Polaris  

How does one measure prosperity? And what could that mean for the geopolitical future?

How Yukio Hatoyama aproaches Asia, more broadly, will likely dictate how he engages India.

Singapore’s economy appears to have bounced 20.4%. That may be good for the Little Red Dot, but it’s bad for God. Confused? So am I.

Last year, I came across a map of the United States, where the names of each state had been replaced by those of countries with similar-sized economies. That gave me another idea: replacing country names on a map with those of Fortune Global 500 companies whose annual revenues were similar to their GDPs.

On Deng and drink.

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline,” Frank Zappa is said to have said. “It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” How true. Introducing the “Frank Zappa Scale” of comprehensive national power…

In the international realm, Stephen Walt asks, who are the underachievers and who are the overachievers? In other words, when does power not match influence, and why?

Everyone had such low expectations regarding whether the G-20 summit would actually accomplish anything (other than the usual Nicolas Sarkozy tantrum), that the resulting announcement of $1.1 trillion worth of funding pledges is being hailed as the biggest multilateral breakthrough since George H.W. Bush started complaining about the lack of quality Chinese food at the [...]

I’ve been AWOL the last ten days or so with work commitments, but I do plan to get back into my regular blogarithm. For now, a World Bank report on G-20 protectionism, and mixed signals from the Pentagon on troop deployment.

In a recent speech, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy, Shyam Saran, makes three significant arguments which should provide a sound basis for broader Indian strategy in the coming years. First, getting out of the recession will require greater U.S.-China cooperation which India should take into consideration. Second, the crisis gives India strategic space and flexibility. And third, that India should not use the crisis to regress back into statism and economic isolationism, but should rather treat it as an opportunity to enhance its infrastructure, to increase its regional integration and to secure an adequate energy supply.