US needs reality check

With the world's most dynamic economy and peerless military, "America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world," US President Barack Obama declared at the US Military Academy at West Point.

He could have presented a much longer list of symbols of American dominance - Apple, Google, Amazon, and surely the National Security Agency, whose eavesdropping is literally omnipresent in the increasingly connected world.

As it has been for the past century, the United States will remain indispensable "for the century to come".

So Obama showed his bottom line: "America must always lead on the world stage." And the question "is not whether America will lead", but how it will lead.

The answer to that is something the entire world wants to know.

Meant apparently to fend off criticism about his approach to global problems being weak or ineffective, the sweeping vision of US foreign policy he laid out appeared more defensive than enlightening.

The real loophole in the policy statement is far bigger than the omission of such topics as the "pivot" to the Asia-Pacific.

Obama was correct in observing that some of America's "most costly mistakes" since World War II derived from its "willingness to rush into military adventures". Both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are cases in point. So he was at least a little wiser than his trigger-happy immediate predecessor in concluding that not "every problem has a military solution", that military action "cannot be the only - or even primary - component" of US leadership in every instance, and that America should broaden its tools "to include diplomacy".

In a clear break from US policies in the recent past, Obama highlighted "collective action", coalition building, and "willingness to work through multilateral channels". He even vowed to do more to enhance such multilateral international organizations as the United Nations.

Such words, if faithfully put into deeds, may considerably upgrade US leadership. Yet, it will prove extremely difficult because Americans are simply too accustomed to seeing the world as they believe it should be rather than as it actually is.

In both the East and South China seas, for instance, preoccupation with protection of its treaty allies has prevented the Obama administration from seeing the obvious truths at the roots of the tensions there.

Biased perceptions of "China's economic rise and military reach", as were evident in Obama's speech, only enlarge the trust deficit between Beijing and Washington. Which in turn undermines the US' moral integrity as global leader.