Does the Swamp still matter?

Please forgive my title this week; as an old editor once told me, whenever you have a headline with a question mark the answer is usually obvious. Yes, of course what happens in Washington and in the US at large still matters tremendously in the global economy and geopolitics. But I raise the topic, because as I mention in my latest column, I had the pleasure of spending a chunk of last week in Istanbul on a city break with my daughter. News of all things impeachment and Trump-related seemed very far away there, which was a great pleasure. This is not to say that Turkish newspapers are a good way to keep up with the wider world — they seemed ever more sanitised by government censors. But the fact that the US was less important conversationally than during my past visits to Turkey — and China more so — is the topic of both my column and this note.

For starters, the whole tourism industry in Istanbul seemed increasingly geared up to cater to the Chinese as opposed to just Americans (whose visits tailed off in part due to terrorism) or the Europeans. This is, of course, the case in many places now. I was in Venice briefly this time last year and noticed that many of the higher-end boutiques had sales staff that spoke Mandarin. Also, we kept getting great deals — hotel upgrades, short lines at top attractions, easy reservations in usually hard to book restaurants — because the Chinese tourists that had been expected during the Chinese new year period didn’t arrive, either because of coronavirus, or because they were already cutting back on travel (Chinese household consumption had weakened significantly as a driver of economic growth even before the health crisis).

Everyone in high-end tourism in Istanbul still speaks at least basic English. But as in so many emerging markets, there’s also now a thriving domestic luxury economy. At my favourite jewellery boutique, Sevan Bicakci, most of the other clients were Turkish or tourists from the Gulf. When I took my daughter to eat in a fish restaurant in my grandparents’ old neighbourhood of Besiktas, a formerly working-class area that has now become impossibly cool, I didn’t spot a single westerner. But despite the economic turmoil in the country, there were plenty of young Turks drinking expensive cocktails in trendy bars on the street where my grandmother used to throw down a bucket from the window to haul up the fresh milk she’d buy from a passing peddler.

This is the story of gentrification and globalisation, and it’s really no surprise. Emerging markets have emerged and we’ve been in the post-American world for some time now. But it struck me that whatever happens in the Swamp, whoever wins in 2020, Americans are slowly but surely going to have to cope with their diminishing importance in the world at large. And I don’t think they have any idea how to do it (Ed, any lessons there from Britain’s colonial legacy?). They remain typically naive about the wider world — I was shocked by how many friends in New York asked if it was safe to travel in Istanbul (well, yes, assuming you are there to eat baklava and buy gold rather than be a working journalist or human rights activist).

The swing away from the US, and towards China, in so many places is really just a question of numbers. Even amid a slowdown, China made up roughly a third of the growth in the world’s gross domestic product last year, more than the US, Europe and Japan combined. The Turks I spoke to were more interested in what was happening in the Middle Kingdom than the US (that admittedly had to do in part with coronavirus, but still….). They were also far more preoccupied with their own political and economic milieu than with ours (despite President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s loss of Istanbul, there were still plenty of nationalistic propaganda posters around; I also passed a shop front with a poster of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk peeking out from behind in a curtain in a way that I found fascinatingly oblique — was he ironic? Or watchful?).

Donald Trump just wasn’t really a topic. And I can’t really say I minded.

Recommended reading

• Don’t miss George Soros laying down the gauntlet against Facebook in this New York Times op-ed. 
• In the FT, I enjoyed Richard Waters’ take on lessons from the Jeff Bezos phone hack. I’m also keeping close track of our coronavirus live blog.
• And I was pleasantly surprised to see The Wall Street Journal give Sheila Bair column inches to lay out the Republican case for Elizabeth Warren.

Edward Luce responds

I usually shy away from making comparisons between post-imperial Britain and a declining US because there are such big differences. The most important one is that the US will never decline to the extent of Britain. America is the third largest country in the world by population and has more natural resources than the first two (China and India) combined. It will always be among the leading global powers. Second, we had better pray that the US does what it takes to make use of that position as its relative power declines further. 

Britain had it relatively easy — it could simply pass the baton to the US, which was like-minded enough to soften the UK’s relative decline and even give London a prized seat on its global steering committee. America has no America to pass its power on to. The key objective for the US is to cultivate alliances, promote institutions of global governance and networks of co-operation, and hope these are enough to bind China into a global set of rules. Unfortunately Trump is taking America in the opposite direction. It is hard to overstate how myopic and counter-productive that is. America First is America Alone. 

Source: Economy - ft.com