george kennan once expressed america's strategic plan thus:
"america has 8% of the world's population and enjoys 50% of its resources. our foreign policy is intended to keep it that way".
conversely, here's what the nehru kkkangress wants:
"india has 16% of the world's population and enjoys 3% of its resources. nehruvian stalinist policies are intended to keep it that way"
this parag khanna is clearly in sync with nehru and manmohan singh and sitaram yechuri as to india's place in the world: a third-world pathetic backwater equated with pakistan, whereas china, well, china are the masters of the universe. and i just loved the fact that parag khanna (who is this guy? never heard of him. must be one of the sepoys like sugata bose and so forth) has just re-introduced the india-pak-equal-equal story. when over the last five years we had all gotten away from that and gotten into china-india-equal-equal. of course the chinese and the pakistanis don't like this, so they have got this guy to go back to equating india, a great civilization, with pakistan, a failing, nothing state.
khanna seems to be forgetting that europe is going to be eurabia soon. and that china is likely to fall apart from centrifugal forces. i think khanna's thesis is absurd; for the foreseeable future, america, even though it's limping, will continue to be first among equals, simply because it is a remote, continent-sized nation. europe will sink with the weight of its arabs. china will fall apart. the chinese and arab money being invested in america will simply get nationalized by the americans one fine day. and his thesis that "eurasia" is key is wrong -- it is only since 1750 that europe was anywhere in the picture. it was "asia" that was always the leader, and it was a bipolar system, with india and china as the poles. europe was an afterthought, a land full of primitive savages. until they invented "guns, germs and steel", that is. but europe has no core competence going forward, especially as they will be busy being dhimmis.
i didn't read this thing, just got ram narayan's forward. but one part i do agree with, and i have been saying it for years -- the chinese are going to walk into russian siberia any day now. i had forecast it would happen in 2005, but i was obviously a little off.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ram Narayanan
Parag Khanna, senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation, has written a book "The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order," to be published by Random House in March. The following essay titled, "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony", published in today's NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE is adapted from that book.
Some excerpts:
**China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America's standing in the world remains in steady decline.
** [America is] competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.
**China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the world's crucial pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan. At this stage, Western diplomats have only mustered the wherewithal to quietly denounce Chinese aid policies and value-neutral alliances, but they are far from being able to do much of anything about them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
By PARAG KHANNA
Published: January 27, 2008
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