Us politics

In his recent cover story for The Spectator, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman talked about how, in the United States, China was beginning to take on the appearance of a new Cold War-style foe. Many Americans accuse China of stealing US jobs, of keeping the its currency undervalued, of exporting deflation by selling its products abroad at unfair prices, and of failing to meet its commitments to the World Trade Organisation. Two months ago, a poll from WSJ/CNBC showed that the majority of Tea Party activists oppose free trade – seeing China as the sole beneficiary of a free trade policy. But it is not only the Tea Party that

As the G20 summit begins in Seoul, the emphasis in much of the papers is on the economic hostility between America and China. The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote a cover piece on this matter for The Spectator two weeks ago, which we’ve reprinted here for the benefit of CoffeeHousers: In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in

You know the drill: the second part of the Times’s Bush serialisation (£) is out today, so here are ten more highlights from their coverage. The book is also out today, so we can, as the former President suggests, draw our own conclusions. 1) Watching the towers collapse. “I caught enough fleeting glimpses of the coverage to understand the horror of what the American people were watching. Stranded people were jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center towers. I felt their agony and despair. I had the most powerful job in the world, yet I felt powerless to help them. At one point, the television signal held steady

It is appropriate that the US president will be in India on the day that President Bush’s memoirs are published. For President Bush transformed the relations between these two countries, making a strategic alliance possible. This will turn out to be one of Bush’s most important legacies. A strong US-India relationship is vital if this century is going to be one that sees democracy advance. An alliance between the US and India would act as an effective check on China’s attempts to assert its power in Asia. However, I suspect that, for obvious and understandable reasons, most of the coverage of Bush’s memoirs will focus on his comments on 9/11

The backlash that Barack Obama is now experiencing seemed almost impossible when the neophyte senator swept into the White House. It was, in fact, predicted by some. In 2007 when Barack Obama was but an ambitious Illinois senator, American defence expert Kori Shake penned an essay called the Coming Crisis of High Expectations. It was about how the EU and the US would inevitably slide apart – but its message was broader. Beware of exorbitant expectations, she seemed to be saying. Reality hurts. How much it hurts will become clear today. It looks like a House of Representatives-sized hurt but not a Senate-shaped one. Harry Reid clung on to his

Russia and Nato are now allies, or birds of a feather at least. The Independent reports that the twentieth century’s opposed spheres will work together for stability in Afghanistan. The attendant irony is blissful. Two years ago, machismo raged between Nato and Russia over Georgia. Why the sudden accord? There are two schools of thought, both relating to the East’s inexorable rise. Russia can no longer determine Central Asia of its own accord: China co-opted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a long-time pillar of Russian power in Asia, to condemn Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – a sign, to Russian eyes at least, of China’s creeping influence in Central