America as an idea
James Fallows
American power is declining as Barack Obama begins his presidency. American power has been declining through the entirety of my conscious life.
The first presidential election I remember with any clarity was in 1960. Part of the argument John F. Kennedy made against Richard Nixon and the record of the Eisenhower years was that a “prestige gap” had left the United States at a disadvantage relative to the Soviet Union, not to mention the alleged dangers of a missile gap. By the late 1960s, the United States was suffering its first-ever military defeat and was estranged from many of its allies because of the Johnson-Nixon policies in Vietnam, not to mention being torn apart by the worst domestic disturbances in more than a century.
Restoring solvency
Stephen Walt
It is by now a cliché to observe that Barack Obama took office facing the greatest challenge of any United States president since Franklin Roosevelt. The US economy had been in free-fall since the northern summer of 2008, the nation’s image around the world had taken a beating over the previous eight years. Obama inherited a losing war in Iraq, a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and a wide array of unresolved foreign policy problems. No president in living memory had taken office with so much to solve and such limited room to manoeuvre.
American strength
Robert Shapiro
In the first half of 2008, the United States headed into what seemed to be a normal business downturn triggered by a doubling of energy prices, although a few perspicacious analysts warned that something more fundamental was happening, at least in housing prices. They were correct: a bubble had pushed up housing prices for a decade—not only in the US, but across most advanced economies—drawing in many of the large institutions that provide finance in the US and much of the world to create and purchase highly leveraged securities based on bubble-inflated mortgage values and their unregulated derivatives.
Seven years to get it right
Coral Bell
When Barack Obama was talking to about 200,000 Berliners during the United States presidential campaign in 2008, he said “that the problems of the world were too great to be solved by one nation alone”. Well, most of us always knew that. But Obama was recognising more than the United States’ need for the European alliance. He was acknowledging the profound, irreversible redistribution of power in the world that actually has far more to do with China and India than with the Europeans. History suggests a precedent for adapting diplomatic practice to such changes—a precedent to which Obama appears intuitively oriented.
Asia, America and Australia
Michael Wesley
For more than a century, Pacific Asia has profoundly shaped the Australian-American relationship. By the mid-19th century, elites in both countries were defining themselves as Pacific nations, and the lands and societies of Pacific Asia provided important ingredients of the geopolitical identity of each. Asia was seen as a new frontier for these young and vigorous settler societies, which as the century wore on identified themselves and each other as representatives of the “Anglo-Saxon race” that had taken possession of the most productive temperate territories outside of Europe.
Handle with care
John Ikenberry
The rise of China will be one of the great dramas of the 21st century. According to some observers we are witnessing the end of the American era and the gradual transition from a Western-oriented world order to one increasingly dominated by Asia. The historian Niall Ferguson argues that the bloody 20th century is in fact a story of “the descent of the West”; a “reorientation of the world” in which the Atlantic powers ceded their mastery of the world to the East.
Trading disagreements
Bill Emmott
In recent decades, every financial crisis that has had cross-border dimensions or implications has brought forth widespread calls reform of the international financial system. Such calls have often featured suggestions that it is time for a new Bretton Woods, referring to the United Statesled conference in New Hampshire in July 1944 that gave rise to the post-war monetary system and its institutions. Less grandiose, but with similar intent have been calls for changes to the international financial architecture.
Chimerica and Australia
Geoffrey Garrett
For more than a decade, the modus operandi of United States-China relations has been pragmatic, interest based and disciplined. Both sides have focused squarely on economic win-wins, managing down their lurking geopolitical rivalries and keeping a lid on potentially incendiary political disagreements and military tensions. Presidents Hu Jintao and Barack Obama have already signalled their strong intentions to keep relations between their two countries on this path.
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In the news
US housing expert has some home truths
16 Mar 2010
Sydney Morning Herald
In this article by Andrew West, current guest of the US studies Centre Henry Cicneros, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration gives his opinion on the NSW Government’s potential use of powers to acquire private land and turn it over to property developers.
A TOP adviser to the Obama administration has warned the Keneally government to exercise extreme caution before using proposed powers that would allow it to acquire private land and turn it over to property developers.
Henry Cisneros, who was secretary of housing and urban development under the former US president Bill Clinton and now advises the White House Office of Urban Affairs, said the government would have to demonstrate that seizing private land was for "a larger public good".
Dr Cisneros, who is in Australia as a guest of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney for a series of lectures and meetings, told the Herald such powers were controversial in the US.
"It's been a raging controversy that's gone all the way up to the Supreme Court," he said.
"It is a problem and, in the US, private property is treated so sacredly there would be inhibitions against it. On the other hand, there have been court rulings saying that, for a defined public good, it is allowable."
Dr Cisneros served four terms as the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, before being appointed to the Clinton cabinet in 1993. He is now a developer of low-income housing and an occasional White House counsellor.
As mayor, he said, he never forced a private owner to sell to the city. "I did not do it to someone who did not want to sell," he said. "We frequently approached people about selling in order to build a 137-store mall downtown, but it was for business use."
But if governments can prove that buying private land occupied by a single home or business was to sell it to a developer for medium and high density dwellings to ease a housing crisis, such powers are justified, he said.
"You could compensate people appropriately, even into the future for the enhanced value," he said. "If fairness can be achieved, if there is a larger public good in creating greater density of housing, then any city that can do it should work at it."
Dr Cisneros also warned that as Australian cities become more crowded and expensive, governments may have to build "workforce housing" for essential staff, such as police, teachers, nurses, and firefighters.
Several years ago, after a fierce storm lashed Seattle, there was no power for several days because repair crews, who could not afford to live in the city, could not return to work from their distant homes. King County in Seattle now has an ordinance that gives workforce housing priority on plots of unused or abandoned land.
In San Jose, California, the city had to offer housing aid to teachers who were resigning after just two years because they could not bear the long commute to school. "The city was losing all that investment in teacher training," Dr Cisneros said.
In nearby San Ramon, police who are forced to live 120 kilometres away now work three 12-hour shifts a week, and stay in dormitories. "They can't make the commute," he said. "So you're getting dysfunctional policing."
In the news
Smith steps up condemnation of Israel over 1600 new settler homes
12 Mar 2010
Sydney Morning Herald
In this report by Kirsty Needham the US Studies Centres' Associate Professor Brendon O'Connor and Postdoctoral Fellow Jeremy Pressman are interviewed about the significance of the latest controversy involving Israeli settlements on disputed land.
STEPHEN SMITH has joined a chorus of international criticism of Israel over its controversial approval of thousands of new settler homes, which threatens to scupper US-brokered Middle East peace talks.
Analysts said the strong language of the Minister for Foreign Affairs was a departure from Australia's record of ''playing it safe'' on Israeli politics. It follows the straining of Australia-Israel relations after the forgery of four Australian passports used in the assassination of a Hamas figure in Dubai, allegedly by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
Federal police investigating the passport incident are believed to have returned to Australia, but yesterday Mr Smith's office said he had not yet seen their report.
The Israeli government has blamed the announcement of 1600 new homes by its interior minister - just as the US Vice-President, Joe Biden, arrived in Jerusalem and days after the Palestinian Authority had agreed to indirect talks - on a bureaucratic mishap.
The White House has condemned the announcement as undermining the peace process. Mr Smith told Sky News yesterday: ''This is a bad decision at the wrong time, and it's not a helpful contribution to the peace process.''
Britain, the European Union, France and Egypt also condemned Israel's move. But Brendon O'Connor, associate professor in American politics at the University of Sydney's US Studies Centre, said it was a departure for Australia to criticise Israel.
''Australia has previously played this issue very safe compared to a lot of European countries,'' he said. Jeremy Pressman, an American post-doctoral fellow at the centre who specialises in the Arab-Israeli conflict, said the passport tension was likely to be a factor in Mr Smith's rebuke but the broader international community had been angered by the timing of the announcement.
''It is traditional Israeli coalition politics and a long-running way to poke the US in the eye,'' Dr Pressman said.
Mr Smith has told the Israeli ambassador that lack of co-operation with the federal police investigation could bring adverse consequences but has said he will read the report before drawing conclusions.
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