Who are the world’s 100 leading public intellectuals? Woundingly, I do not appear on the list compiled by “Prospect” and “Foreign Policy” magazines. But at least I sit along the corridor from one of these great brains: Martin Wolf is on the list.

Prospect are now inviting readers to vote for a top five. In the interests of self-aggrandisement by association, I have decided only to vote for colleagues or former colleagues - so my five votes go to Martin, Niall Ferguson (FT columnist), Larry Summers (ditto), Christopher Hitchens (Sunday Correspondent) and Anne Applebaum (The Economist). This seems an appropriately infantile response to an infantile exercise. And anything that stops Noam Chomsky from winning again has to be worthwhile.

I popped next door to congratulate/tease Martin about his eminence. And he made rather a good point. (One would expect no less, of course.) Today’s intellectuals are a rather unimpressive bunch compared to a similar list of “public intellectuals” you could have compiled in 1850. Martin reeled off the names of Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville. To which I would add - Dickens, Tolstoy, Darwin, Balzac.

All of the above were already well known by 1850 and I think they stack up pretty well when compared with Chomsky, Fukuyama, Kagan - or even, dare I say it, Martin Wolf.

So are we living in some sort of intellectual dark age? Or have Prospect and Foreign Policy simply overlooked the great minds of our era?

We have a new conventional wisdom. Hillary is done for…again. The notion that Barack Obama has all but secured the Democratic nomination is hard to argue against.

For those of you who wish to see me discussing this in video format, here is the link.

One question I’m not asked on the video, is whether it is conceivable that Hillary will accept the number two spot on an Obama ticket?

I think she probably would: vice-president is more glamorous than Senator. But will she be offered it?

Obama’s people point out that - after a long campaign - the two candidates cordially loathe each other. They say he would prefer almost anybody rather than Hillary. But if Democractic grandees decide that the only way to heal the breach in the party is to have an Obama-Clinton ticket, they might just try and twist Senator Obama’s arm. He would resist, initially. But if the case were made repeatedly and insistently? Who knows, it just might happen.

American presidents are meant to have big ideas about the world: a “new frontier”, an “alliance for progress”, a “war on terror”. Unfortunately for the Democratic party the big idea that most animates their two would-be presidents – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – seems to be mutually assured destruction.

That has left the field open to Senator John McCain. The Republican is currently the only presidential candidate to champion a striking new idea about America’s role in the world. The world should pay attention, since the chances of Mr McCain winning the presidency are going up by the day.

Mr McCain’s big idea is for the formation of a “league of democracies” with America at its heart. In a recent speech in Los Angeles, he outlined a plan to “harness the vast power of more than 100 democracies”. This was not just a vague notion tossed out to fill a speech. Mr McCain has been banging on about the league of democracies – in public and in private – for more than a year. In another speech at the Hoover Institution last year, Mr McCain gave some concrete examples of what such a league might do. Essentially, it seems to be a means to get around the United Nations.

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Viewed from the United States, there are three ways of looking at the rise of China and India: as an illusion, as a threat or as an opportunity. Fareed Zakaria is an optimist.

Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, came to the US as an 18-year-old student from India. But, in many ways, this is a very American book - both in its optimism and in its determination to leave the reader with useful lessons.

Much of the material in The Post-American World will be well known to anyone with a passing interest in international affairs: the stunning economic growth in Asia; the challenge to America’s post cold-war hegemony; the parallels between modern America and the British empire. Zakaria tells this story in a convincing and entertaining way. But it is familiar stuff.

The novel feature of Zakaria’s book is its effort to argue that “the rise of the rest” need not entail the decline of the US.

To illustrate his point, he draws an analogy with tennis. A generation ago, American players dominated the US Open. Now they have to share the prizes with players from other nations. This does not mean that Americans have suddenly got worse at tennis. It is just that others have learnt how to play the game.

Continue reading "Books essay: The levellers" »

I went to a couple of meetings this week where the food crisis was discussed. At Chatham House on Monday John Holmes, the UN’s co-ordinator for emeregency relief, gave a careful and under-stated presentation -which was still alarming in its implications. He told me after the meeting that he thinks that we are still only at the beginning of the food crisis - and that prices and hunger are likely to keep rising for a while yet.

I’ve certainly noticed on my travels that food prices are now a big political issue in almost every country that I visit. I first noticed it on a trip to Pakistan and Bangladesh at the beginning of the year. In both countries, people told me that the biggest source of popular discontent were not the machinations of President Musharraf or the Bangladeshi interim government. It was the fact that the price of staple foods had gone up by as much as 40% over the last year. Continue reading "Food prices, political unrest and Jeff Sachs" »

In case you haven’t been reading the papers, London has a new mayor. Boris Johnson has won. I thought that both Boris and Ken Livingstone gave unusually graceful speeches at the count last night. There was no triumphalism or buffoonery in Boris’s speech - and his tribute to Ken was generous and sounded genuine. Livingstone, for his part, avoided bitterness and accepted responsbility for his defeat - which was also generous, given that the more plausible explanation is that he was a victim of an anti-Labour rip-tide that is sweeping Britain.

The conventional explanation of Boris’s victory is that the voters are fed up. The economy is turning down, people are scared of crime and everybody in London is in a bit of gloom. This seems to me precisely wrong. Electing Boris is the act of a supremely confident city. You wouldn’t take a chance on a joker like him if you were actually worried about the future.

In my magazine piece on Boris I made much of the idea that we might not want Mayor Johnson in charge, next time terrorists hit London. But actually, I think that’s probably alarmist. Fortunately, it will not be upto the mayor to organise the city’s response to a bombing. He will have to “speak for London”. Livingstone did that well on 7/7; and I think Boris would probably rise to the occasion.

This may be the laziest blog I have ever done. But I heartily recommend this splendid seven-minute video from Slate, summarising the Democratic presidential race so far.

And just to add a teensy bit of value of my own. I met a long-time Clinton adviser at an event in London today. His private take is that Obama has now locked up the nomination. Yes, the Reverend Wright stuff is incredibly damaging. But it’s too late to de-rail Obama now. He said that: “The Democratic elite decided a few weeks ago that Obama will be the nominee. And he will be. The trouble is that he can’t finish Clinton off. And that show’s he a weak candidate.”

I ran this past an Obama adviser whose reaction was - “We don’t think it’s over yet. We’ve thought that so many times. And we’ve been wrong.”

It is difficult not to feel sorry for Barack Obama. The whole Jeremiah Wright thing is a complete nightmare. I doubt that Obama’s late-in-the-day repudiation of his spiritual mentor of 20 years is going to do the trick. Wright will be an issue for the rest of the campaign.

And so he should be. Obama has responded to Hillary Clinton’s assertion that she is the candidate of “experience”, by talking about his superior judgement. But what does it say about his judgement that he chose Reverend Wright as his pastor?

I don’t believe that Obama ever gave credence to Wright’s nuttier theories - such as his flirtation with the idea that AIDS might have been created by the US government as a genocidal weapon against blacks. I doubt that Obama agrees with Wright’s opinion that Louis Farrakhan is one of the great figures of 20th century history.

No, I think the “judgement” that Obama made was much more colder and more rational than that. One of his advisers once suggested to me that when Obama was looking to build a career in Chicago politics, it made sense for him to associate himself with the Rev. Wright. Someone with Obama’s middle-class and elite credentials might otherwise have struggled to build a political base in black Chicago.

That is the most plausible explanation I’ve heard for Obama’s long dalliance with Jeremiah Wright. It is understandable enough. But it is a rather calculating act for a man who claims to represent a new sort of politics. And the calculation looks rather less shrewd, now that he has made the transition to national politics

One of the disadvantages of having my e-mail address printed in the paper is that I get a lot of weird people communicating with me. (I am not referring to the honoured readers of this blog.)

Most of the offers of cheap Viagra are caught in the FT’s capacious spam-filter. But I seem to get an awful lot of people trying to interest me in dubious-sounding business propositions. Most of them I delete without a second thought. But I think this particular communication has an unusual panache to it.

EMERALDS, FOSSILS AND RUBIES: YOUR VERY BEST ACQUISITION AGAINST ECONOMICAL CRISIS
 
GOOD DAY ULTRA-AFFLUENT PARTNER, DEAREST BROTHER:
 

Continue reading "Dubious business propositions" »

It sounds like something from a political thriller by Michael Crichton. Arab sheikhs and Chinese communists amass billions of dollars. They wait for a moment of financial weakness in the US. Then they use their massive “sovereign wealth funds” to buy large stakes in strategic US firms. They secure places on the board. Then, at a crucial moment, they…

Well, what exactly do they do? Slip out of a board meeting and blow up the building? Deliberately destroy the companies in which they have invested, in the hope of harming the hated Americans?

The fears aroused by the rise of sovereign wealth funds are deep – but vague. SWFs are investment vehicles controlled by governments. They are rich and getting richer. They currently control about $3,000bn and their total valuation by 2015 has been variously projected at anything between $10,000bn and $15,000bn.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.