Actually Liu doesn’t have a huge amount of foreign service experience. He appears to have worked mainly in Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters in China. His current post (which started in 2013) is only his third ongoing assignment in a foreign country.
You also have to keep in mind that by the standards of most western countries, Obama would be considered a conservative. The average Republican would be considered way off on the right fringe.
Vote Rob Ford the party candidate.
I think it would end up being a race between Obama and some nondescript Chinese guy.
Obama would do very well. He would get more than 50 percent of the US vote because as much as the Righties absolutely and irrationally despise Obama, many would vote for him over some Chinese guy, especially if they couldn’t sit on their hands but had to vote. Most of Central, South, and North America would vote for Obama as would most of Europe and Africa, although a surprising number of Africans would vote for the Chinese guy. Obama would get much of Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific, and a majority of the Middle East.
Nondescript Chinese guy would get all of China and much of Asia, most of the former Soviet Union and India (if we are not counting these as parts of Asia), and some of the Middle East.
In the end, nondescript Chinese guy would win, and it would be by a landslide.
Even if Obama could advertise freely in China, using the top public relations firms?
I do not believe it would make much difference how well Obama advertised. He’s an outsider who most Chinese don’t know and would not spend the time to learn about.
Republicans are going to vote for whoever the US is fronting. Their “us vs them” mentality would prioritize Obama over *any *Chinese man. Might as well throw our weight behind Obama.
Although a famous singer or international movie star with a good political reputation could do well. What about Arnie?
The premise of the thread is flawed anyway. There is simply no way the U.S. will ever bow to a foreign ruler. We’d turn the planet into a radioactive wasteland before that happened. Any any power attempting to enforce anything after all nukes are expended will find a “rifle behind every blade of grass” if they attempted invasion.
The top two will be a Chinese and an Indian. No one else will matter. Not even the Pope could come close.
Nobody is forcing you to participate in this little exercise. If you can’t handle "what-if"s, try some other thread.
Edited to add: If it will help, let’s say that everyone has decided to play along because cute little fairies will rip our genitals out of our bodies with teeny tiny silver swords if we don’t.
They would get very few votes beyond China, and I think it’s pretty reasonable that North America, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa, which combined have more people than China, as well as China’s rivals like India and Japan, might try to unite their support (to some degree, at least) behind an acceptable candidate to avoid Chinese domination.
I think Clooney would rate higher.
Who has democracy? In the US, the next president will be some Democrat, probably Hillary, or some Republican, Maybe Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or one of a half a dozen others. They will be thoroughly vetted by the people with the money, and the two who are chosen will be presented to the people to choose between the two. One will be pro-choice, one antiabortion; one antigun, one progun; one this, one that; but both will agree on 99% of the really big stuff.
It won’t be any Republican, at least not the Republicans you mentioned.
Maybe 20 years ago that was the case, but Now? Not so much. I’d be surprised if Republicans and Democrats agree on 10 percent of the big stuff, and even if they do, it certainly isn’t evident in what little they actually get done.
I expect by “big stuff” he means an interventionist foreign policy, loosely regulated capitalism, and so on.
Cool cool thread. But I think people are framing this too much in the perview of current leaders - The one thing a successful supreme poobah would have to be is really frickin expert in foreign relations and not bias to any particular country. And I mean the best at foreign relations. How else could that person convene 196 different countries into a productive coalition, many of whom have crazy amounts of different in their social and moral worldviews?
I think the good candidates from America, Europe, some of Asia, the Pacific and Latin blocs are going to be not currently serving a public office. Think prominent humanitarians, think former UN secretary generals, maybe even think former CEO’s of multinationals. It would be a mess in the first year, per the hypothetical two year election process. But very very cool cool.