The larger picture
President Barack Obama’s story is to be unfolded in a landscape where even the very existence of human race is in jeopardy. Being as human as any of us, one surely cannot expect him to perform miracles and reverse the trends of financial crisis, global food crisis and environmental crisis overnight.
He needs the support of all for this and it looks as if his biggest allies are now into a never-ending feud.
The EU progress is currently bogged down by the ego-clashes of French President Nicholas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Sarkozy being Sarkozy the PR man is likely to be very cozy with Obama and try to get US support for his move to part-nationalize “strategic companies” in EU.
But Obama may still remember how Germans wooed him during his pre-election visit to Germany. The straight faced, ever serious Germans just fell for Obama.
The market-savvy Merkel claims the “French type” economic “protectionism” by Sarkozy will spell doom and Sarkozy has moved to close German companies in French market, one by one. For many in EU they are back with a renaissance of French style “interventionism”.
Meanwhile Gordon Brown gloats over the fact that the bail out plan copied by the EU was the British blueprint, a feather in the British cap and makes it a point to carve his own niche in EU detaching himself from the frivolous current EU President - Sarkozy.
In the mini-theatre of EU what one sees is a kind of a dress rehearsal for Barack Obama.
Will he side with Sarkozy and embrace ‘economic protectionism’ for America to come out of their own crisis or will he toe the Merkel line of market which though may have worked for Germany may not work for the United States of America, and therefore for many others?
All these days he has been more with the former. But can one predict the future?
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