Chavez and Ahmadinejad, though, share in common the fact that both are where they are now because they won genuinely democratic elections. Both indeed are at present among the most popular national leaders in the world.As has been observed, perhaps the worst mistake anyone can make is to wish for something too badly. The risk they run is that they may get it.One wish that's widely held, including by quite a number of Canadians, is that the American empire should head off into the sunset or, at the very least, stop trying to make everyone else do things its way.Another wish, this one held by a lot of Americans, is that the world should become a much more democratic place. To President George W. Bush, democracy has become a cure-all to terrorism.In different ways, both grand wishes are being fulfilled. The consequence, as might have been predicted, is a whole new set of problems that are not at all necessarily any better than their predecessors.First, the state of the American empire. It's still got an abundance of hard power (all those cruise missiles as well as its awesome high-tech inventiveness) and lots of soft power (while great numbers of Muslims hate America, far, far, more of them want to go there than to any other country, including their own). But the tiredness of Americans, the ebbing away of their self-confidence and, most blessed of all, the decline in their triumphalism, are all increasingly plain. As is, no less so, the extent to which America's financial indebtedness makes it economically vulnerable.All a plus. Immediately afterward comes the minus. The less imperialist the U.S. becomes, the more imperialist other countries will become. It's a rule of nature: The pack always has to have a leader.China is an obvious eventual rival. It may one day establish "a new global paradigm."That's exactly the problem. The author of that flattering comment about China was Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's brutal and incompetent dictator. As goes Mugabe, so go many like him in Africa. The Sudanese government's refusal to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force that might stop the genocide in its Darfur region is only possible because of China's threat to use its Security Council veto; the cause of China's support for Khartoum is all the Sudanese oil flowing to China.In Southeast Asia, China is fast gaining diplomatic influence by way of low-interest loans to countries like Laos, Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia. A particular attraction of these loans is that, unlike ones from the World Bank, they carry no rules about health and safety and environmental standards, and penalties for corruption.Another comer is Iran. Articles now routinely describe it as a "Middle Eastern superpower." The president of this would-be superpower denies the Holocaust, says Israel should be wiped off the map and is defying the UN over its nuclear program.Another comer is Venezuela, or more exactly its president, Hugo Chavez. At last weekend's Summit of the (116) Non-Aligned Nations in Havana, Chavez forged an anti-American alliance with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Among others thumping the same anti-American drum at the summit were North Korea, Sudan and Cuba. It's a club any dictator can join.Democracy thus has for its great advocate Bush the great disadvantage of giving the people what they want, regardless of what it may be that the U.S. might think they should want. As with Palestine's Islamist Hamas government. While democracy is heightening the confrontation, it may yet also temper it. In two years' time, the U.S. will elect a new president. The next president's most important attribute is very likely to be that she or he is not Bush.Without Bush as president, the U.S. is bound to look and sound a lot less imperialist. Without a Bush to beat up on, leaders like Chavez and Ahmadinejad will have to look for something other than anti-Americanism to make their names by.So the world thereafter will become a safer place? Not necessarily. It will become a place where there's more room for China to extend its influence and values, and Russia also, and Iran. The world, that's to say, will go on turning.
Richard Gwyn's column appears every Tuesday. gwynR@sympatico.ca.