As One Looks Back, One Sees That

Russia Has Lost An Empire But Not Yet Found A Role. Russia Has To Decide What It Wants To Be. And As We Know In Britain, That Takes Some Time. It Is Quite Tough To Lose An Empire And Russia Lost Its Empire Very Rapidly And Very Admirably, That Is To Say Peacefully, It Didn't Fight.

I Find Chinese Debates About Their Political System Domestically, But Also About China's Claims In The International System, To Be Among The Most Original And Surprising And Exciting Of Our Time. The Starting Point Is A System That None Of Us Had Anticipated, Which I Call Leninist Capitalism, But Also Obviously Because It Is The Most Important Emerging Power. The Question Of China's Relations With The United States In Particular, And The Rest Of The World In General, Is The Question Of War And Peace In The 21st Century.

I'm A Historian By Training And By Conviction. And So The Thing That Has Throughout Informed My Thinking About International Relations Is History. I Think, For Example, The Reason That I Was Perhaps Able To See Sooner Than Some Others That The Soviet Empire In Eastern Europe Was Decaying--if Not Disintegrating--was That I Came To It Through History And Through Germany, Rather Than Through Sovietology And Through Moscow. And Therefore The Starting Point Was That No Empire In History Has Lasted Forever, And This One Won't Either.

There Is Already A Generation Of European Graduates Who Feel They Have Been Robbed Of The Better Future They Were Led To Expect. They Are Members Of A New Class: The Precariat.

The Eurozone Has Clearly Gone Spectacularly Wrong, Pulling Down All The Continental Economies.