For years the hackneyed joke about Brazil was that it was the country of tomorrow and always would be. But almost a decade ago, in the wake of the reforms of the Cardoso administration, and then thanks to the remarkable presidential tenure of Luiz Inacio "Lula" Da Silva and the industry and enterprise of the Brazilian people, the joke was overtaken by events. As investors, CEOs, journalists and most of the world's leading powers have recognized, Brazil has arrived.

While U.S. leaders like Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama have acknowledged the change, many in the U.S. policy community remained holdouts or skeptics. Yes, Brazil was on the rise they said, but they always found a way to qualify their views, to establish one criteria or another that Brazil would have to meet before it was finally seen as a "first-class power." While Asia specialists embraced the rise of China and India and quickly began to remake policy based on changing power relationships, Latin specialists clung to the past, to old formulations and prejudices.

In the eyes of these living museum pieces of Washington's small, inbred Latin American affairs community, Brazil might be the country of tomorrow, it might even be the country of later on today, but we would be sticking with the policies of yesterday until further notice.

Today, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has issued a new task force report on U.S.-Brazil relations that goes a long way toward breaking with the past by recommending the U.S. move toward a new policy stance with regard to Brazil.  The central point of the report is that Brazil must be liberated from the Latin policy barrio and viewed as one of the most important global powers of today and of the century ahead. 

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The United States seem to be swimming in economic initiatives that are going to go nowhere. But are we really surprised? After all, as in the case of U.S. efforts with regard to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Israel and the Palestinians, we also seem to be swimming in foreign-policy initiatives that are very unlikely to produce much (positive) change to the status quo.

But seriously, if the United States is going to devote our efforts to empty symbolism and hollow gestures, couldn't we focus on some that were leavened by a little nobility, creativity or boldness? If we are going to float proposals that are doomed to failure or ineffectiveness, couldn't we float better proposals?

Let's take the four big economic initiatives making headlines this week.

The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement
We were greeted this morning with the unsurprising news that the efforts by U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and his Korean counterparts to hammer out a new and improved version of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade deal had foundered on beef and automobile issues. I lead with this news because it is one of those rare proposals that actually have the opportunity to fail twice -- in addition to this week's setback, it could also fail in the negotiating phase. That's not very likely (the White House promises a deal "within weeks"). But even if the deal is reached, the likelihood that a free trade deal is going to make it through the U.S. Congress any time soon seems slim.

While conventional wisdom has it that Republicans are warmer to free trade than Democrats, the reality is that centrists are warmer to trade. The real opposition lies in the growing right and left wings in each party. A story in today's New York Times highlighted a Pew poll that 44 percent of Americans feel free trade deals have been bad for the country, while only 35 percent feel they have been beneficial. While some deals are viewed more favorably, others -- like deals with China or Korea, countries viewed with more unease -- are not. The article also notes that, "Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who were aligned with the Tea Party movement had a particularly negative view of the impact of free trade agreements." In the last election cycle something like 4 out of 10 voters identified themselves with the Tea Party or Tea Party candidates -- a group that now has 110 members of Congress.

With the Blue Dogs slaughtered in the last election, the power in Democratic caucus has also shifted solidly to the left; between that fact and the growing importance of unions as 2012 nears, the idea that a trade deal might get approved anytime soon should provoke some skepticism.

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We are not in Kansas anymore. More importantly, Kansas is not even where it once was.

Once upon a time and in the minds of most living Americans, Kansas was more than just a synonym or a metaphor for America's heartland, it was the actual geographic mid-point of the United States. You could debate whether the exact location deserving of this honor was closer to Lebanon or Grenola, but at the end of the day, all would agree that by virtue of the power and position of the United States, somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere was the center of the world.

No more. America may be the richest and most powerful nation on earth. But the world's economic center of gravity is shifting away from Kansas much more rapidly than anyone had any reason to expect it would even a decade or so ago. (I know this for a fact -- as a senior economic official in the Clinton Administration who helped put together and run the first U.S. inter-agency effort focused on the world's largest emerging markets, I remember how officials would smile patronizingly and roll their eyes, "Yes, China, India, Brazil, yes... important, but not in our lifetimes.")

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This weekend the Obama Administration will send a team to China headed by the somewhat unlikely duo of Larry Summers, head of the National Economic Council, and Tom Donilon, deputy national security advisor. The purpose is to send a clear message that the U.S. is approaching its relations with China strategically, with a view that integrates the full range of economic and security concerns.

While such trips are old hat for Summers, the journey represents a bit of a change of pace for Donilon, the inside guy who is credited with having done a great job making sure the policy process trains have been running on time within the National Security Council. Some in Washington are buzzing that this is a profile- and skill-raising trip intended to make Donilon a better candidate to replace National Security Advisor James L. Jones should Jones decide to depart, as many expect he will. Others grumble that the trip represents precisely the kind of "operational" role for the NSC and NEC that many cabinet departments have long thought should be out of bounds for White House policy coordinators.

But beyond the Washington gossip the trip has caused, the juxtaposition of economic and security concerns offers an illustration of an often over-looked fact -- the centrality of economic issues to current U.S. national security concerns. In China, the tricky calculus is fostering collaboration on security issues from North Korea to Iran in the face of political pressure back home to press Beijing harder on issues like currency valuation and unfair competitive practices (especially those associated with pressuring foreign firms to transfer proprietary technologies).

The U.S. has never been especially effective at coordinating its multiple interests in China so that pressure in one policy area produces progress in another -- or even simply avoids causing setbacks. So this trip, in concept at least, represents a step in the right direction -- at least if Congress doesn't undercut the administration's efforts by, for example, drafting its own legislation on currency issues.

But China is just one of a host of current hotspots where Summers, Geithner, and the international economic team are playing a central role on national security issues.

For example, in Afghanistan, the story of the week turns on the amazingly brazen behavior of the Karzai gang in trying to pressure the United States into bailing out a clearly corrupt and mismanaged bank in which President Hamid Karzai's brother, Mahmood Karzai, is the third largest shareholder. Mahmood has publicly called for a bailout even though his affiliation with a bank through which U.S. funds flow to Afghan security forces compromises both him and the president. Both remain unabashed, however, behaving like the proverbial kids who murder their parents and seek the mercy of the court on the grounds that they are now orphans. So the United States is in a pickle: Step in and support the Afghan kleptocracy and its culture of corruption or stand on principle (and law), and run the risk that the bank falters. It's not a situation that General David Petraeus can handle, but how the economic team manages it will have direct ramifications for him.

In the same way, some of the most sensitive concerns regarding Pakistan turn on economic policy. Will the Zardari government pump too much cash into the economy to deal with the aftereffects of the devastating flooding, and risk a major inflationary episode? Or will it introduce price controls and a set of micro economic measures that, if mismanaged, could produce social tensions or even rioting? The wrong mix of policies could plunge the already fractured and battered country into political turmoil and perhaps the reintroduction of military rule.

In talks with the Israelis and the Palestinians, many of the core concerns will turn on how to improve the economic conditions for the Palestinian people. If they can get past initial hurdles, they will, of course, ultimately have to move to a state structure that will enable organic economic growth in a Palestinian state, actually fostering job and wealth creation for people who have lived in an economic no man's land for too long.

In North Korea, it is reported that the administration, conducting high level meetings on the subject this week, is seeking to explore "engagement." In the case of the economically isolated and struggling North, that inevitably will mean economic packages in exchange for gradual normalization of relations or reductions of threats.  At the same time, this week, the administration widened sanctions intended to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.

In Iran, the core initiative at the moment is making targeted economic sanctions work. In Iraq, the issue is fostering economic growth to help "purchase" social stability. The list goes on. It is clear that wherever the stakes are highest for the United States in the world, even as military and diplomatic initiatives garner most of the attention, behind the scenes much of the most critical work is being undertaken by international economic officials.

It is interesting to note in this respect that the responsibility for conceiving and coordinating most of these activities lies in the White House to a much greater degree than it does with military or diplomatic initiatives. The White House team on these issues is excellent. But in the end, these functions are so fundamental that the real leadership capabilities need to be cultivated elsewhere.

The economic team at the State Department could and should play a greater role in this respect; Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Robert Hormats is a talented and experienced official. As I have written before, State also could and should develop a dramatically enhanced capability when it comes to emergency economic intervention -- pre- or post-crisis. And all the other economic agencies need to be prepared to collaborate on this, not on an ad hoc basis but through a permanent program promoting cross-training and what the military might call inter-operability. Call it an economic rapid response capability -- or call them economic green berets.

We need people we can drop into critical situations and help manage them with an eye to our security and political needs rather than traditional purely economic metrics. That's a critical role for which development officials are ill-suited, and we still don't really have the fully developed institutional structure we need to support it.

Looking at the issues faced by the United States today, while one can't help but admire much of what is being done, the strategic side of the international economic agenda is such that it warrants some real thought about how and with whom we should be meeting such challenges in the future.

The one blog I read every week is Peter King's "Monday Morning Quarterback" at Sports Illustrated. King aficionados might recognize my weak (if unattributed) shout-outs to him which come in the form of not really worrying so much about the length of any post, covering a variety of subjects, and liberally blending in the pop culture references. They will also recognize that I am not in his league and that the subject about which he writes, football, is significantly more interesting than most of the subjects about which I write.

One of the things he does frequently is offer lists of rapid fire opinions which often come under the rubric of "Ten Things I Think I Think." Consider the following yet another tribute to him ... because that is a much nicer way of thinking of it than concluding I simply stole his title and format. 

1. Jim Jones is coming into his own. He was just what Obama needed this weekend: Solid, thoughtful, and immune to Republican taunts that this administration doesn't get the military.
2. Good as Jones was, frankly, I am surprised General McChrystal has gotten off so easy for his comments last week about why narrowing our objectives in Afghanistan wasn't a good idea. It was totally out of bounds and bordering on insubordination. He is trying to play political hardball with his Commander-in-Chief ... a game he is always going to lose. Jones put it to rest elegantly however, with his pointed comment that gracefully reminded everyone where McChrystal sits in the chain of command.
3. As good and skeptical as the administration seems to be about the advice they are getting on Afghanistan, we seem to be on the verge of once again allowing ourselves to be played on Iran's nuclear program. Teheran creates the illusion of dialogue and simulated openness ... but they are proven liars who have every incentive to have a long-process and with each passing day, less to ultimately play by international rules. (They are Lucy with the football. We are Charlie Brown. When will we learn?)
4. This kerfuffle about Chicago is nonsense. The president went and promoted his home city for a few hours. It's not like he was out of touch. It's not like he didn't use the time to achieve other things.  Imagine the press if he hadn't gone and the results were what they were. A non-story.
5. I am from New Jersey. I hate the Washington Redskins. I love that they are condemned to wander aimlessly through the Swamps of Snyder testing the limits of their own mediocrity. But their lousiness only makes it a greater insult to Native Americans that the team continues to cling to a name that is a repulsive relic, an ethnic slur that would not be tolerated if the group being insulted were more politically powerful. Enough. Change the name.
6. Rumor has it the administration is -- at the highest levels -- trying to figure out a way to get the Panama and Colombia trade deals done. That's good news. To the extent it is the only trade liberalization that gets done on Ron Kirk's watch, that would be a bad thing. Remember folks, these are measly little deals.  Do them...but let's not buy into some twisted logic that argues that if you do them it will excuse a raft of protectionist measures (Chinese tires, anyone?) as counterpoint in a "balanced" policy.
7. Speaking of balance: The problem with U.S. foreign policy is that more often than not the true Secretary of State of the United States is yesterday's newspaper. That's what determines what today's policy will be. We achieve balance in complex relationships through cyclical inconsistency. Slam China on tires ... tiptoe around them on Tibet ... hope that gives you some room to make nice with Taiwan on arms transfers. Too often the countervailing measures are out of whack in terms of real importance to us or to them. 
8. The Times has a piece today headlined "The G.O.P. Campaign Message in a Word: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs." While it might be argued that's three words, it's right on point. This is what campaign 2010 will be about, especially with growing certainty that the unemployment rate will pass 10 percent. But I worry we are missing a bigger problem: the jobless recovery. Who's to say the six million jobs we lost come back or come back fast enough to keep up with demand for work? Look at the auto industry: rapid shift of well known brands to China, India and Korea. New brands rising. Same story elsewhere. I think we need to prepare for a future that is actually rather different from the past.
9. The Pew Research Center releases a study today saying that most of coverage of the economic downturn focused on problems on Wall Street and government issues and that how average folks were hit got short shrift. Hope they didn't spend too much money on the study ... because as worthy as the intent may be and as important as the message is, we already knew that, right?
10. I can't tell whether the picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohammed El Baradei on the cover of today's Wall Street Journal struck me because it reminded me of Wallace Shawn and Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride or because I think it may end up being used as a model for the little plastic statuettes to be used on wedding cakes for gay men of a certain age, but it brought welcome absurdity to the front page of the Wall Street Journal (as opposed to the editorial page where it is usually found).

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Like thieves in the night, the administration snuck out an announcement late Friday evening that President Obama had signed an order imposing massive duties on Chinese tires. The United States argued that a "surge" in sales of the Chinese tires indicated unfair pricing and resulted in the loss of 7,000 U.S. jobs. They did so at the urging of unions and despite a lack of support from U.S. tire manufacturers, many of which are already producing tires in China. Naturally, the Chinese erupted with cries of "rampant protectionism" and introduced their own twist on giving the United States the bird with threats of retaliation against U.S. poultry imports. Vehicles may also be targeted.

Why you might ask would they do it late on a Friday evening, after newspapers and evening news shows had seen their deadlines pass? And more saliently, why might the United States do this, in the first place? 

Of course, the first question is easy. The Obama administration was trying to bury the story. You can hardly blame them. It's not pretty. It's pure politics. I'm all for using trade laws to ensure fair trade. But, the U.S. case here is weak and its timing is appalling.

Which in turn gets us to the second question.

Just one day earlier Russia's announcement of its desire not to impose sanctions on Iran in an effort to restrain its nuclear arms ambitions had U.S. officials scrambling for plan B. One very senior official mentioned to me this would mean an intensified effort to reach out to the Chinese. Eight hours later we imposed these duties on them. Now I understand that the secret to a successful "partnership" with the Chinese is the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time -- or more accurately to walk together while occasionally smacking each other around the head and face. But still, a little thoughtful coordination might be nice. 

Given the central importance of China on Iran, of China on North Korea, of China on the global economic recovery, of China on climate and given the weakness of the case on tires and the generally lousy message it sends regarding our stance on trade (the Obama team's first big trade move is clearly a protectionist one), couldn't this have been tabled? Handled another way?

It should have been, of course. But it wasn't for two reasons. One is that the administration needs the unions to get out there and provide grass roots support on the health care bill. That's been commented on by others and is certainly an important piece of explaining this move which, at best, can be described as ill-timed and ill-considered.

But there is another undercurrent here. This was just one of several moves last week that suggest that the Obama administration sees another threat that is more important to its own survival than whatever happens in Iran or on climate or even on health care. What Iranian nukes are to Israel in the way of an existential threat, unemployment rates are to the Democratic majority in Congress in terms of next year's elections. You will see many offensives from this ambitious administration over the next 18 months but the most central from a political point of view will be a full-court press to show that not only do they care about jobs but that they have a plan for reversing the losses that have been the most painful dimension of this recession.

So last week there were several early steps in this regard. Positioning themselves as a champion of job preservation to unions on tires was just one. Moving car czar Ron Bloom to become the "manufacturing czar" was another. And, buried in today's announcements of financial reforms you will find announcements of continued financing supports for small businesses that were retained despite reported resistance from the Fed. These are just minor tactical moves. But taken together you are seeing the first volleys in a battle to position the administration as activists on job creation. Climate legislation may falter, but rest assured there will be an energy bill that is positioned largely as a green jobs bill in any case. There may not be another stimulus package in name, but next year's budget will contain one within it and the focus will be jobs.

There's no harm in this, in principle, of course. Indeed, it makes sense and one hopes that the administration's economic team gets in front of this story in a way they did not on health care, defining goals and principles clearly and early. But the administration needs to be careful. Exports are a leading U.S. job creator and triggering global protectionism and trade wars worldwide while simultaneously hanging back from getting FTAs approved or making progress on a global round of trade talks is a proven way of losing jobs in the name of creating them.

And if you are losing jobs through protectionism and losing vital partners internationally at the same time, well, that's a formula for trouble that can't even be hidden by quasi-clandestine press announcements late on a Friday night.

MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Imagine, if you can, that you are me. I wish I could give you a taste of what it's like. Perhaps you have some idea. That throng of 10,000 models wildly stampeding in New York over the weekend? Despite what you may have heard or read, it was all over a completely unsubstantiated rumor that I was in New York to visit my poor brother who was suffering with the fact that his beloved Orangemen had once again choked in a big game...this year, on his birthday. There they were, thousands of semi-literate stick-figure women hurling their eighty-six pound frames into one another just for a glimpse of me, pushing, shoving, hungering as though I were that forbidden extra slice of tofu that they would later barf up when no one else was looking. Oh, I know, the news said they were all there to audition for the latest season of "America's Next Top Eating Disorder Victim" but seriously, don't you think that even the modeling community is sick to death of Tyra at this point?

And I understand it. She was a trail-blazer once: a breath of fresh air with a bright smile and an agenda to help others. But, now after an endless series of episodes in which chain smoking high-school drop-outs steal each other's hair products, we realize that this show isn't about helping people. It's all about Tyra all the time. The winners, the losers, they hear her pep talks, they get the benefit of insights from her hand-picked staff of fashion-world superstars, the crème de la crème of the world's narcissicists, but none of them actually win except Tyra who gets to keep her career going (and of course, the fabulous J. Alexander, who only actually exists inside Tyra's mind... as a kind of idealized image of what she would be like if she were actually a woman.)

Come to think of it, though, there is absolutely no fair analogy that I am willing to make between that show and anything currently going on in Washington. So, back to my weekend...which, of course, did not actually involve throngs of stampeding models. (Although my brother actually was devastated by Syracuse's loss, suffering that will only grow worse when North Carolina once again wins the NCAA Championships in a couple weeks.) Instead, it involved tramping through the mall trying to get Verizon to fix my daugher's cell phone, dealing with their special brand of customer service that puts a capital UCK back into the expression F YOU, and spending hours more switching her over to AT&T. Meanwhile, all the while I am actually thinking, what kind of a blog posting will I write on Monday morning?

I even put myself through the torture of watching of all the Sunday morning television talk fests. There the administration rolled out its economic spokespeople -- Austan Goolsbee on Fox, Larry Summers on "This Week" and Christina Romer on "Meet the Press" to say, in unison, "we hate AIG but other than that everything is under control." Of course, especially frustrating was the AIG rant which was certainly too little too late much as the time Tyra failed to move quickly enough to rein in Bre after she wrongfully accused poor Nicole of stealing her granola bars during Season Five. ("The Girl Who Retaliates.") 

Also the focus on the AIG bonuses was a distraction from the much bigger and more offensive component of the AIG story that unfolded over the weekend thanks to the fact that they finally released the names of the counterparties who got made whole by tax-payer dollars. For example, Societe General, Deutsche Bank and Barclay's alone got over $30 billion (we'll leave aside the over $12 billion Hank Paulson's Goldman Sachs got because that is a story that is so breathtaking offensive that apparently no one wants to write about it). While much of this happened last year, let's face it, Tim Geithner was in the middle of it all from the outset, so was Ben Bernanke, the Obama team was looped into this from November on and they could have done plenty from the moment they got into office but they didn't. Of course, they could have done more had they actually made it a priority to hire a team at Treasury at some point during the past five months of knowing they were going to take over the country in the middle of the worst crisis since the depression or the Black Death of the 14th Century or the time Tyra was shown in an unflattering one-piece and accused of being fat in early 2007. (I'm not minimizing this. I am merely trying to track the Obama administration's move from the talking points produced by their initial economic spokesperson, Chicken Little, to those produced by their most recent hire in the press office, Alfred E. Newman.)

Of these performances by the way, I give Romer and Goolsbee each Cs, (able to translate complex ideas into simple English sentences, unfortunately obligated to tap dance around tough issue like just what exactly we are going to do about the financial crisis) and Summers an A (calm, thoughtful discussion of issues). Summers conversation actually contained a really important nugget: that the administration was working on moving derivatives transactions to an exchange setting which would regularize them and make them more transparent. This would be a big breakthrough and could in fact, be one of the most important steps of fixing what is broken in the financial world. Needless to say no one has picked up on it (that I have seen) since he said it. The "balance" on these shows was provided by the likes of what appeared to be cardboard cutouts resemblng Senators Mitch McConnell and Bob Corker and Representative Eric Cantor. Corker outshone his colleagues by seeming to actually think about the issues and gets a D. The other two get Fs only because I can't give anything lower. Reflexive, barren of ideas, purely partisan. America could do with an opposition party but truly, I think we may be heading into a period in which the relevant and defining political division in the U.S. is between moderate and liberal Democrats. McConnell and Cantor make us yearn for the refreshing relevance of say, John Bell, last candidate to run for president under the Whig banner. (As a reminder to all who do not think that political parties in America can come and go as swiftly as did Janice Dickinson off the judging panel at America's Next Top Model as soon as it was realized that she was both a psycho skank from hell and, at the same time, ten times more interesting than Tyra.)

Anyway, not only did the superficial discussions of the Sunday talkers drive me as crazy as usual (I was particularly infuriated with CNBC's Steve Liesman of CNBC who when asked about whether the media dropped the ball on the financial crisis responded by saying he was all over the mortgage backed securities risks in 2006...as though that were a good record given that these problems had been brewing for a decade and that the bigger issues of problems in the derivatives markets, Wall Street's failure to assess risk properly, the regulatory breakdown in Washington, the problems of mark to market financing, the corruption associated with Wall Street's revolving door in DC, and the wrong-headed decision to bring down Glass Steagall were more or less ignored), but I was also tormented by what they weren't covering. They let the Obama administration set the agenda by who was being made available. They bought into the Obama administration's theme of the week story packaging the way viewers bought into last year's heart-warming but completely fabricated ANTM victory of plus-sized model Whitney as she demonstrated that in the end "inner beauty" always trumps a love of Kit Kat bars.

Meanwhile, back in the real world you could feel America's Next Top Crisis brewing off camera. Soon, I couldn't help but sense, Obama's, Q-rating, his smooth talk and his desire to have it both ways (spend but lecture about responsibility, offer conciliation with the world but talk tough, declare the end is nigh but encourage everyone to cheer up) would no longer help. Tough issues that will pose tough choices about America's willingness to use force, to confront friends, to show political courage, were emerging.

Zardari's last days in Pakistan are once again producing the specter of a meltdown in that nuclear nation of 170 million. Russia is announcing plans to establish bomber bases in Cuba or Venezuela (and the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is shrugging it off). The left's victory in El Salvador extending Chavez's Axis of Bluster even as keen observers recognize that Mexico's war on its drug cartels is pushing them into Guatemala where, at the moment, the government is doing practically nothing. Meanwhile, the Chinese are announcing their discomfort with U.S. Treasuries (which Larry Summers fairly glibly dismissed as Chinese political posturing). The G20 ministerial revealed real divisions between the United States and Europe and between the United States and the BRICs. And the press entirely missed the subtext of President Lula's visit to meet with Obama over the weekend. While all was sweetness and light for the cameras, and while the two men genuinely did have a quick rapport, rumors among Brazilian officials suggest that Lula came away concerned about Obama's attitudes toward trade and what was characterized as a sense of Obama's naivety. Obama gave off signals in their talks that he was not going to push hard to get the Doha Round done and that fixing the distortionary U.S. tariff on Brazilian ethanol would have to wait. You've got to love it...and also, um, hate it...when an old-school leftist labor leader comes to Washington and comes away disappointed that the U.S. president is not going to do enough to liberalize the trade agenda or fight off protectionist forces at home.

Then, after all this, I ended up having to be up late at night sitting up while my high school senior age daughter -- who by the way deserves all the blame for making me watch "America's Next Top Model" -- worked on a creative writing assignment that was supposed to be stream of consciousness. So now, in retrospect, it is clear to me that even the structure for this post was not my own idea. But after such an enervating, mind-numbing weekend, there is a part of me that considers any consciousness at all to be something of an achievement.

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