Sunday Posts

This is a bit of Washington-speak I picked up from watching the news: It basically means that the American strategy for world dominion, shall we say world peace, have changed its focus to Asia. The Cold War is well and truly over, and despite its vast nuclear arsenal and apparent ambitions, Russia is no longer considered a threat. The American military personnel and arsenal would now shift to Asia, particularly East Asia, where the Chinese presents the biggest threat to the current world order, one of American hegemony. Or, at least that's the plan.  Indeed, despite the professed Asian pivot, very little has actually happened on the ground. The United States has started withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Europe, but they have mostly gone home. The American military may have the biggest budget in the world, but they may have been over-reaching, not in terms of technology or military prowess, but in terms of willingness to engage all over the world and to b...

Britain is changing, for all purposes and intent, from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential one. The process would have started some years back. One can't really pin it down to a particular event, though Tony Blair, with his gift of presence, largely initiated the process. His successor in office, Gordon Brown, accepted and continued the process, first by insisting on a mid-term succession, and then making the election, wrong- headedly , a referendum on himself. In doing so, however, he lost; though not before a never before Leader's Debate on TV, where the three party leaders took carefully pre -selected questions from a carefully pre -selected audience and made their various political statements. Besides, the British Press intervened in the political process, as is the tradition, but this time, they were focused far more on personalities, particularly that of Gordon Brown, than on the parties. The process of transformation into a Presidential system has only hastened a...

Niall Ferguson makes an interesting point in his recent essay in Foreign Affairs. Titled ' Complexity and Chaos ', his central premise is that while we may tend to try to identify the reasons why empires collapse, these efforts are over-deterministic and suffers from 'narrative fallacy'. He attempts to illustrate this point by referring to the precipitous collapse of Rome, which happened in a matter of decades; or, that of Soviet Union, which withered away in a matter of days. Indeed, empires are complex systems, with many factors influencing one another and also the final outcome. While we tend to apply a sort of linear causation, which is equally employed to explain the rise of great powers as well as their decline, it is not the way the real world works. Professor Ferguson refers in context to the current prognosis about the decline of American empire, and contends that this may happen not in a series of logical steps as we seem to expect it, but with an abrupt, chao...

The news that overshadows any announcements made in the G20 this week is that Obama 'snubbed' Gordon Brown. The British media went on an overdrive on the leak that while Downing Street wanted an one-on-one with the President on the sidelines of the UN meet or the G20, no such meeting could be organized. Gordon Brown had to be satisfied with a walk and talk discussion with President Obama in the kitchen of the UN, though he had a 'substantial discussion', following the Downing Street communique. The British media obviously did not like this: President Obama failed to call Gordon Brown immediately after taking office, he landed up in London a few months later and gifted the Prime Minister a set of DVDs which did not run because of the wrong region coding and finally this! President Obama does not seem to have any time for the 'special relationship' that the British assume that they enjoy, and he is making it way too obvious for the British tastes. What is going o...

To someone who grew up in India, and knew what it meant to have below par healthcare and greedy doctors, and then lived in Britain and experienced NHS , world's greatest mystery is indeed why do Americans fear the idea of universal health care . The news have it that tens of thousands marched last week protesting against the government spending money on health care reforms, which will cover most people in America and possibly fix a broken system. But, truth be told - my wonderment did not start in the last few days; I have always found it baffling that Americans do not like the idea of government paying for health care , and label it 'socialism' for some unfathomable reason. I would have tucked it away in my brain as another peculiarity of the strange country which is possibly the most religious in the world but holds the right to own a gun so dear to its heart. But, America's refusal to let its government spend money on health care is more serious than that and ...

Cousins sometimes fight, but it gets too personal if the beloved NHS looks 'evil and Orwellian ' to politicians in America. Have the Americans not had enough of this myth about socialised medicine and still believe the stories that boards decide which medicine one can get? That's utter nonsense; for all the little disappointments I had with NHS in Britain - and I am an immigrant - I can't ever say it is evil, because it was mostly better than I expected. Agreed, I come from India. But then I am not benchmarking against the state hospitals in India, but against the better run private ones, where one can get world class treatment if they can afford it. More like America, I would say. Or the ones in Thailand and in Dubai, which is no less expensive than anywhere else in the world and no less luxurious. True, our local Mayday hospital may not stand in comparison in terms of luxury, but I have met some of the best professional doctors there, who were really committed to pa...