M.D. Nalapat
Beijing, China —
Judging by the boost given to exports from China and the flow of technology to
that country from 1993 to 2000, when Bill Clinton was president of the United
States, it is small wonder that even low-income ethnic Chinese in San Francisco
and New York felt compelled to contribute to Hillary Clinton's 2008
presidential election campaign.
Although
Clinton, now U.S. secretary of state, makes the obligatory warm references to
the other giant of Asia, India, these seem to be motivated less by conviction
than by awareness of the muscular Indian-American lobby in Washington, D.C.
As the junior
senator from New York, Clinton led the effort to get India to concede to China
a nuclear monopoly in Asia, by giving up its own weapons-development program.
She was visibly unhelpful in promoting a policy of closer defense and
technology cooperation with India, besides fiercely opposing the India-U.S.
nuclear agreement, along with the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.
The Clintons
have never hidden their affinity for Europeanist policy wonks such as Strobe
Talbott or Richard Holbrook, who regard only the European countries as
"natural partners" of the United States. They are, of course, wrong.
The United
States is not a European country transplanted in North America, but a
quadricontinental power that has elements of Europe, Asia, Africa and South
America in its cultural DNA. Indeed, such heterogeneity is the reason why
"U.S. culture" – a pair of words that many regard as an oxymoron –
has had the same powerful impact on the world as the English language did
during the 19th-century heyday of the British Empire.
