Global Paradigms

China Must Be Central to US Global Agenda by Leon T. Hadar Leon T. Hadar is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington This article appeared in the South China Morning Post on December 10, 2008 The major criticism that East Asian officials would make of the outgoing Bush administration's foreign policy would be Washington's focus on the geostrategic problems in the broader Middle East in the past eight years, and the resulting sidelining of China and most of East Asia on the US global agenda. This neglect of China needs to change. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent trips to South Asia (to try to defuse Indo-Pakistani tensions in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorism) and to the Middle East (to attempt to re-energise Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) have been highlighted in leading US newspapers. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's meetings in Beijing, as part of the ongoing Strategic Economic Dialogue, have, however, only...

Business Times - 12 Dec 2008 These days, with huge industry bailouts, it seems the US is following in the economic footsteps of Russia and China By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT DURING the height of the globalisation era of the 1990s, political economists Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, published The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World, a treatise on the relationship between the government and the marketplace which became an instant best-seller and was turned into a documentary. Taking the title from a 1922 speech by the founding father of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin - who used the phrase 'commanding heights' to refer to industries in an economy that effectively control and support the others, such as oil, railroads, banking and steel - the authors defined globalisation as a period in economic history when free markets predominate, and governments relinquish control over the 'commanding heigh...