Until Bush's second term the general American approach has been engagement; invest, trade and hope the Chinese become a liberal democracy - at some point.  Almost exactly three decades after the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's market reforms, the Chinese state has made only incremental steps toward a liberal democratic system.  The path the Chinese seem to be treading is not of Chile or Spain, but Wilhelmine Germany.  Develop a strong economy to allow for a strong military and global influence, keep  elective democracy and individual liberties to a window dressing minimum.  Worrisome though this is, China is not rising alone.  Almost unnoticed is the emergence of Brazil as a first class power.  Not for much longer will Latin America be the United States' backyard, as other Latin states turn naturally to Brazil for leadership.  The clumsy military rule and runaway inflation of the W's and 1990s has been replaced by political moderates committed - broadly - to the market system.  Brazil has been tomorrow's country almost since its independence in 1822, tomorrow seems to have belatedly arrived.  

More pertinent to the Chinese threat is India.  The Bush administration has made concrete steps at establishing a working alliance with the subcontinental giant.  Signing an agreement to share key nuclear technologies - a break with a traditional non-proliferation approach of the US - and moves toward a free trade agreement.  There has also been a clear shift under Bush in seeing India as an ally, rather than a threat to its traditional regional ally Pakistan.   During the campaign Obama flirted with anti-free trade rhetoric and repeated the standard leftist bromides on nuclear non-proliferation. It's unlikely the new president can do much to undue his predecessors work in these areas.  What he can fail to do is engage both India and Brazil fully and properly.

An old fashion sphere of influence deal with Brazil, over Latin America, is probably unworkable in our more open and demotic age, unlike in the High Victorian era of imperialism.  Still informal understandings will have to be worked out.  Mexico and Central America willl lean toward Washington, as will much of the Caribbean.  There are interesting possibilities in Washington and Brasilia playing good cop / bad cop with Cuba.  South America proper will inexorably come under the shadow of Brazil.  Here too will be opportunities for the United States to counterbalance - albeit carefully - any perceived Brazilian arrogance or bullying.  Farther afield the new giant must be seen as not simply a formidable power in its own right - nearly 200 million people - but as the hub of an Iberian linguistic group of over 600 million people, not so far off from the total of native English speakers.  The two Iberian languages also have a global reach, with sizable populations in Africa (Angola and Mozambique), and smaller outposts in Asia (Goa, Macau and East Timor).  To fuel the country's recent tremendous growth, China has developed a next work of resource supplying client states in Africa.  Countries wary of American influence might view Brazilian investment - especially in large scale commercial farming where the country is a leader - as a useful counter balance to both Washington and Beijing.

At the tectonic, as well as geopolitical, fault line of the Himalayas, India is the West's forward base and powerful counterbalance.  While its growth has been less consistent, or dramatic, than its rival, the Indian state possess the priceless attribute of legitimacy.  The madness of Indian politics suggests chaos, but its rulers do not fear - as the PRC's do - a revolt from below.  India may yet play tortoise to the Chinese hare in economic development.

Of all the historical leaders Barack Obama has been compared to - JFK, FDR and absurdly Lincoln - the most plausible might be the Marquess of Salisbury, Britain's Prime Minister at the turn of the last century.  It was Salisbury who admitted - at least privately and to his cabinet - the inevitability of the rise of the United States, and sought to manage British relative decline in a peaceful way.  In hindsight, and only in hindsight, the wisest course for Britain to have pursued in the Edwardian era was a strategic alliance with the American Republic.  Had a formal pledge existed of American support in event of an existential threat to the British Empire, two world wars might have been avoided, or at the very least curtailed in duration.  Such a deal would have been politically impossible then.  It would have meant an admission of weakness by Britain, an end to her "splendid isolation."  For the United States such an alliance would also have meant an end to its Washingtonian policy of avoiding "entangling alliances," to say nothing of its instinctive- and often foolish - aversion ot British imperialism.  The mental legacy of the late Georgian era was still working very strongly in early 20th century global politics, a superpower still thinking of itself as a small isolated string of colonies, a fading superpower unable to admit that its vast lead on the rest of the world had shrunk.

Today the mental legacies of the past are the cold war obsession with nuclear non-proliferation (preventing it completely rather than worrying about who gets it), a reasonable concern in a hair-trigger bi-polar world, and an outdated view of China.  The first hinders full engagement with a nuclear armed India that now needs civilian technologies to develop its economy. Bush's Forward Policy of Freedom - forgotten in the febrile rhetoric of the last five years - has begun to realign American foreign policy along moral and political values (freedom versus tyranny) in the realities of a multi-polar world. The second is perhaps more dangerous.  China is still viewed through rose-colour spectacles.