Is 'bombast' a necessity?

Caught an interesting NYT article on the economic and diplomatic inroads that China quietly made in Latin America during the Bush years. For those unfamiliar with the state of relations between that Administration and our southern neighbors, let's just say 'antarctic' wouldn't be far off. Indeed, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, love him or hate him, probably owes a good part of his career to the seething contempt for Bush that characterizes the region.

One thing jumped out at me near the end.

Despite forging ties to Venezuela and extending loans to other nations that have chafed at Washington’s clout, Beijing has bolstered its presence without bombast, perhaps out of an awareness that its relationship with the United States is still of paramount importance. But this deference may not last.

“This is China playing the long game,” said Gregory Chin, a political scientist at York University in Toronto. “If this ultimately translates into political influence, then that is how the game is played.”

This seems to imply that the default or preferred state for a superpower, or any power at all, is 'bombast', the lack or absence of which is considered 'deference'. Notwithstanding that this strikes me as a false dichotomy, how is bombast anything more than a luxury, indulged at one's own risk? China is strengthening its hand in real terms, whether it trumpets this to the skies or not. Even if it were the biggest fish in the pond, I fail to see how this sort of bragging could do anything to advance its agenda. If anything, it would hurt their interests.

I'm curious; is this sort of thinking a product of the past 8 years--though they should have been enough to show anyone the folly of bombast in foreign relations--or is it simply a generally accepted principle? Were I to helm a superpower, I would do my utmost to keep everything as simple and low profile as possible; attracting attention and riling people up would only hinder my cause in the long run. Something to ponder, anyway.

That final paragraph reminds me a bit of why I'm such a fan of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu; I'll make a follow up post at some point to discuss those interests in greater detail.

A colonial upstart

Went in with my coworkers to a law firm yesterday for a lesson on U.S. trade law and how it's made, plus U.S. civics in general. It was mainly for their benefit, though I learned a few new things that I hadn't known about the way we handle treaties and trade agreements before. Surprisingly interesting, actually, especially to note the incredulity and confusion many of my coworkers felt toward our system, "our way of doing things."

I'll talk about the substance of it in another post, but near the beginning I was struck when the presenter emphasized these differences, noting that citizens of nations with parliamentary governments often get confused by "our different system."

"Our different system"...only 239 years old, and we command such influence! I have read others making this observation many times before, but for some reason it felt more clear at this point than it ever had for me before.

Was our system at all made with the thought that we might one day be so dominant? Unlikely. No young or small nation bothers with that sort of thing. Even today, do we make our laws with a mind to their vast, often indirect, influence? There's certainly a tug-of-war there as far as whether to sacrifice even small gains for ourselves that we might make a better impact on the rest of the world, with the internationalists vs. the neo/paleocons--the internationalists vs. the nationalists, really, though putting it like that sounds somehow stupid.

My instincts lie with the internationalists, though I'm not so naive as to advocate throwing ourselves completely at the mercy of the U.N. in its current state, where China and Russia still exercise veto power. However, the sentimental "city on a hill" and other American exceptionalist drivel that the nationalists so love to spout gets zero sympathy from me.

We are a country of human beings, just like every other state on this earth. We happen to be blessed with certain democratic and meritocratic tendencies--some enshrined in our government, others existing purely by tradition--as well has a vast amount of living space* and natural resources. If pushed far enough and scared well enough, the American people are just as capable of enabling evil as the German and Russian peoples have historically been. Perhaps our institutions would serve as a speed bump on the road to hell, but in the end analysis, our government, just like any other government, really is one of men rather than laws, to contradict President Ford.

At any rate, sovereignty is a purely practical, and hopefully temporary, concern. As I point out above, when put to the test, the "American" prefix has little to do with the "people" that follows it. More on that in another post.





*the comparison to the loaded Lebensraum (edit: as the Nazis used it -- thanks Greg) is apt, I think, considering the way we viewed it when the natives still occupied it.