The most noteworthy thing that Barack Obama has done since he became president is to put his stamp of approval on policies that at the end of the presidency of George W. Bush were considered unacceptable by a majority of the American public (and which appalled much of the world). He has thereby joined the large number of his fellow Democratic Party members who, dependent as they are on support from special interest groups, had countersigned them long ago. I am referring to the two things in particular that have gone disastrously wrong, and which Obama had been expected by his activist supporters to try to reverse: American belligerency and the unaccountable power of the crisis-creating apparatus of financial institutions. While after the November election these most undesirable aspects of American participation in the world appeared ready for repair, the trends that made them what they are have now become irreversible. Europeans and Asians ought to take note. Latin Americans have already done so. It is the most significant thing we have learned this past half year in the context of all our future.
     The “give him time!” response from a multitude of those who had faith in Obama has proved to be very damaging, as it throttled

see also the new Sampiemon column on Obama in Moscow

    Much progressive political energy is lost as it is channelled toward narrowly conceived causes, where it may do some good but where much of it is wasted. This was an overwhelming impression I had when attending the Tallberg forum in Sweden the week before last. It was, to be sure, a wonderful occasion to meet some of the roughly 400 people who had come from literally all corners of the world and who – certainly the ones I met – clearly had their hearts in the right place. I do not want to detract from their seriousness and hard work as they try to help alleviate dire conditions of poverty, ecological crisis, and other fairly concrete ills of the world in connection to which human action might make a difference. But would their causes not be better served if at least some of this energy was channelled into efforts to revive countervailing power against the forces that cause the problems of their concern to begin with?
     One of the biggest central notions of the forum is ‘sustainable development’. When listening to the earnest accounts presented at one of the preliminary sessions I suddenly felt a compulsion to comment on it all as an outsider, thinking myself to be eminently qualified by the fact that the term sustainable development had, until then, giving me the jitters. Practically all attention has gone to sustainable methods, while the very things to be developed tend to get a cursory glance and appear to be mostly taken for granted.

    The forced resignation of the leader of Japan's opposition party, Ichiro Ozawa, and the election of Yukio Hatoyama as his succcessor, may appear to outsiders as the proverbial storm in a teacup, but it is more than that: it is directly related to the question whether or not Japan's curse of ‘muddling through’ will be lifted after the forthcoming elections. Especially now that it has been demonstrated, once again, that the immune system of Japan's political world is still capable of keeping down those who might upset the status quo.
     The status quo is treasured by Japan's administrative bureaucracy, of which the editors of the big newspapers, the managers of the industrial federations, as well as those of the financial institutions and much of big industry also form a part. The absence of waves is a sacred condition. It prevents what is known here as "a confused situation" – disturbance of the social order that the administrators fear most. The Japanese public as a whole is less addicted to the status quo. And when I came back to Japan in the beginning of this year my first conversations

    Give the man time! A new head of government cannot do everything at once! He has only had three months. These are the responses that one is likely to get when expressing doubts about the effectiveness of Obama's policies when measured against the high expectations and overwhelming feelings of urgency that something dramatic should be done. Impatience is frequently interpreted as following from insufficient understanding about the set of circumstances that this new president inherited, circumstances that could hardly be worse in the imagination of most sympathisers.
    What Obama has been expected to do comes down to a task for which daunting is too weak an adjective, one requiring herculean powers. And of course that takes time. All true. But by not being critical, by not scrutinising his early decisions about the people with whom he wants to work, by not strongly questioning how these people interpret the jobs they have been asked to do; by not being critical of Obama in his early days, we may unwittingly be adding to the many disadvantages that surround him.
     When in political life something very big must be undertaken, the question of competence on the part of those who undertake it gains supreme importance.

    The prevailing intellectual climate is not friendly to the notion that much of the time we do not know what we are doing, in the sense of producing results that diverge widely from what in all sanity we would have wanted to produce. Intellectually we have come a far way from remote ancestors who thought they could make sense of their reality by invoking "fate" or capricious gods who derived pleasure from playing with humanity. Enlightened thought has us acting as conscious agents.
     All varieties of liberalism - not the "leftism" of American political understanding, but the legacy of Locke, Hume, and John Stuart Mill - hold high the concepts of "agency" and "choice". Especially in the United States these are taken for granted. American social science is steeped in them. Political thought on the most popular level treats them as given. The way in which our society is put together and how it works is the outcome of collective choice, our lives are lived as directed by conscious human agency; the one assumption contains, of course, the other.

    There could hardly be a greater difference between the United States and Japan than when their heads of government change. The American president decapitates, as it were, the government entities staffed by career officials and brings in a double layer of new appointees who, he hopes, will do his bidding. The new Japanese prime minister must be painstakingly heedful of balancing factional interests of the ruling party as he selects members of a cabinet, and those newly chosen top politicians are subsequently treated as temporary visitors in the ministries they ostensibly head. If these Japanese politicians are lucky, and survive more than one of the regular cabinet reshuffles, the top bureaucrats who work theoretically underneath them may perhaps help realize a small pet project that will be associated with their name. In the context of the ubiquitous thorny question of how much politicians should listen to bureaucrats or bureaucrats should be guided by elected representatives, the balance between the two has in both countries swung to extreme and opposite ends.
     But Japan and the United States have still something in common. Something that has suddenly become highly relevant in the United States. Among American government entities, there are a couple of exceptions to the norm of presidential supervision.