Khanna says:
I think it is best to learn Arabic or Chinese (or both) today.

While I can understand learning Mandarin or even Cantonese, why would anyone benefit from learning Arabic? The days when businessman J Paul Getty learned Arabic and uses his fluency to build an empire based on Middle East oil are over.

BTW, it's becoming somewhat popular among certain people here in New York, to send their infant children to Chinese speaking daycare...

I mean non-Asian infants

parag might be thinking from a diplomatic-centric perspective (he's georgetown foreign service educated). arabic is the official language of a lot of countries....

OK, that would make more sense.

In The Tragedy Of Great Power Politics John J. Mearsheimer says that bodies of water stop the projection of military power across the globe.

He predicts that the US will become alarmed if China's economic growth continues, when it becomes apparent that China is going to turn into a mega Hong-Kong alliances will be made with Russia and India to try and contain it.

(This may mean that Pakistan will move out of the US orbit entirely unless, it makes up with India)

Gabor Steingart in the War For Wealth suggests that the real danger will come from trying to play by the rules of fair trade with China as it takes the production and then the service jobs east. As he puts it "the west has a political radar system that is outdated , it only recognises a danger if it is looks like Hitler or Stalin talking tough with military parades."

According to him the west is trying to compete with it's workers who have decent pay, condition, and enviromental protection, against countries who send their kids to the factories, or down the mines, instead of to school.Who ignore enviromental standards, except for carbon trading cons. They can only lose that competition and the kind of free market economics that is being practiced is more dangerious to the west than China's military.

( We are fortunate that China suffers from a crippling lack of diversity).

( We are fortunate that China suffers from a crippling lack of diversity).

:-)

the second world is about rivalry and conflict, but it is mostly economic. i think that's probably right.

The BBC WS was quoting US journalists saying that they dont envy London trying to follow China's impressive Olympics. I am starting to wonder; is there anything the chinese are not good at.

is there anything the chinese are not good at.

well, japan might be a good future projection.

Khanna's belief that the EU is doing superbly well is bizarre. The other global players clearly don't regard it that way.

For instance, Russia's defence minister recently said that, if Poland stations US anti missile systems on its territory, Russia will launch a nuclear strike against Poland. Poland is in the EU (and NATO).

You can only understand Russia's threat, and Europe's response to it, by accepting that: 1) Russia thinks the EU is weak, and 2) the EU thinks the EU is weak.

If China stations anti missile defences on its territory it is unthinkable that Russia will make a Poland-style threat against China. China is just too strong, both economically and militarily. American hawks may want to make a Poland-style threat against Iran. But they don't feel strong enough to do so either. Russia only made the threat against an EU member because they feel the Europeans are weak, and might cave in to the pressure.

The EU response was typical of those who believe they are weak. They didn't break off diplomatic relations with Russia, announce a total trade embargo or amass troops on the EU's eastern border and start "training exercises". That's pretty much how China would react to such a threat from Russia. Not the EU. Their first reaction was to make sure Polish officials working for the EU were kept away from microphones...

george, russia's threat seems a bit weird to me because of westerlies re: poland. also, in the 1980s i read one of the major problems with china was that ~90% of its population was concentrated in ~10% of its land. this seems an exaggeration, but not a major one. anyway, this is what parag is really point to i think....

Razib

Good point about the likely direction of fallout.

Regarding currencies. It's impossible for all currencies to devalue against each other. At least one of them has to go up. The dollar has fallen hard, which means that the Euro has gone up. But the larger European economies (eg Germany) have not been performing particularly well.

A highly-priced currency is not an automatic blessing. It makes it harder for exporters. Perhaps the dominant element in Chinese economic success is the Chinese government's deliberate policy of preventing the Yuan rising to its "real" value. Its "real" value is the price at which China would have no export surpluses or deficits with other countries.

I don't know how much use Khanna makes of Mackinder, but Mackinder's work strikes me as a prime example of the erroneous elevation of empirical regularities to the status of law. The importance of the Pivot Area from 700 BC to about 1300 BC was something of a historical freak, the result of several factors: the effectiveness of offensive cavalry warfare, the enormous steppe grasslands most suitable for raising horses, and the much greater economic productivity of the sedentary areas. The steppe thus was able to, and motivated to, successfully specialize in the military exploitation of the sedentary areas.

When Russia rose to power, it was at the expense of the steppe peoples. Combined military and agricultural improvements made it possible to cultivate the steppe -- agriculture became productive enough to fund the troops, and soldiers became effective enough to defend the farmers. At that point the old pivot was dead and gone. (I recommend Khodarkavsky's "Russia's Steppe Frontier".)

I agree that the geographical point of view should be central, but most of the grand world-systems and geopolitical theories seem bogus. They really need to be broken down to their functional and empirical parts and then reconstructed in terms of contemporary facts.