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<div class="timestamp">October 23, 2012</div>
<h1>Our Secret Sauce</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN"><span>THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN</span></a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
It was striking how much Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy
came down to two subjects: America and the Middle East. The two actually
provide some instructive contrasts, starting with one that I’ve noted
since the onset of this campaign: the contrast between the high degree
of American pluralism and trust that makes our country work, and the
near total absence of it in the Middle East, the region most vexing us
and most likely to blow up on the next president. Muslims are killing
Muslims across the Middle East and Central Asia today: Sunnis versus
Shiites, Pashtuns versus Pashtuns and Kurds versus Turks. Christians are
not faring well there, either. The absence of pluralism and the
prevalence of “rule or die” politics — either my sect or party is in
power or I’m dead — is the dominant political trend in the Arab-Muslim
region today. Nobody trusts anybody, but it is impossible to build a
modern state or an innovation economy without trust. Meanwhile, here in
America, we are debating whether to replace our first black president —
whose middle name is Hussein and whose grandfather was a Muslim — with a
Mormon! Who does that? Nobody else. That radical pluralism is the
secret of our sauce, and blessedly so. America, take a bow. </p>
<p>
But not for too long. </p>
<p>
We have a very special country, but we have to take care of it, not kick
it around like it’s a football. And we can’t do that if we’re imitating
the Middle East’s rule-or-die politics: my party or scorched earth.
Barack Obama has been far from a perfect president. At times, he has
treated friends and opponents with arrogance or just a stubborn
unwillingness to play the game of politics to co-opt those who needed to
be co-opted (he should have embraced the Bowles-Simpson federal debt
plan) to get legislation passed. No one would confuse Obama for Lyndon
Johnson. But no one would confuse today’s Republican Party for the
G.O.P. of the 1960s or 1970s, either. </p>
<p>
It is impossible to look at the G.O.P.’s behavior in the last four years
— from its unwillingness to consider Obama’s jobs bill, which was
praised by independent economists, to the unwillingness of its
presidential candidates to consider a $1 increase in taxes for $10 of
spending cuts, to the time it spent on sheer lunacy such as questioning
the president’s birth certificate — and not conclude that many in the
party just wanted Obama to fail in the hope that they could pick up the
pieces. Too many Republicans, particularly moderate business types,
don’t want to admit how much their party has been led around of late,
not by traditional conservatives, but by a radical Tea Party base that
has driven decent, smart conservatives — like Bob Bennett of Utah, Bob
Inglis of South Carolina, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Olympia Snowe of
Maine — out of office. </p>
<p>
What I’d say about Obama’s domestic and Middle East policies is that,
given the messes and political constraints he inherited in both arenas,
he did about as well as anyone could. He kept the homeland safe,
prevented us from getting drawn into any sinkholes and killed bad guys.
It is not the stuff of foreign policy legend, but it was not bad. I’d
say the same at home. He stanched the bleeding in the economy and
initiated some smart reforms in education, energy and health — the true
effectiveness of which we will only know in the future. It was not
exactly the New Deal, but considering the deep hole created by the years
of George W. Bush, it also was not a New Depression. A quick turnaround
in either arena was never possible. </p>
<p>
But while that kind of politics got us through the last four years, it
won’t get us through the next four. We cannot have another term of
partisan gridlock. We are heading into a world where the breakdown of
the European supranational state system, combined with the breakdown of
the Arab nation state system, combined with climate change, combined
with a much greater global interdependence, means that we will be more
and more buffeted by problems that are too dangerous to ignore but too
complicated and big to fix alone. And when a country finds itself in
that kind of situation, there is one thing it absolutely must do, and
that is <em>build resiliency</em>. </p>
<p>
We need to weatherproof our house so we can control our destiny and play
the vital stabilizing role the world needs us to play. And that leads
to another difference between us and the Middle East. We don’t know how
to fix their problems anymore. But we do know how to fix <em>our</em>
problems. In the short run, we have to invest in infrastructure,
education and research — the sources of our strength to stimulate growth
— while simultaneously putting in place a credible long-term plan to
cut spending and both raise and reform taxes as our economy improves.
</p>
<p>
Regardless of what they have on their Web sites, neither candidate has
spoken honestly to voters in their speeches or commercials about what
this will take. Hey, it’s election time. What else is new? Well, there
is something new. Just doing as well as our domestic political
constraints will allow will not cut it anymore — not given where the
global economy, the Middle East and climate change are going. Just doing
what the political traffic will bear will not lead us to resiliency. It
will lead us to painful, destabilizing vulnerability. </p>
<p>
We need a whole new traffic pattern. That will require a president who
will dare to challenge the country to do big, hard things together, not
just tack with the winds of public opinion, and it will require an
electorate that is ready to value and demand such leadership. </p>
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