Por muito que os líricos lusos desdenhem sempre do "economês", seria bom que o percebessem. Convém não ver só o que está à mostra, mas o fundo do prato, sem nos deixarmos ficar na literatura, por mais badalados sejam os livros que por revoadas fazem as modas dos escaparates, fazendo por conhecer a fábrica da realidade.
O que mais aprecio nos britânicos é que para lá da arte dos subententidos que tanto gostam usar na ficção, no jornalismo discorrem a direito e sem peias. Digo isto sem tomar partido por esta visão. Mas gosto que me expliquem o conjunto para ver se percebo alguma coisa.
«Xi Jinping’s crackdown on China’s entrepreneurial class, prioritising the state’s continued authority over the forces that have helped power the country’s growth, strongly suggests that viable alternatives to the US are still a very long way off. Culturally, economically, and technologically, America remains a formidable force on the world stage, with repeatedly proven powers of regeneration just when everything seems lost. Politically, the US appears paralysed and divided, even broken, but America’s great advantage – its ability to attract the brightest and best of the world’s human capital – remains undimmed. Few with any choice in the matter are going to opt for Beijing over San Francisco.
Two dud presidents in a row, both apparently incapable of providing credible leadership – first Trump and now the clueless Biden – won’t fundamentally change that calculation.
Rewind to the 1970s, and we find similar narratives as those seen today on the inevitability of American decline. The decade began with the upheaval of the “Nixon shock”, the deliberate destruction 50 years ago this week of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that had ruled since the end of the second world war. The whole construct depended both on US policing and on dollar convertibility into gold, and therefore seemed to symbolise America’s dominant position in the global monetary system. At the time, Nixon’s act of apparent vandalism was widely decried as an abdication of the US’s international obligations, and therefore the end of US economic hegemony.
As it turned out, it was neither. By shutting the so-called “gold window” Nixon was merely recognising that a bit like the euro today, maintaining a system of fixed exchange rates that worked for all had become all but impossible, that it was creating unsustainable distortions in trade and capital flows, and that by denying the natural market adjustment mechanism of free floating exchange rates, it was dividing nations one from another rather than unifying them as intended.
Far from destroying dollar hegemony, Nixon’s decision eventually came to reinforce it, laying the foundations for today’s international monetary system where again the dollar reigns supreme, but in less obvious, subtler form.»
[...]
«Two years after the “Nixon shock” came the oil embargo and then in rapid succession, the “fall of Saigon”, marking the end of American involvement in Vietnam. If there is a sense of déjà vu in today’s events, that’s because they have indeed only too painfully happened before. The Iranian hostage crisis under Jimmy Carter topped off a humiliating decade of American failure, and seemed to seal the nation’s fate as a declining power.
Yet it was perhaps the wake-up call that the US needed. Rebooted, the economy was soon to roar back in reinvigorated form. A similar economic and political renaissance was to sweep Britain. It didn’t stop there. By the end of the 1980s, we had had the fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed triumph of Western, democratic capitalism over communism. So utterly vindicated and supreme did the American model seem that Francis Fukuyama declared it “the end of history”, which only goes to show how mistaken contemporary geopolitical analysis frequently is. There is never an end to history, only a perpetual ebbing and flowing of political tides and narratives.»
