China

SHANGHAI -- "Most of them are so superbly ugly that they're exciting." That's what Qingyun Ma, dean of the architecture school at USC, told me last Tuesday afternoon when I asked him what he thought of this city's remarkable explosion of skyscrapers.

We were in a taxi heading east on the elevated Yan'an Highway, in the heart of the city, continuing a conversation we had started an hour earlier in a conference room at the architecture firm he runs here in the French Concession neighborhood.

On June 26 The New America Foundation's American Strategy Program and the Heinrich Böll Foundation hosted Reinhard Bütikofer, the leader of Germany's Green Party, for a discussion about possibilities of cooperation with China over the issue of climate change. Steve Clemons, the director of the American Strategy Program, moderated the discussion. An MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below, while video is available at right.

This article is adapted from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

Most scholars and policymakers favor stemming the tide of nuclear proliferation, even as they acknowledge the pacifying effects of established nuclear arsenals on great power relations. When it comes to nuclear arsenals, how robust must a country's nuclear arsenal be--how much is enough? Some of the key variables in existing studies - e.g., the nuclear "balance of power" - have been poorly conceived, and the data used to measure the nuclear balance and its effect on policy has come from suspect sources.

A similar version of this article also appears on The New Republic, which features a debate between Steven Clemons and Richard Just, TNR's deputy editor, on the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics.

This article is the third part of a TNR debate between Steven Clemons and Richard Just, deputy editor from The New Republic, on the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics.

Please click here for the first part of the debate. For the second part, please click here.

This article is the first part of a TNR debate between Steven Clemons and Richard Just, deputy editor from The New Republic, on the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics.

From: Steven Clemons
To: Richard Just

Hillary Clinton recently called on George W. Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies, and I think she's showing a strategic blind spot that is worrisome.

It is difficult to find a westerner who does not intuitively support the idea of a free Tibet. But would Americans ever let go of Texas or California? For China, the Anglo-Russian great game for control of central Asia was neither inconclusive nor fruitless, something that cannot be said for Russia or Britain. Indeed, China was the big winner.

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Grand explanations of how to understand the complex twenty-first century world have all fallen short-until now. In The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Parag Khanna shows how America's dominant moment has quickly been replaced by a geopolitical marketplace where the European Union and China compete with the U.S.