US UNDER OBAMA BEGINS TO GROW UP

Was President Obama "successful" or not in his trip to the G20 meeting in London. This is a typical American question. "Successful" is what we want and it is always interpreted in the sense of whether we got the world to do as we want them to do. Good for us and the world, Obama was not successful in this sense. What Obama did was to help the US grow up, mature, begin to understand the world the way it is. Along the way, he got about as much as anyone could get from the Europeans and others by taking the mature approach to relationships in which the other is actually respected.

There is a good reason that Europeans do not agree to more stimulus. They do not need it the way we need it because they have not starved their states the way we have and the basic needs of citizens are met, to a larger degree than those of Americans are, by state programs of support for education and health care. The Europeans may not be as dynamic, economically speaking, but they are more mature in their approach to spending and taxes; their wealth is greater and more shared among the classes than in the US. China's situation is entirely different from the US and European problems. They do not lack for cosummers or demand internally. What the Chinese face is the drop in world wide demand for their goods...so it is exactly in their interest for the US to stimulate while they do not need to as their internal markets still outstrip their ability to produce goods for domestic use. Where they make money is in the trade with others. In fact, it was the Anglo (US/British) banking system and approach to economy that has led the world into the current depression and the rest of the world is absolutely committed to not paying for what we created.

The same is true on Afghanistan. The Europeans have a different view of the world that does not divide it into we and them in some kind of eternal battle between good and evil, so they can measure the threat versus the cost of containing it in a very different way than we have. The Europeans know that Afghanistan is a black hole, and, more importantly, that military action has a very limited role to play in any attempts to build a representative and effective state. And, they have decided that preventive measure at home is the way to address the terrorist threat combined with strategic alliances and intelligence work in the Muslim nations. it is a more relaxed approach to the terrorist threat that has a more realistic estimate of the threat that terrorism poses to the Western world.

We should be thankful that President Obama is beginning to understand, for us, that the world is made up of a variety of legitimate interests and approaches to solving problems from which we could learn a great deal, just as othes might learn some things from us. Stimulus is the way we have to go because we have starved the state and regulation is more important to European states whose economic stability is more secure than ours and thus, needs, for banks and financial institutions to act in a way that maximizes steady growth, not huge and temporary profit.

So, just to be American and measure success, we can say that Obama probably got almost 100% of what was possible to get from a world that has different needs and share a different level of responsibility for the current crisis in economy and war. Plus, he helped America begin to grow up, mature as a part of the global family, something that we and the world sorely need to happen.