West to East

Hoge argued that the transfer of power from West to East will soon change the ways in which international challenges are framed and dealt with. Asia’s growing economic power, fast translating into greater political and military power, invests the region’s old hostilities with a more international edge. Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Kashmir — ‘‘Any of them could explode into large-scale warfare that would make the current Middle East confrontations seem like police operations’’.

But Hoge’s real worry was this: that the West, or the US, was not preparing itself for the changing lay of the international field. From Washington’s perspective, he said, it is necessary to concentrate on engagement with China and India.

Hoge immediately pointed out the difficulties in the first relationship: China and the US may be destined to be rivals. Chinese analysts, he said, are already suspicious of US moves to realign its military forces by moving from the Pacific rim into Central Asia. They suspect that these new positions could combine with Washington’s ‘‘newly intensified military cooperation’’ with India, to add up to the ‘‘soft containment’’ of China.

Washington, said Hoge, would want to use India as a counter-balance to China and as a strong proponent of democracy in its own right. But, ‘‘to step into these roles, India needs to quicken the pace of its economic reforms and avoid the Hindu nationalism espoused by the Bharatiya Janata Party… unless Congress follows its secular tradition in governing, it will undercut any utility India might have for the US campaign to counter the influence of radical Islamists.’’

Over to February!

The Economist is already anticipating P Chidambaram’s next. India’s FM is getting down to work on reforms for his full annual budget in February next year, it said. It listed out the areas: taxation, subsidies, development expenditures.

The magazine sounded worried about the likely opposition to the proposals to ‘‘refocus’’ the planned development expenditure and to devolving responsibilities to local bodies. In the end, it seemed to count on Montek Singh Ahluwalia having got it right. India has a ‘‘high noise to signal ratio’’, he said, which makes the opposition sound more stubborn than it is.

Ten years later

Tony Blair completed 10 years as Labour leader this week and along with him, the idea of New Labour. It was the occasion for many, in the Left wing and Right wing media, to look back in different shades of anger.

It is Iraq, of course. A Guardian/ICM poll to mark the day revealed that 55 per cent believe he lied over Iraq and an unprecedented 56 per cent believe the war was unjustified. Commentators accused Blair of being much too ‘‘presidential’’, especially on Iraq. Comments about his ‘‘sofa diplomacy’’ were given a persistent airing.

Ironically, it is also on Iraq that commentators seemed to concede Blair the most. On Iraq, he took on his opponents and argued his case, miscalculated though it is turning out to be. For the rest, an army of critics accused him of an imitative political project.

Jackie Ashley in the Guardian counted out the pieces of rhetoric in Blair’s Britain — more choice and less bureaucracy in schools and hospitals; an end to ’60s liberalism in the criminal justice system; tough asylum policies; stubborn, if disastrous, privatisations — and exclaimed on their uncanny familiarity to those who covered the Tory administrations of the ’80s and ’90s. New Labour wore the clothes of Thatcherism effortlessly, lamented Martin Jaques, in the same paper. New Labour cloaks even its redistributive policies in a larger welter of administrative measures, he said.

P.S.: A few months ago, the Economist had announced: ‘‘Until further notice, In Defense of Globalisation becomes the standard general-interest reference, the intelligent layman’s handbook, on global economic integration’’. Well, this week, the magazine has given notice. In its view, Jagdish Bhagwati’s tome has been bettered. Martin Wolf’s new book Why Globalisation Works is the book the Economist now hails as the ‘‘fullest and most sophisticated treatment to date of the case for globalisation… the definitive treatment of the subject…’’