‘Foreign Policy’ magazine’s Winners and Losers of 2009

Foreign Policy magazine, the authoritative, Washington Post-owned “rag of the wonks,” has once again named the biggest international winners and losers of the year.

Not surprisingly, the Middle East is The Biggest Loser – or losers, since FP picked the Israelis and Palestinians to share this honor (truly an ironic pairing, as they share almost nothing else:)

Sadly, these folks have ended up on this list so often … that they should be retired from future consideration. Once again hope and hype has been followed by a chilling dose of reality, an opaque “peace process,” and in the end by the fact that you can’t cut a deal between two groups when one of them isn’t quite organized to either represent their views effectively or implement any deals that actually get done. While the world wants to blame it on the Israelis, the thing that slammed the break on this process toward the end of 2009 was the fact that the Palestinians couldn’t get their act together.

credit: PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP/Getty Images

A big chunk of credit for getting his region named Biggest Loser goes to one of FP’s biggest winners of 2009 – Israeli’s right-wing hawk of a Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, known as Bibi:

Admit it; you thought he would be disaster. But here’s the reality, he engineered the most remarkable bit of political kung fu in Israeli history. All he did was turn Obama’s initial realist-induced skepticism into the first time ever that an Israeli government benefited by having the United States seemingly turn against it…. Every time Obama or his team would lecture against a Netanyahu position, it would inadvertently help the sly Israeli PM.

Maybe to keep its jet-lagged readers awake, FP usually sprinkles in some tabloid losers, this year naming Kanye West and heads-in-the-sand golf journalists (who ignored the Tiger Woods sex story) along with the U.S. dollar, the G8, American Capitalism, the E.U. – and it seems, much of what used to make up a stable Western economic establishment.

Winners: U.S. President Barack Obama, the newest Nobel Laureate, was named the Biggest Winner of 2009. His new modus operandi, says FP, is pragmatism: “When the economy is circling the drain and existential threats are everywhere around you, posturing and slogans are seen for the window-dressing they are. Isn’t it interesting that a U.S. president primarily known for his rhetorical gifts is crafting a presidency in which words are really secondary and everything is about the deal. (Arguably, in some cases, to a fault.)”

I doubt Obama will be on this list in 2010 unless his dealmaking persuades the Biggest Losers to come to the negotiating table and get the MidEast peace process restarted.

Some of the other winners bode rather badly for the U.S.’s future: Chimerica (we borrow from the Chinese to pay for everything,)  the Taliban, the G20 (a vehicle for China, India, and Brazil,) the International Monetary Fund, and the Superclass as personified by Goldman Sachs. (The latter not surprising as this list was compiled by David Rothkopf, author of The Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.)

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