Polaris  

Fears in Europe of a rising Asian monolith are not just misplaced, but also hazardous.

Three inter-related questions stand out for keen followers of India.

Permanent UN Security Council membership for India is not just unlikely, it’s undesirable. Why then do we care so much about it?

I must admit to being surprised by Vir Sanghvi’s recent column for The Hindustan Times, not because of how taken in he appears to have been with former U.S. president George W. Bush, but rather how convinced [...]

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

The European parliamentary elections highlight two worrying trends for its political future. The first is apparent voter fatigue with the idea of Europe. The second is the rise of the anti-immigration far-right. Immigration is an emotion issue, yet there is a clear link between developed states’ abilities to incorporate immigrants and the dynamism and resilience of their economies.

On Deng and drink.

MEP and former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard struggles to identify what went wrong with the ideal of a European federation, blaming unambitious European arrivistes, the non-integration of Muslim states, and American imperialism. In Brussels, it appears, you can have it all ways at once.

Something about conspiracy theories about secret societies ruling the world doesn’t hold. If these “secret societies” are meant to be ruling the world, why are they only open to Americans, Europeans and Japanese? Furthermore, if their jobs have been to retain power, they’ve done a remarkably crap job. More likely, the conspiracy theorists just didn’t get the memo from Goldman Sachs.

“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?