I wanted this morning to commemorate and laud the Obama administration's decision to hold its first State Dinner in honor of the nation of India, as represented by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur.
The symbolism of this honor is plain, and I hope goes to the heart of Obama's geopolitical thinking. India and the United States are the world's two most populous pluralistic democracies. Between us, we account for almost 1.5 billion people, and all of us through our mutual constitutions are guaranteed the right to vote for our parliamentary and executive leadership. The successful and orderly self-governance by over 1 billion Indians lays down -- at a fundamental level --a critical standard for human affairs in the 21st century. It is one we should all recognize, embrace and fortify. India is saying through its example that our numerous and growing species can rely going forward on the freely expressed judgment and electoral participation of a knowledgeable citizenry.
There is another model of governance in ascendance today that is openly resisting this notion, that of the People's Republic of China.
I think we are currently engaged in an ideological struggle every bit as portentous as US-Soviet Cold War. The Soviet Union's failure was a moral one, in that it denied democratic freedoms to its citizens and those living in satellite nations under its military yoke. But its failure was precipitated by the compounded inferiorities of its command-and-control economic model. Today, the Chinese Communist Party has amended the tenets of communist centralization with notable success -- furiously engaging in capital creation and productivity expansion -- but has not recognized the moral principles of democratic governance. In so doing, it is waging an ideological battle that gets to the core of the human condition in this century: is it our destiny as individuals to be consumers, or citizens?
The geopolitical struggle coming in sharp relief today is between democratic and undemocratic capitalisms. However, the struggle is not just geopolitical, but also internal. Innumerable policies of our own government are burdened by the influence of multi-nationalist corporate capital indifferent to the principle of political self-expression. We have surrendered much economic production to a Chinese economic model that does not recognize the right to unionize. We are surrendering future productive opportunities in the critical non-carbon-based energy sector to a nation that is heavily subsidizing the same. And we have been financing foreign adventures of dubious value by indebting ourselves to a government that daily -- in large ways and small -- resists as a matter of principle democratic governance, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. All this is taking place as we scramble for any meaningful, scalable productivity, and as the means of acquiring higher education and training slip from the grasp of our youth. This has also taken place as we have subverted many of our own core constitutional values in reaction to 9/11, and failed to bring the perpetrators of these high crimes to justice.
While only symbolic, the Obama administration's invitation to India to attend its first state dinner recognizes our duty to democratic governance comes first, that our closest allies will be those who practice it, and that the moral place of regulated capitalism is to serve and strengthen it. By casting our lot with India, we hue more closely to our founding documents than we ever could with the Chinese government as presently constituted. Fostering the growth and stability of a democratic India, and forging multinational initiatives in alliance with them, must be a cornerstone of American internationalism.
We engage today with China from a position of weakness. The initiative of Nixon and Kissinger to triangulate the geopolitical ambitions of the Soviet Union and China has been inoperable now for an entire generation. Two new geopolitical necessities now have emerged -- to demonstrate that democratic governance can better harness the tools of capitalism in the service of human progress, individual dignity and ecological stability than undemocratic governance. And to show that democracy can, in fact, resist subordination to capitalism when there is a contemporaneous economic model that embraces democracy's subordination. (A third, to the extent we can do so, is to encourage, finance, equip and advocate on behalf of the Chinese democratic diaspora.)
The fact is, we don't yet know whether we will rise to these challenges. A robust US-Indian alliance will help serve notice that we intend to find out.