Obama First President Inheriting Declining Empire

Nice Work George W. Bush, Not!

 January 5. 2009

President-elect Barack Obama

A profound article in the UK Telegraph outlined the damage of the George W. Bush years, in testing America to its financial, military and social limits. It also discussed that Barack Obama will be the first U.S. president to inherit an empire on the decline, which is sad.

George W. Bush

The writer appropriately points out there are lessons to be learned from Bush's travesty of a presidency, which one can only hope, current and future world governments will not use as a template in any way, shape or form. It is to be discarded and treated for what it was, a colossal failure that not only wreaked havoc at home, but created a massive financial and military imbalance in the world.

G7 finance ministers

The scope of the damage from Bush's tenure should be taught in universities as a reminder of what not to do when one becomes head of state.

Rusty superpower in need of careful driver

But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.

The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously...

But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance...

We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. “Yes we can!” was an easy sentiment to recommend. “No we can't,” will be a far, far harder thing to say.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk