Starting From The Ruins Of The Second

I Have Also Been Saddened, Though Hardly Surprised, By The Weakness Of The Eu's Reaction To The Criminal Attack On The Danish Embassy In Syria, Which Seems To Have Been Permitted, If Not Actively Encouraged, By The Syrian Regime.

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.

As One Looks Back, One Sees That The Fall Of The Berlin Wall Opened The Door To Three Developments - The Eurozone, Which Was Crafted Around German Unification, The Free Movement Of Peoples Within Europe, Particularly People From The New Democracies Of Eastern Europe, And, More Broadly, It Opened The Door To Globalization.

It Is Not Just That It Is Profoundly Offensive To The Leaders And People Of A Democratic Germany To Paint Hitler On The Wall (or On The Remnants Of The Wall). It Is Also Consummately Counterproductive. Such Sauce Does Not Make The Meat Of Substantive Criticism More Interesting. It Means That The Whole Dish Is Pushed Away. It Does Not Mean That Britain's Voice Is Listened To More Attentively In The Councils Of Europe. It Means That It Is Listened To Even Less.

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.