US brinksmanship caps year of declining prestige

The bill might have saved the US from an unprecedented and potentially catastrophic default, but the long-term, serious damages to the global standing of the US has already been done. The second US debt scare in three years has caused the rating agency Fitch to put the US on notice for a possible downgrade. Banks that were fencing themselves off from a possible debt crisis by limiting exposure are no doubt already planning for the next crisis. World leaders ditched diplomatic courtesy and publicly lectured Washington politicians to get their act together.

The self-inflicted crisis capped a year of declining global prestige for the US. In spring, the media reported on the secret global wiretapping programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA). The US was revealed to have eavesdropped on foreign diplomats, including those from European allies and has cast a global net to filter the communication of hundreds of million phone and Internet users around the world. In the summer months, President Barack Obama got red-faced when he bumbled on how to act in response to the Syrian government forces after they crossed his “red line” of using chemical weapons. In the end, the US handed the driver’s seat to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who engineered a deal to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons and got to lecture the US on its “dangerous” exceptionalism in a New York Times op-ed piece.

The congressional gridlock, however, has dealt the worst blow to the nation’s international image by far. The absence of US influence at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is a clear symbol of that damage. US allies, who were left with a dominating Chinese leader as Obama dropped out from the summit to address the US government shutdown, will no doubt question the US commitment and capability to follow Obama’s “pivot to Asia” strategy. What’s worse, the Chinese media’s call for a “de-Americanised world” gained gravitas amid the US fiscal chaos.

While the world might not agree with the NSA wiretapping programme and Washington’s conflicting Middle East policies, they are not seen as a systematic failure. In the gridlock, on the other hand, a few US lawmakers from one of the two legislative houses were able to grind the nation to a halt despite opposition from the other legislative house and the executive branch.

When the Tea Party faction of the GOP tried to extort Congress to the defund Obamacare with threats of government shutdown and debt default, it was basically saying the law was so bad it is worth risking a global economic catastrophe to gut it.

Most Republicans are against the law, which they see as a huge entitlement programme that will bankrupt the nation, but the majority of GOP lawmakers aim to undo the law by putting a Republican in the White House in 2016 and then repeal it. Their idea is basically that a popular health care law engineered by the Democrats will lead to their failure in 2016.

The “defunders”, as the tea party hard-liners launching the debt ceiling fight are known, found it imperative to stop Obamacare now before the insurances bought through a marketplace set up by the law kicks in on January 1, 2014. It will be more difficult take away a programme once people start to use it.

In other words, the defunders felt the need to hold a nation hostage to undo a law passed by Congress, upheld by the Supreme Court and which won a referendum in the 2012 presidential election because it was their last chance to kill it before people realise they might actually like it.

It is easy to blame the crisis on the defunders, but the true problem lies in the systematic flaws of US democracy that give a minority of hard-liners the power to stop the whole nation.