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As China prepares for its big military parade next Thursday, when it will celebrate 60 years of Communist party rule with a display of power, it is clear the country has come out of the global crisis with its prestige greatly enhanced. It is not just the strong rebound in the economy. China is becoming more influential and confident overseas, shaping events rather than reluctantly reacting. President Hu Jintao even stole the show this week at the United Nations climate change summit with his pledge to restrain carbon emissions. Two years ago, environmental groups were terrified by China’s galloping energy...

The Chinese Communist Party’s principal organs, the People’s Daily and Global Times have issued minatory statements on the current state of Sino-Indian relations. According to the latter, a domestic opinion poll, confined presumably to the Han public, has revealed that 90 per cent of the population perceive India as the foremost threat to China’s security. Being a colonial empire it is rewarding to make a distinction between Herrenvolk rulers and their ethnic minority subjects. Even the brazen Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s celebrated propaganda chief, would have fought shy of including the Tibetans, Mongolians and Uighurs in this regimented anti-Indian endeavour....

Sure to please the America hating left that elected a Marxist as our new president, a Senior Russian Political Analyst now says “Obama's victory in the presidential election marks an end to the superpower era for the United States.” Sergei Rogov, director of the U.S. and Canada Institute says, “The U.S. presidential election has great significance. I would qualify its results as the end of an era ...of several decades when the U.S. became a superpower and attempted to emerge as the only superpower in a unipolar world after the end of the Cold War.” Does Rogov recognize that sole...

Nor does the U.S. seem all that badly off, comparatively speaking, when it comes to its ability to finance a bailout. Last month's $700 billion bailout package seems staggeringly large, but it amounts to a little more than 5% of U.S. gross domestic product. Compare that to Germany's $400 billion to $536 billion rescue package (between 12% and 16% of its GDP), or Britain's $835 billion plan (30%).

Summary: The United States' unipolar moment is over. International relations in the twenty-first century will be defined by nonpolarity. Power will be diffuse rather than concentrated, and the influence of nation-states will decline as that of nonstate actors increases. But this is not all bad news for the United States; Washington can still manage the transition and make the world a safer place. RICHARD N. HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Americans tend to think of the presidency as all-powerful, but much of its authority comes from the ability to convince the public to follow, and the same is sometimes true in diplomacy. The time when George W. Bush could perform that trick has long passed. But if Americans are adjusting to the idea of a weak Bush, an even tougher mental leap awaits them once he leaves office: accepting that the U.S. isn't the force abroad it was just a few years ago. The next President's hardest job may be getting the country used to that

For a time in 2007, the New England Patriots appeared to be the very definition of a superpower. After achieving an undefeated regular season and arriving at the Super Bowl 18-0, the Patriots seemed poised to make history and become the first team in the history of the NFL to have a perfect 19-0 season. On the eve of Super Bowl XLII, few predicted anything but a Patriot victory. Pre-game analysis didn't focus on the question of whether the Patriots would win the Super Bowl, but rather on whether the Patriots were in fact the greatest football team ever to...

Bangalore's hi-tech enclaves are an oasis of excellence With its economy growing at more than triple the speed of Britain's, India has become a global leader in information technology and other hi-tech products. But how has this been possible in a country where poverty is so widespread and where more than a third of people are still illiterate? In the words of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, "the danger of India moving in the direction of being half California and half sub-Saharan Africa is a real one." The contrast between hi-tech, silicon enclaves such as Bangalore and the primitive...

Everybody’s homework assignment this week is, first, to absorb Parag Khanna’s breathtaking revisioning of the United States in the world, and, second, to add your comment on the late great American Empire. Can it have come and gone so fast? Parag Khanna will join us in class with James Der Derian, the master of global security and media studies at Brown, on Thursday afternoon. Parag Khanna: Who Shrunk US Power? Parag Khanna’s scorecard-lineup of the “post-American world” is more striking for appearing counterintuitively in the safe, smug New York Times Sunday magazine. Five years ago in the same spot, Michael...

Intransigent face of the Chinese superpower By Victor Mallet Published: January 23 2008 19:42 | Last updated: January 23 2008 19:42 It is remarkable how China the selfish superpower is fading from public view. In its place comes China the peacemaker and potential saviour of the faltering world economy. Western governments look to China as an engine of economic growth. Western banks see it as a source of capital. European leaders, eager for commercial advantage, pay homage to Beijing. In the US, the rise of China – notorious only months ago for purportedly stealing American jobs, destroying the environment and...

America is the richest country and the most sophisticated high-tech military power in the world, and is spending more on defence in real terms than at any time since the end of the second world war. Yet it is being exhausted by insurgents armed with AK-47 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and improvised bombs. With strong pressure on President George Bush to withdraw from Iraq, jihadist militants scent a victory as momentous as the eviction of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989—a defeat that helped to dissolve the Soviet empire. True, America has recovered from previous disasters, not least the Vietnam...

Steven R. Watts is "a global management consultant and a Research Fellow and Intercultural Studies Ph.D. candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary." He is "currently creating risk mitigation strategies for multicultural corporations operating in developing countries. These strategies focus on non-traditional, innovative approaches to sustainable economic development, eradication of poverty and reduction of risk to business continuity in some of the most challenging regions of the world. He is also an invited speaker to universities and business organizations." His non-traditional, innovative approach at this website, "Welcome to the 21st century" (thanks to Hal), appears to revolve around the emergence of a...

May 17, 2007 China's Quest for a Superpower Military by John J. Tkacik, Jr. Backgrounder #2036 The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (PRC) announced on March 4, 2007, that it would increase the country's military budget by 17.8 percent in 2007 to a total of $45 bil­lion—by far the largest acknowledged amount that China has ever spent on its military.1 The Chinese government went out of its way to reassure the world that this spending hike was normal and need not worry anyone. "China is committed to taking a path of peaceful development and it pursues...

Summary: Controversies over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism have overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration's grand strategy: its attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power and the emergence of states such as China and India. This unheralded move is well intentioned and well advised, and Washington should redouble its efforts.

Russian President Vlamimir Putin, in one of his harshest attacks on the United States in seven years in power, accused Washington of attempting to force its will on the world...............

Mr Putin and Mr Gates are both former spies So will the 43rd Munich Security Conference be remembered as the start of a new Cold War? That is probably the single most important question to emerge from this long weekend of speeches and private chats among the world's most powerful. Certainly Russian President Vladimir Putin's strident speech stands out from the crowd. In it, to recap, he strongly criticised the US and its European allies, with his harshest criticism reserved for Washington. The US had, he said, overstepped its borders in every way, seeking to impose its will on...

Mr Putin said the US "has overstepped its borders" The Munich security conference was born in the 1960s - the height of the Cold War. Forty years on, there been talk of a new chill. Given the tone and content of Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to the gathered defence ministers, parliamentarians and pundits, it is not, perhaps, hard to see why. Warming quickly to his task after only the briefest of greetings, President Putin accused the US of establishing, or trying to establish, a "uni-polar" world. "What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term,...

Affluence is more apparent these days BBC World Service will be dedicating a week of special programmes from 3-11 February looking at how India is changing. The BBC's George Arney has been reporting on India for many years and, for just as long, the country's promise has been waiting to be fulfilled. How do you summarise a country which is home to one in six members of the human race, which contains a third of the world's poorest people and yet has an increasingly consumer-oriented middle-class twice the size of the population of Germany? And which - according to...

India could overtake Britain and have the world's fifth largest economy within a decade as the country's growth accelerates, a new report says. If trends continue, India's economy may then surpass the US and be second only to China's by mid-century, the report by investment bank Goldman Sachs says. Manufacturing has helped to drive India's economy The report says India's programme of reforms has brought increased competition and efficiency. But there will be a heavy cost as India demands more and more energy. Boom time Everywhere you turn in India's cities are signs of economic boom. The implications of...

Moscow must develop and sell more sophisticated weapons to remain “a superpower,” Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov said Dec. 25. ”Our country cannot keep its status as a superpower on the basis of its territory and natural resources alone,” The Ria Novosti agency reported Ivanov as saying.