海角大神

This week, as Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping pays a visit to Washington, there will doubtless be many calls for the Obama administration to talk tough with America鈥檚 largest trading partner. No more of that nonsense of undercutting US workers with your cheap labor, sir, and you had better start supporting some democratic reforms in the Middle East and back home or there鈥檚 going to be trouble. Big trouble.

There will also be calls for the US to cultivate Mr. Xi, who is likely to replace President Hu Jintao when Mr. Hu is ready to step down. Show him the superiority of the free market system, unfettered by regulations and government planning. Slip some of that American Soft Power 鈩� into his green tea in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan did it with Mikhail Gorbachev, and now Mr. Gorbachev is endorsing Louis Vuitton.

But what should the Obama administration do? Some say America鈥檚 persuasive power have passed their peak. The American economy is beginning to recover, but the longer term trends of job-loss, debt, and geopolitical exhaustion mean that any US president 鈥� Democrat or Republican 鈥� will have limited tools of bluster to define the terms of any future US-China relationship. Americans expect exceptionalism 鈥撀爎emember Tom Brokaw鈥檚 Greatest Generation 鈥� and they expect their leaders to take up where the Roosevelts, Eisenhowers, and Reagans left off.

But a slew of well-argued pieces this week show that these expectations are maybe misplaced.

In Foreign Policy, Daniel Blumenthal 鈥� an expert on China at the American Enterprise Institute 鈥� says that it鈥檚 na茂ve to think that either tough talk or sweet talk are going to win over Xi and set China on a different path. The truth is that the China that Xi would eventually govern is much more pluralistic and complex than the China that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon negotiated with during the cold war, or as politically weak as the Soviet Union that Mr. Gorbachev so helpfully dismantled.

One-on-one diplomacy has its place, but nothing beats having a real strategy on how to deal with China, and Blumenthal calls America鈥檚 current policy a 鈥渕uddle.鈥�

America itself is not the giant disciplined gunboat that some foreign policy hawks assume it is, either, writes Charles Kupchan in this month鈥檚 Foreign Affairs. All over the world, democracies have suffered the most through economic globalization and in the recent economic meltdown. Indeed, it may be authoritarian governments with state-run economies who have ridden out the economic panics of 2007 and onward, leaving democracies to face the anger of their voters.

In excerpts in the Atlantic and in a book review in Friday鈥檚 New York Times, Charles Murray has resurrected his Bell Curve theory to explain the growing inequality of US society. The key to success, if I understand Mr. Murray鈥檚 theory correctly, is education, and the key to success in education is to inherit a great IQ from your parents. For the rest, the door is shut. Sorry about that.

Maybe I missed them, but I didn鈥檛 see any articles out there proposing solutions. Diagnosing a problem seems to be the easy half of this battle. But how about the solution?

Is the decline of America preordained? Is there anything that businesspeople, elected American officials, and even individual American voters can do to turn things around? Can the US build the kind of strategic partnership 鈥� based on common goals and ideals 鈥� that the US built with its onetime colonial master, Britain? If someone wrote a story about solutions, I鈥檇 certainly read it.