Obama: World Divider? (Guardian, UK)

The 47th president was sworn in on an unseasonably warm January day. President Gloria Evangelista, the first Hispanic and second woman president of the United States, took the oath on a Spanish-language bible held by her husband, Victor Chu. The controversy about Chu's lucrative lobbying contracts for Chinese companies was temporarily forgotten. Former president Barack Obama, his hair white since the traumatic last months of his second term in office, stood watching, sandwiched between his Republican predecessor, George Bush, and successor, Kitty McFarlane. The strange weather on this 20 January 2025 was attributed by many to the effects of global warming, which the Obama administration had vainly struggled to slow. In her inaugural speech, delivered partly in English and partly in Spanish, president Evangelista paid fulsome tribute to the Chinese-American strategic partnership, known colloquially as the G2.

So much has been said to locate Obama's "historic" (oh weary moniker) inauguration day in the long sweep of American history, but we should also view it in the perspective of a probable future. According to the latest projection from the United States' own National Intelligence Council, "by 2025, the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power continuing to narrow between developed and developing countries". This does not require that America will decline; only that others continue to rise. There was a hint almost of melancholy defiance in Obama's inaugural rallying cry: "We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on earth. We remain ..."

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