Obama and a Global Meltdown

Marc Ambinder reports that there is a great deal of worry inside Team Obama about the state of the global economy:

It's quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama's transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better....

...Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public, (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

To tie this into a post earlier in the week about the drastic decline in oil prices curbing the appetite for foreign adventurism in Moscow and Tehran, it strikes me that a similar dynamic may curtail Washington's global ambitions considerably.