Sitting in a private club in Mumbai the other day, Sanjay Sachdev explained why I might detect an air of anxiety as I made my way across India. Enron, Arthur Andersen, Argentina, global debt, the potential for war some distance north of where we sipped our coffee: "There's a certain element of despair," said this quick, articulate man, the managing director of IDBI-Principal Asset Management Co, a US-Indian joint venture.
Sachdev was wise to worry, and he is emphatically far from alone. When I left the US last week to begin a long swing through Asia, the talk among Americans was of policy drift and a certain confusion.
Where next, the question was posed, with the war on terrorism? With the Afghan military operation in mop-up phase, what are we supposed to do now? These are stunning questions when contemplated from a side of the planet that has a thousand undone tasks before it.
Strategically, diplomatically, in our economic thinking -- a moment of heightened uncertainty arrives in our post-Sept. 11, post-neoliberal universe. And with every step forward, the absence of a leading voice, a motivating force or an energizing idea becomes ever more apparent.
The war on terrorism, the campaign in Afghanistan, and the simultaneous collapse of the utopian ideals of free-market extremists: From here it is perfectly apparent that these are all of a piece. And what ties them together most, regrettably, is the dearth of new thinking among Americans as to the sensible way through the complicated place the world has suddenly become.
Let us distinguish here between the assertion of power and the assertion of leadership, for the two are very different. And it is an unfortunate fact of history that those possessing the former in overabundance tend to think it obviates any need to exercise the latter.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell's just-concluded visit to South Asian capitals is a case in point. Powell performed with creditable poise, as he always does, in a many-sided situation of obvious difficulty. But what exactly did he do? What did he bring to the resolution of the complex situation India and Pakistan now face? One saw, more than anything else, a man caught in a thicket of his own government's making.
Ease tensions, Powell advised, and then start a dialogue.
No, the Americans would not assume a mediating role. No, Washington would not press the case in New Delhi for its new friend, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and neither would there be any immediate change in the US relationship with India.
The Washington of George W. Bush is now challenged to engage in diplomacy of a complexity it may or may not be capable of.
Everyone here knows that in its new alliance with Pakistan, the US has landed itself with contradictions it must handle primarily by obscuring them. Indians are left to conclude that the US is still working out of a Cold War policy framework that ought to have been discarded years ago.
"A close examination of much of what Gen. Powell has said," a front-page piece in an Indian daily noted after the US diplomat's visit, "may well lead to the question: Has he said anything at all?" The article was headlined: "Powellspeak: An Analysis."
The lingering thought since the Powell tour is that things could have gone worse between the world's largest democracy and its oldest, as Indians like to think of the two nations. But here and across the region, the so-far unstated reverse side of this coin is that things could be going much better.
Seeds of impatience seem about to push through the ground -- here, elsewhere in Asia, and beyond. We know about the techno-glories of the American military machine, the sentiment runs; now tell us just what the machine has been deployed to accomplish.
There's another way to put this. A few weeks ago, an American professor combed all available documents to produce the most authoritative analysis to date of civilian casualties in the Afghan bombing campaign -- a matter Washington declines to discuss. By Dec. 7, the study concluded, the figure reached a conservative estimate of 3,800 -- and probably surpasses the number killed on Sept. 11. "At some point," a friend here said the other day, "this should be justified." Newly complex relationships, from Iran eastward to China, will require sophisticated attention in coming months. The new government in Kabul will have to prove itself something more than an American creation in the service of oil and gas companies, and behind Musharraf's friendship, one hears, there is a tide of anti-Americanism among Pakistanis that could easily turn into tomorrow's crisis.
In Manila, legislators fret and crowds gather outside the US Embassy as American troops prepare to begin the next phase of the war on terrorism. In Saudi Arabia, The Washington Post reported a few days ago, there is disquiet from the street upward to the ruling elite regarding the continued presence of US troops on Saudi soil.
It would appear, in sum, that the American narrative of the world since Sept. 11 is beginning to look incomplete -- and that no one is writing Chapter Two.
The same point applies to the economic model Washington has so vigorously advanced over the past decade. Argentine President Eduardo Duhalde had the right word for it last week: It's "exhausted." Duhalde now proposes to replace it with measures to revive domestic production, create jobs, and put the interests of Argentina and Argentines first. The only thing shocking about this list of priorities is how many people in Washington and elsewhere outside Argentina find it shocking.
In South Korea, the days grow short for the government of Kim Dae-jung. Last week, Seoul asked Washington -- once again -- for help in advancing the cause of detente with the North. It's blood from stones. The South Koreans and their honorable president would be wise to start thinking of alternative ways forward -- ideas of their own making.
This leads us to a positive point that lies at the heart of this picture. If a vacuum of new ideas in Washington is becoming ever more apparent, perhaps it creates a moment in which Asians can begin formulating some of their own.
For the Americans, we have to start thinking in terms of lost opportunities.
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