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Despite the “rise and fall of the unipolar concert,” China and Russia’s balancing strategies have backfired: they are not leading to multipolarity, but are actually reinforcing unipolarity. The reason is that China and Russia’s balancing strategies have focused on regional “revisionism,” which has provoked powerful responses in East Asia and Europe to contain them. Russia’s balancing strategy has to a large extent proven to be counter-productive. Instead of preventing the expansion of NATO through a “divide and conquer” strategy, or driving a diplomatic wedge between the United States and Europe, Russian revisionism has united NATO...Perhaps most illustrative of all, a...

The foreign ministers of India, Russia and China were meeting Wednesday in the Indian capital in a bid to strengthen relations and to explore cooperation on issues such as counterterrorism and energy security, Indian officials said. The meeting between India's External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing is part of efforts by the three countries to forge a trilateral forum to work more closely on regional security issues, the officials said. "This will be the second stand-alone meeting of its kind," said Navtej Sarna, external affairs ministry spokesman. The foreign ministers...

Mr Putin and Mr Gates are both former spies So will the 43rd Munich Security Conference be remembered as the start of a new Cold War? That is probably the single most important question to emerge from this long weekend of speeches and private chats among the world's most powerful. Certainly Russian President Vladimir Putin's strident speech stands out from the crowd. In it, to recap, he strongly criticised the US and its European allies, with his harshest criticism reserved for Washington. The US had, he said, overstepped its borders in every way, seeking to impose its will on...

Mr Putin said the US "has overstepped its borders" The Munich security conference was born in the 1960s - the height of the Cold War. Forty years on, there been talk of a new chill. Given the tone and content of Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to the gathered defence ministers, parliamentarians and pundits, it is not, perhaps, hard to see why. Warming quickly to his task after only the briefest of greetings, President Putin accused the US of establishing, or trying to establish, a "uni-polar" world. "What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term,...

Affluence is more apparent these days BBC World Service will be dedicating a week of special programmes from 3-11 February looking at how India is changing. The BBC's George Arney has been reporting on India for many years and, for just as long, the country's promise has been waiting to be fulfilled. How do you summarise a country which is home to one in six members of the human race, which contains a third of the world's poorest people and yet has an increasingly consumer-oriented middle-class twice the size of the population of Germany? And which - according to...

If the third world war has begun, its cause is Washington's ambition for undivided world hegemony.The third world war has begun. Newt Gingrich says so, and in a more measured and rational way, Timothy Garton Ash points in the same direction. For, Garton Ash the mayhem he sees all around him is rooted in a US weakness, which has allowed the effective creation of a "multipolar world". He looks to a future in which we may all be "nostalgic for the bad old days of American supremacy". Gingrich is still a unipolar guy down to his bouffant roots. These are...

Find another false idol to worship, multilateral fetishists -- the U.N. is a failure.ONCE AGAIN the "international community" is clamoring for the U.N. to fix things in the Middle East. It's reminiscent of an episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer is in dire straits. In a panic, he yells heavenward, "I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!" For some fetishists of multilateralism, the U.N. seems to fill this odd space in their brains once reserved for God, providence or even Superman — whatever force of good that can save civilization from...

A Unipolar World Americans have an healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift: Who needs it? We’re protected by two great oceans, we have this continent practically to ourselves and we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us. It took three giants of the twentieth century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. And then it ended with one of the great anti-climaxes in history. Without...

If America is the greatest nation on Earth, what's so wrong with saying so?Circumstance recently commanded the need for a taxi, my destination triggering in the driver the sort of incoherent recollections one normally expects from a great-grandfather who’s no longer allowed to touch the remote control. “I used to live down there, 1970,” he began, “Drove a 1968 Camaro, paid $1,495 for it … had a factory installed tape player.” Sorry, I didn’t ask whether it played eight track or cassette tapes. “Back then, gas was 27.9 cents a gallon, and smokes were 30 cents a pack. Now it’s...

An American Empire! If You Want It instead of Freedom, Part 1 by Richard M. Ebeling Fifty years ago, the classical liberal author and journalist Garet Garrett published a collection of essays called The People's Pottage (1953). In the midst of the Korean War, he tried to persuade the American people that the United States was on a new course that conflicted with the original conception of the nation. Its constitutional safeguards for the preservation of freedom were being threatened and undermined by the role the government was assuming around the world. The specific danger was reflected in the title...