Thread: Hostile Russia!

From The Times
August 22, 2008
Russian fighting machine is showing its age, say military analysts

Pictures of triumphant Russian soldiers sitting on armoured personnel carriers as they were driven through towns in Georgia will be among the lasting images of the seven-day war. But the victory did not tell the whole story, analysts said yesterday.

The ageing vehicles were so lightly armed and so uncomfortable and hot to sit in that the Russian soldiers felt safer perched on top. “At least they could then react quickly if there was an attack,” Colonel Christopher Langton, an expert on Russian armed forces at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said.

For an invading force from what used to be a military superpower, Russia's 58th Army did not look like a modern fighting unit. Victory came as a result of overwhelming numerical superiority and a textbook Soviet-style strategy based on detailed planning that leaves little room for flexibility. It was shock and awe by force of numbers, rather than by precision-guided weapons.

The Russians have learnt lessons from American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and from their own experiences in the Balkans, but the Georgia operation was old-style fighting with Cold War-era equipment.

The Russians arrived in Georgia not only with inadequately protected troop carriers but also lacking in airborne surveillance platforms to pinpoint targets for their gunners and bombers. They lost four aircraft, shot down by Russian-built Georgian anti-aircraft weapons. One of the aircraft was a Tupolev supersonic bomber (Tu22) known by Nato as a Blinder.

Colonel Langton said the Georgians had highly mobile anti-aircraft systems and were able to move them around to attack the Russian jets. Without the range of sophisticated unmanned aerial platforms that the Americans always deploy to watch over the battlefield, the Russians were flying blind into the war zone.

General Anatoly Kornukov, the former head of the Russian Air Force, told the Moscow-based Independent Military Review that the failure to destroy Georgian anti-aircraft capabilities before the Tu22 arrived in the region meant the crew of the bomber were sent to their deaths.

Losing aircraft at the hands of such a tiny opponent was unfortunate. Losing their overall commander, who suffered shrapnel wounds as he travelled in an armoured convoy in South Ossetia, the breakaway Georgian region, looked like carelessness. General Anatoli Khrulyov, the head of the 58th Army, was in a convoy that appeared to lack air cover.

Perhaps, most embarrassingly, the Russians discovered that some of the Georgian equipment was more advanced than their own. Georgia's T72 tanks and Su25 jet fighters were upgraded with night-vision equipment, something the Russians appeared to lack. “The Russian forces had to operate in an environment of technical inferiority,” Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Russian Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, told The Moscow Times.

The brief Georgia war, however, showed a Russian army that had improved significantly from the 1990s, when corruption, lack of leadership and poor funding hampered the once-mighty Red Army severely as it became bogged down in Chechnya, where largely conscript troops were deployed. In Georgia, the majority were professional soldiers, although the defence ministry in Moscow admitted there were some conscripts.

“The Russian army has shown that it is far more deployable than in the 90s, able to get frontline troops in and out in a short space of time,” Matthew Clements, from Jane's Information Group, said.

Russia has said that one of it priorities is to rebuild its army, and much of its new-found oil wealth has gone into weapons. The defence budget went up 22 per cent last year and Moscow plans to spend £100 billion in the next ten years on new hardware.

Russia formally informed Nato yesterday that it was halting military co-operation with the alliance until further notice. Nato foreign ministers had already announced after an emergency meeting in Brussels on Tuesday that no meeting of the Nato/Russia Council could be held until all Russian troops were withdrawn from Georgia.

Failings

— Ageing armoured personnel carriers lacked proper bolt-on armour to protect against anti-tank weapons

— No airborne unmanned surveillance platforms to spot Georgian anti-air defence systems

— No precision-guided missiles/bombs

— No night-vision or satellite-linked navigation equipment

— No protection for Tu22 bomber destroyed during reconnaissance

(Source: Times archives)

Russian fighting machine is showing its age, say military analysts - Times Online

At the same time, this is an interesting commentary acout the state of the Russian forces!

Investors quit Russia after Georgia war

By Charles Clover in Moscow

Published: August 21 2008 19:57 | Last updated: August 21 2008 19:57

Investors pulled their money out of Russia in the wake of the Georgia conflict at the fastest rate since the 1998 rouble crisis, new figures showed on Thursday.

Russian debt and equity markets have also suffered sharp falls since the conflict began on August 8, with yields on domestic rouble bonds increasing by up to 150 basis points in the last month.

The moves come as President Dmitry Medvedev faces pressure from business leaders concerned that the impact of the global credit crisis is starting to be felt in Russia.

Credit conditions are to be discussed at next month’s “summit of oligarchs”, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs meeting that former President Vladimir Putin held annually to discuss economic issues.

Vladimir Potanin, head of Interros, one of Russia’s largest industrial groups, has complained about the shortage of long-term credit to Mr Medvedev, the financial newspaper Vedomisti reported on Thursday.

The tight credit conditions have been exacerbated by foreign capital flight since the war. Data released by Russia’s central bank showed a drop in foreign currency reserves of just over $16.4bn in the week beginning August 8. This was one of the largest absolute weekly drops in 10 years, according to Ivan Tchakarov at Lehman Brothers.

The only larger drop in reserves since 1998 was $16.5bn in June 2006, when Russia paid off the bulk of its Paris club debt.

Gennady Melikyan, the central bank’s deputy chairman, said the sell-off had been triggered by the “political situation”, adding: “Foreigners are pulling out of some assets and stock markets and the exchange rate has suffered most. I think we have come close to the bottom now.”

While the value of the rouble has stayed relatively stable since the start of the conflict, with the help of central bank intervention, the stock market has fallen 6.5 per cent since August 7 and companies have found it harder to raise capital as investors demand sharply higher yields to buy their bonds to reflect the perceived risk.

The moves show that Russia’s economy, in spite of having one of the strongest national balance sheets in the world, is not immune to global market sentiment, which could end up being an important check on Kremlin decision-making.

“The million-headed hydra of the bourgeoisie has sent a signal: ‘change your course, comrades!’” wrote the popular internet columnist Dmitry Oreshkin on Åæåäíåâíûé Æóðíàë in a joking reference to the communist background of Russia’s leadership.

Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, said the capital flight had largely subsided and would be more than made up for by projected inflows. Russia’s foreign currency reserves, at $581bn, are the world's third largest. “There is nothing that has happened that could cause us to change any of our plans,” he said.

But the ebbing of foreign investor confidence will make it harder for Russian companies to raise debt and equity finance since foreign sources account for a disproportionate share of long-term capital for Russian corporate borrowers.

“The market is vulnerable to foreign capital flight,” said Kingsmill Bond at Troika Dialogue, the investment bank. “The major Achilles heel of the Russian market is that there is very little domestic long-term capital.”

Partly as a result of the Georgian conflict, yields on domestic rouble bonds have increased in the last month by between 75 and 150bp, Mr Bond said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT.com / World - Investors quit Russia after Georgia war

The effect on Russian economy!

DE BORCHGRAVE: From Tbilisi to Taliban

Arnaud de Borchgrave
Thursday, August 21, 2008

COMMENTARY:

The dog days of August suddenly became the guns of August. In Georgia, the United States and its NATO allies are learning you don't get into a resurgent Russia's space - let alone its face - with impunity.

Russia is back, just as the United States would be back had it lost the Cold War 20 years ago and watched Russia trying to extend its Warsaw Pact security blanket to the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. It was a case of elementary geopolitics, more than democracy vs. authoritarianism.

As Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute geopolitical experts in the United States, wrote: "The fighting in Georgia [was] not a warning about some new drift into great power confrontation or a new Cold War. It is a reminder that the world is not shaped by democratic values, international law, good intentions, globalism, rational bargains, or the search for dialogue."

The Center for Strategic and International Studies' senior strategic scholar, Mr. Cordesman added: "All of these elements do play an important role, but the classic power politics are just as real as ever. Nation-states still have the guns and missiles. More powerful states will bend or break the rules when they feel it is in their interest to do so and when there is no opposing power bloc that can pose a convincing threat."

With the United States already engaged in two theaters of war, a third war in Georgia against Russia was clearly a nonstarter. President Bush pushed too far on Russia's periphery, "at least a country, not just a bridge, too far." For the Kremlin, Mr. Bush was Don Quixote and his loyal servant Sancho Panza (Mikhail Saakashvili) proposing to fight injustice through chivalry.

Far more serious for the United States is Pakistan, one of the world's eight nuclear powers, sans Pervez Musharraf. A key non-NATO ally's pro-American president resigned to avoid impeachment. The country's fourth military ruler in its 60-year history was considered, unfairly, as President Bush's puppet. Pakistan's four provincial assemblies had voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Musharraf's resignation. "Go, Musharraf, go," had become a national refrain as the Federal Assembly and the Senate readied articles of impeachment and the national economy went into free fall with capital flight, inflation at 30 percent and nationwide food shortages.

In power since 1999, Mr. Musharraf, then the army chief, deposed Nawaz Sharif and dispatched him to exile in Saudi Arabia, only to see him return late last year - and lead the movement to topple him. After protracted negotiations, Mr. Musharraf hoped to play Mr. Sharif off against Benazir Bhutto, the country's most popular political leader who had been prime minister twice in her career. But she was assassinated and replaced as head of the country's largest party, the Pakistan People's Party, by Asif Zardari, her widower who had spent more than 11 years in prison on a wide variety of corruption charges, none of them leading to conviction.

Mr. Zardari is now positioning himself to succeed Mr. Musharraf. But he and his partner in the coalition government, Nawaz Sharif, are barely on speaking terms. There is still no government worth the name. Handpicked by Mr. Zardari, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, 56, has been presiding over a dysfunctional nongovernment (in a dispute with Mr. Zardari, Mr. Sharif's nine ministers declined to show up for work) since last March.

Mr. Gilani's recent trip to Washington to see Mr. Bush and his national security team left his American interlocutors puzzled about his knowledge of world affairs. His encounter with the Council on Foreign Relations raised more questions.

None of this would matter very much if it weren't for the future of NATO, now at stake, not in Georgia, but in Afghanistan, a country the size of France. A resurgent Taliban, based in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), is now surging in widely scattered parts of a narco-state.

Some 60,000 U.S. and NATO forces now in Afghanistan is a deceptive number as all of NATO's European forces - with the exception of the British and the Dutch - are hamstrung by caveats imposed by their parliaments against offensive operations.

Some 120,000 Pakistani troops (up from 100,000 in recent months) are now stationed in FATA. Strung out in more than 1,000 hilltop outposts overlooking infiltration routes in the valleys below, they complain about U.S.-supplied, obsolete night vision equipment that is useless by moonlight.

Inside largely lawless FATA, the population is for the most part sympathetic to the jihadist insurgency. The jihadists also have sympathizers among the Pakistani-trained Frontier Corps, drawn from the local population and officered by Pakistani regulars. There is a widespread belief in the U.S. intelligence community of collusion between Pakistan's intelligence services and the Taliban leadership.

Increasingly, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is launching drones, equipped with precision-guided bombs and missiles, against intelligence-generated targets of Taliban venues. This is seen in Pakistan as violations of their sovereignty, but there isn't much they can do about it, given that Taliban-in-Pakistan, a separate command from Taliban-in-Afghanistan, has ordered suicide-bombing from the Northwest Frontier Province to Sindh Province in the south.

The unknown in the Pakistani imbroglio is Nawaz Sharif and Saudi Arabia where he spent seven years in exile after being deposed by Mr. Musharraf's 1999 army coup. U.S. influence in Pakistan is waning while Saudi's is waxing. The kingdom's Wahhabi clergy funded many of Pakistan's 12,000 madrassas since long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Libya and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have also kicked in sizable sums for these one-discipline Koranic schools. Prior to Sept. 11, only three countries - Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan - recognized Taliban's tyrannic theocracy in Kabul.

A Pakistani source just back from the Khyber agency in FATA told this reporter on Aug. 18 that posters of Nawaz Sharif were much in evidence. The people he spoke with were "extremely happy that Musharraf and the U.S. are leaving the scene." Roadside stores were selling all types of arms (including rocket launchers) and ammo. Taliban in black turbans were roaming joyously in stolen vehicles.

In Islamabad, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the army chief, told a visitor he was determined to keep the army out of politics. Rapidly unfolding events and a seriously ailing body politic may force a "rethink."

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times and for United Press International.

Washington Times - DE BORCHGRAVE: From Tbilisi to Taliban

A commentary from Washington Times on the effect of the war in Georgia and some other trouble spots.

THE CAUCASUS
If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
Creators Syndicate - Celebrating 20 Years as a World-Class Syndicate Of Talent

The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.

Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.

If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.

From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.

Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter's response to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did -- nothing.

These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.

The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.

Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.

And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?

As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West? For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.

If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?

The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.

What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin's trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?

Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.

The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous over-extension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.

The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into its face, going about it exactly the right way.

Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.

A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.

©2008 Creators Syndicate


If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us? - 08/22/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

A commentary by one of America's well known political analyst!

One wonders indeed, would the US go to war over Georgia?

Would it bolster US interests if the US went to war with Russia?

Some more commentaries:

washingtonpost.com

Richard Holbrooke - What the West Can Do - washingtonpost.com

What next? - International Herald Tribune

World Politics Review | Tit for Tat: Russia Suspends Relations with NATO

The outlook on a triple-superpower world

It's time for Russia, China, and the US to work together.
By Helena Cobban

from the August 22, 2008 edition

Washington - The tectonic plates of world politics have been shifting for several years now, and on Aug. 8 the extent of this shift became plain. In Beijing, China held a stunning coming-out party as a world power. Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia, signaling loud and clear that it would no longer be taken for granted.

Russia is back. China has emerged. Suddenly, the United States isn't the world's only superpower.

How will these three big powers interact in the years ahead, and what does that mean for all of humanity?

The global architecture that's emerging will be very different from the cold war. That was a contest between two big powers with clashing visions of how the whole world should be organized, and it centered on a very costly – and risky – nuclear arms race. The emerging framework will probably be anchored by the three large powers and by four others (Europe, Japan, India, and Brazil). And in today's more globalized world, raw military power has become much less important; economic and "soft" power, more so.

Here's the good news: The interests of the world's leading powers are deeply entwined. China and Japan hold large amounts of US debt; Russia supplies much of Europe's energy needs; markets, investments, and production systems criss-cross national boundaries.

This interdependence makes open warfare among them less likely. A war would be devastating for the whole system – especially for the US, whose military is stretched very thin and whose economy relies on overseas oil and loans.

From the beginning of the crisis in Georgia, President Bush has recognized these facts. He has wisely refrained from doing anything there that might lead to a shooting war with Russia. That might not seem "right" to many Americans. But Georgia was certainly not blameless. Now Washington should work hard for a settlement – possibly a broad demilitarization – that can protect both Georgia's borders and minority rights.

But our strong concern over Georgia shouldn't distract Americans from doing some hard thinking about how to work with both Russia and China – and other governments – to address even bigger global challenges: nuclear proliferation (especially in Iran), violent transnational Islamism, and climate change – not to mention the continuing challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the new Big Three work together on these issues, each will bring to the table distinctive strengths, vulnerabilities, and national aspirations.

The US brings its record as a longstanding (if now troubled) economic powerhouse, its role in creating and sustaining the present world system, and its advocacy – some would say hypocritical advocacy – of human rights, freedoms, and democratic government. Many Americans still feel the US is, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "the last best hope of earth."

Russia comes as a country that, having shed an empire along with the communist ideas that underlay it, has found a new internal balance – fueled by energy wealth – and restored its national pride. For many Russians, the 1990s were a time of social upheaval and humiliation at the hands of foreigners. Now their main impetus is one of prickly self-assertion: "Don't take us for granted again!"

And China comes as a behemoth that has emerged quietly. For all its repressive internal policies, Beijing has generally played a softer hand externally, relying much more on building economic and cultural ties than on military expansion. Many Chinese are proud that their rulers have brought their country out of centuries of warlordism, poverty, and subjugation by foreigners to its presently powerful position. They recognize that this was achieved through engagement with other world powers, not open confrontation, and that trend looks set to continue.

Is the United Nations strong and flexible enough to host the kinds of globe-girdling discussions that now need to be held – among these three, but also including the rest of the world's peoples? I believe so, though Big Three policymakers will also need to find quieter places where they can brainstorm different options, probe one another's reactions, and build decent working relationships away from the public spotlight.

The UN Security Council will be one key forum where a durable settlement for Georgia gets hammered out. Both the US and Russia have veto power there, so the focus needs to be on negotiating a consensus text that both governments – as well as the people of Georgia – can live with. Consensus is also the working rule at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a 56-nation body that will probably also have a key role in midwifing and monitoring the peace accords for Georgia.

Do Russia's leaders care much whether they get kicked out of the "G-8" or denied entry to the World Trade Organization, as Bush administration officials have threatened? I doubt it. But they – and the rest of us – should care deeply about finding a way to deal with all the issues on today's global agenda without getting into a shooting war that would inflict unimaginable harm on us all.

• Helena Cobban, a former Monitor correspondent, is a "Friend in Washington" with the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Her latest book is "Re-engage! America and the World after Bush."

The outlook on a triple-superpower world | csmonitor.com

Another view of the aftermath of the Georgian affair!

Originally Posted by Ray

The effect on Russian economy!

I suppose the Chinese or Indians would step in, if only from government nudging than anything else.

EDIT: I suppose the Chinese or Indians would step in, if only from government nudging than anything else, sir.

AMERICA
Is China highlighting our `Sputnik moment'?

Posted on Fri, Aug. 22, 2008

By JAMIE METZL
Project Syndicate

Aug. 8, 2008, may someday be remembered as the first day of the post-American era. Or it could be remembered as another ''Sputnik moment,'' when, as with the Soviet foray into outer space in 1957, the American people realized that the country had lost its footing and decided it was time for the United States to get its act together.

There was no mistaking the power and symbolism of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympic Games on Aug. 8. That multimedia spectacular did far more than trace China's 5,000-year history; it was a statement that China is a major civilization that demands and deserves its rightful place in the global hierarchy.

There was also no mistaking the symbolism of seeing President Bush, waving cheerfully from his spot in the bleachers while Chinese President Hu Jintao sat behind what looked more like a throne. It is hard to imagine that China's government, which obsesses over every minute issue of diplomatic protocol, had not orchestrated this stark image of America's decline relative to the country to which it owes $1.4 trillion. It would be hard to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan accepting a similar relative position.

At the very same time that Bush was waving from the stands, Russia was invading Georgia, America's closest partner in the Caucasus. Russia's message to other West-leaning countries in the former Soviet world was clear: America cannot protect you.

Frighteningly, the Russians were likely correct. While the Iraq quagmire has made it difficult for America to project force around the world, America's growing debt, conflicts with friends and enemies alike, absence of any perceivable strategy for changing times, and its political system's seeming inability to take action to address these challenges have combined to turn America into a struggling giant.

Today, from Iran to Darfur to Zimbabwe to Georgia, the world is witnessing the effects of a budding post-American world, and the picture does not look pretty. As much as we all value the rise of new powers like China and India, it remains to be seen whether these countries will become as benevolent a power as America, however flawed, has been over the past half-century.

Neo-colonialism is returning to Africa, the global project of human rights is in retreat, and the world trade system is becoming far less open. Brutal dictators go unpunished because their interests are protected by large powers with stakes in their natural resources. Reversing this trend is not only in America's interest, but also in the world's interest.

To do so, Americans must identify and address the great challenges the United States faces, starting from the ground up.

• Fixing America's campaign finance structure, which leads to massive misallocations of government funds.

• Resuscitating America's wildly uneven and often moribund education system.

• Building an immigration system that actively recruits the most talented people from around the world via a fast track to U.S. citizenship.

• Developing a national energy policy that moves us far more quickly toward energy independence.

All of these would all be important steps in this direction. Working to rebuild the traditional bipartisan foreign-policy consensus would also make the United States a far more predictable partner to friends and allies around the world. And America must be a respectful partner in order to encourage rising powers like India and China to play more constructive roles in international affairs.

The world is not ready for the post-American era, and countries like China and India must play a far greater role in strengthening the existing institutions of world peace and, where appropriate, building new ones that can promote a positive agenda of security, dignity, rights and prosperity across the globe.

The Beijing Olympics could be remembered as a new ''Sputnik moment'' for the United States, inspiring the country to meaningfully face the music of a changing world. But America can make it so only by recognizing the great challenges it faces and taking bold steps toward addressing them, at home and with allies abroad.

Jamie Metzl is executive vice president of the Asia Society and a former member of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.

©2008 Project Syndicate

Is China highlighting our `Sputnik moment'? - 08/22/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

Restructuring needed?