By Gideon Rachman
Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”
By Gideon Rachman
The defining geopolitical drama of the next century will be the battle for power and influence between China and America. That emerging struggle is already posing awkward choices for Asian countries, caught between the two global giants.
At the end of August, I wrote a column headlined – “2011, the year of global indignation“. I suggested that there was a global mood of anti-elite anger, linking outbreaks of popular protest in countries as different as Egypt, India, Chile, China, Israel, Greece and Spain. It is Spain and France that gave birth to the movement, known as the indignados (the indignant). I also wrote, however, that there was “one striking exception to the this pattern – the US.” Perhaps I spoke too soon. The arrest of more than 700 anti Wall Street protesters in New York - and the possibility that similar protests could spread to other cities in the US - means that the wave of global unrest has now arrived on America’s shores. The whole thing has a whiff of 1968 about it.
American business and political leaders reflect on the 9/11 terror attacks and how they changed the US and the world.
Some concern among Republicans about the anti-China belligerence in Mitt Romney’s big jobs speech on Tuesday. (Ironically it was Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s economic advisers, who said one of the bravest and most sensible things on economics to come out of the Bush administration, and was forced to apologise for it.)
US debt, Greek debt, and Indonesian growth
In this week’s podcast: Obama and the US debt limit – the president avoids default at the 11th hour; Greece, we ask whether the second bail-out package is enough to stem contagion across the eurozone; and, Indonesia’s growth trajectory attracts foreign investment.
Presented by Rob Minto with James Crabtree, Martin Sandbu and Gideon Rachman, in the studio in London and Anthony Deutsch in Jakarta – interviewed by Serena Tarling.
Produced by LJ Filotrani
Beware anybody who believes that the answers to the problems of the world can be found in a single book. Marxists poring over Das Kapital, Maoists waving the Little Red Book, mullahs demanding fidelity to the Koran – it is never good news.
The space shuttle is in its last ever flight, and Washington is locked in debt talks that now resemble a Samuel Beckett play on which someone has forgotten to bring down the curtain. A good time to recall one of the fiscal follies from the heady spending days of the 2000s boom: George W. Bush’s idea of putting a man on Mars.
As plans go, the Mars programme was a particularly mad one: it would have cost about a trillion dollars, (over many years, admittedly, so the net present value would have been a lot lower) in an agency notorious for cost overruns. Best quote at the time came from the redoubtable Charles Schultze, former White House economist under Jimmy Carter: the price of keeping an astronaut safe in space means every crewed mission becomes a flying Ming vase.
It wasn’t the most reckless spending programme of that era, however. That honour goes to the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or more specifically the fact that it was unfunded by tax rises, which was estimated at the time to add more to the long-term federal deficit than the entirety of Social Security. A list of the lawmakers who signed up for it makes interesting reading: it includes the well-known fiscal hawks Messrs Boehner, Cantor and Ryan.
Just saying.
In Washington they are arguing about a debt ceiling; in Brussels they are staring into a debt abyss. But the basic problem is the same. Both the US and the European Union have public finances that are out of control and political systems that are too dysfunctional to fix the problem. America and Europe are in the same sinking boat.
Audio Nato, Greece, Vietnam
In this week’s podcast: scathing criticism of Nato from the US calls the alliance’s future into question; the political instability in Greece compounds the sovereign debt crisis and causes arguments within Germany; strains over contested islands in the South China Sea could see an unlikely alliance between old enemies, Vietnam and the US.
Presented by Gideon Rachman, with James Blitz, Quentin Peel and Ben Bland
Produced by LJ Filotrani and Rob Minto
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