Sharing Power and Learning Cooperation in a New Global Reality
The reality of a new world in which the United States is no longer the dominant superpower, in which it must share economic power -- the new military might -- with other nations including perhaps some for which we have felt only disdain and even loathing is now crystal clear if it hasn't dawned on your consciousness before now. In the past few days, two major news events have occurred to clarify and epitomize this new order for me.First, the European Union has threatened to derail Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellisons bewildering attempt to purchase Sun Microsystems. Prior to the formation of the EU, such a thing would have been mostly unthinkable by any single European nation or group thereof, and infeasible of execution in any case. But the European standard of antitrust is what America's should be. Where we focus on damage to competition, the EU focuses on "consumer harm." And there's very little doubt in anyone's mind that if Oracle owns Sun, the days of MySQL as a powerful alternative to Oracle DB are numbered, and the number is damn small. Our authorities don't get open source, don't understand the problem here and exercise their power in an economy which doesn't value the consumer. Europe is essentially saying, "We have better ideas and we can stop this as well." Second, President Obama finds himself going to China this week not as the leader of the most powerful nation in the free world visiting a backward nation and lecturing them on civil rights as have all of his predecessors but rather as a major debtor visiting his primary banker. The dynamics of that relationship have changed to a point where we will have to satisfy our Asian financiers that we understand how to run our economy well enough to continue to be able to pay back our debt to them. (Of course, my business partner Chipp Walters reminds me of the old adage: If you owe the bank $20,000, they have you where they want you. If you owe the bank $20 million, you have them right where you want them.) It is increasingly a world of cultural pluralism and cooperation, which I believe ultimately leads more directly to world peace but which will be far more difficult a pill for America to swallow than most of us yet realize.
