ranking change, as tallied by U.S. business magazine Forbes, is a lasting trend, much less a sign of China exceeding the U.S. in national power. Even the biggest fans of the socialist economic juggernaut concede it will take at least another couple of decades for such a reversal to happen, if at all.

Yet one can hardly miss the undeniable reality in the magazine story: The United States has long ceased to be what it was two decades ago ― the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world.

A myriad of electoral post mortems sums up Obama’s defeat to the U.S. leader’s failure to sell his long-term ideals (reforms) to American voters, who are bound by short-term reality (jobs). But the U.S. election history shows the defeat in mid-term polls could be a mixed blessing for a sitting president’s reelection bid if he or she can rectify shortcomings through compromise and better communication with voters.

It remains to be seen whether this will be the case with America’s first black president, but the outlook does not appear bright for several reasons.

Above all, foreigners can’t help but be concerned that America and some Americans have long lost their moral superiority that has made them the world’s leader ― the classic Protestant work ethic, including hard labor and saving, self-sacrifice and consideration for others. Replacing such values seem to be extravagance ― described as “irrational exuberance” by former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan ― individualism and even ideological extremism.

What has brought about the global financial crisis was not only the Wall Street fat cats, who raked in billions of dollars in salaries for building up a financial house of cards, but also numerous average Americans who spent beyond their means with the gap filled by incurring huge debts owed to emerging countries, the majority of whose people only knew two words ― work and save.

The U.S. working poor are complaining that Wall Street has monopolized the benefits of financial capitalism and is trying to push the burden of tackling the crisis onto taxpayers. Yet Americans might as well think foreigners, especially those in emerging economies, regard the entire United States as a Wall Street investment bank ― monopolizing a boom while sharing a crisis, knowing it is “too big to fail.” The global trade imbalance, seen from a different aspect, is the imbalance of a work-and- reward system among global villagers.

And the upcoming G20 summit is only an arena, no more, no less, in which the U.S. and other industrial countries are forcing the other 13 emerging powers to shoulder the burden together. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was right when he said, “I am going to the G20 to fight.”

The U.S. Republicans are vowing to undo Obama’s reforms, including the essential regulations to curb casino capitalism, while extending tax cuts also for the richest 1 percent, dealing even a bigger blow to their fiscal health. We wish President Obama success if what he is about to do is bring back moderation and harmony both within the U.S. and in its relationship with other countries. Otherwise, he may likely be recorded as a failed progressive president by trying to reverse the retrogressive tide in a declining empire.

It is against this backdrop the nation hosts the G20 Seoul Summit, as the first non-G7 country to do so. Whether Korea will act on behalf of G7 to which it eagerly wants to belong or for the interests of G13 to which it belongs in reality and will remain so in the foreseeable future will determine the national economic fortune for quite long.

Watching the Lee Myung-bak administration’s haste to wrap up free trade talks with the U.S. even by conceding more in auto trade only for the successful hosting of the summit, however, one can’t help but worry about the bottom line of the forthcoming event.