Alyssa Ayres — Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World

India has a different concept of democracy and liberalism than America and Indian traditions and values are different from America's. This is true of other democracies, such as Russia. 

These differences are often not understood or appreciated by the US and this leads to disappointment, pressure and even conflict.

There is more than one way to be free, and imposing a particular view of liberalism is illiberal.

OUP Blog
Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World
Alyssa Ayres

Vasilis Trigkas — Chimerica in Decline?

China’s resilient authoritarianism – or at least Beijing’s continued adherence to a distinctively non-Western polity – has for the moment refuted the democratic “end of history.” Still, the first part of Fukuyama’s polarizing thesis, the liberal part in the “liberal democracy” declaration, has been celebrated by political pundits around the world as the irreversible path of humanity.

The term “Chimerica” has been the epitome of the wishful thinking of liberal intellectuals around the world who deterministically infer that U.S. and Chinese economic interdependence ensures a peaceful hegemonic transition. According to this argument, as both Washington and Beijing engage in a positive sum economic relationship and enhance their material position ad infinitum, the Gates of Janus will be sealed by two prosperous societies who prefer commerce to conquest; consumption to cannons; goods to gunboats. Neither American nor China will dominate the 21st century the liberals ardently declare. Instead, Chimerica – a hybrid state – governed by the invisible hand of the market or by the very visible hands of cosmopolitan business elites will create perpetual prosperity and peace.

Realists have long challenged this liberal orthodoxy. China and the U.S. are on a collision course, they argue, and both states engage in comprehensive balancing – economic, military, technological and diplomatic. Chimerica is a phantom that defies reality and fails to observe the unabated securitization trend in Sino-U.S. relations, realists declare.

Testing the validity of the Chimerica thesis demands a thorough investigation of the three liberal indicators, the fertilizers of interdependence between China and the United States; that is, the very forces that annihilate the nation state, turn boundaries obsolete, and dictate policies based on interstate rather than intrastate conditions. What are these indicators? Dependence on the Chinese market, supply chain dependence, and cosmopolitan business elites.

Worth reading the whole post.

The Diplomat
Chimerica in Decline?
Vasilis Trigkas is a research fellow at the Center for China-EU relations at Tsinghua University and a non-resident Handa Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS.

A Particularly Messy ‘End-Of-Administration’ Kabuki Dance In "Versailles-on-the-Potomac" - Chuck Spinney

Chuck Spinney writes:

Killing the Hog (II)

(reprinted with permission)

"President Obama’s sacking of defense secretary Chuck Hagel began a particularly messy ‘end-of-administration’ kabuki dance in Versailles on the Potomac. This link will take you to a very insightful interview explaining the nature of this spectacle.

Ian Masters (of the excellent radio show Background Briefing) talks to Pierre Sprey* about the third-tier selection of the industry-friendly Ashton Carter to replace Hagel. But there is much more. The discussion quickly spins off into a wider discussion of the dysfunctional politics of the American Empire and the permanent war economy, before it ends with a brilliant discourse on the Air Force’s plan to kill the A-10 Warthog.

Sprey knows what he is talking about. He understands Pentagon politics as well as anyone I ever met. An engineer and mathematician, a highly accomplished bureaucratic infighter, Sprey was a principal member of the design team that over came massive Air Force resistance to create the highly successful F-16 and A-10 jet-fighter bombers in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Robert Coram’s, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War).

In the case of the A-10, Sprey was the both the inspiration and guiding force in its conception and design. He was also the key strategist the bureaucratic battles to stop the Air Force from killing the program — battles that began in late 1960s, when the A-10 was a paper airplane, have continued intermittently to this day, including the current efforts by the Air Force to kill the A-10 over the objections of the Congress.

I urge you to take 20 minutes to listen to the discussion between Ian Masters and Pierre Sprey."  Chuck Spinney

___________
* "Caveat emptor: Sprey is a long-time associate and close friend of mine. I have had a front row seat in the peanut gallery or been a minor player in the A-10 wars from the time I was a 2nd Lt in the AF in 1968 until I retired from the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2003. So I freely admit that am proudly biased both with regard to both Sprey’s work and the A-10."

Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich — The Russia They Lost

Powerful confessional about the loss of American soft power, and really, the loss of America. Is the great experiment over? Has America morphed into the British Empire it won its own independence from?

This is a moving story of disappointment and even betrayal.

SLAVYANGRAD.org

The Russia They Lost
Posted by S. Naylor
Original article by Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich
Translated by: Daniil Mihailovich
Edited by: S. Naylor

Eric W. Dolan — Don’t want to be hassled by creationist teacher? Give up Buddhism, Louisiana public school says (via Raw Story )

Don’t want to be hassled by creationist teacher? Give up Buddhism, Louisiana public school says (via Raw Story )

A public school in Louisiana allegedly advised a Buddhist family to change their beliefs if they didn’t want their child to face harassment from zealous teachers. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Louisiana on Wednesday filed a federal…

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Liu Chang — Commentary: U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world

Power vacuum developing?

Xinhua English
Commentary: U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world
Xinhua writer Liu Chang

See also Charles Hugh Smith, The Impossibility of China Issuing a Reserve Currency

The question of the RMB becoming a reserve currency boils down to this: does Chine export enough RMB via trade deficits to supply the global economy with sufficient RMB to provide reserves in size and be liquid and stable?

Those answering "yes, China does export enough RMB to act as a reserve currency" have to answer how a nation that imports a net $285 billion a year of other nations' currencies can possibly export enough of its currency to act as a reserve currency.

Yanis Varoufakis — James Galbraith on Europe, Greece (and Syriza), Germany and America

What follows is the extended, English language, version of James Galbraith’s recent interview with Roger Strassburg published in NachDenkSeiten.

James Galbraith on Europe, Greece (and Syriza), Germany and America
Yanis Varoufakis

Progress and the vanished frontier

Ultimately, the current debate about more or less government is a distraction from the real question: What combination of government and industry is most likely to restore Americans' sense of a shared future? And that formula must be wrapped in a narrative that explains why progress isn't what it used to be, even though Americans can't imagine a future without it.

Read it at The Huffington Post
America's Problem With "Progress"

Jonathan D. Moreno

Professor, University of Pennsylvania; Senior Fellow, CAP; Author, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America

I've been thinking about this for some time, too. America has a frontier mentality but no longer a frontier. That's turned into a serious problem with admitting reality and has resulted in much denial. The fact is that the US is turning into Europe, which lost its frontier centuries ago and has adjusted. The loss of the frontier is relatively recent for the US, and the countries mindset has not yet reflected the full implications of that.