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The victory gave the slaves nothing but a sense of the grandeur of their master’s empire. The great victory only reinforced their great slavery.

The chief Russian question is: If the fatherland is a monster, should it be loved or hated? Here everything has run together, inseparably. Long ago, a Russian poet put it this way: “A heart weary of hate cannot learn to love.”

Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads.

Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory. It is not a day of peace and remembrance for the victims. It is a day for rattling swords, a day of zinc coffins, a day of aggression, a day of great hypocrisy and great baseness.

In the 16th year of his rule, President Vladimir V. Putin has achieved everything a dictator could strive for. His people love him; his enemies fear him. He has created a regime that rests not on the shaky paragraphs of a constitution but on the unshakable laws of the vassal’s personal loyalty to his sovereign, from the bottom to the top of the pyramid of power.

My father was a Russian; my mother, a Ukrainian. But the Putin regime has set our peoples against each other. Sometimes, I think it’s good my parents did not live to see how Russians and Ukrainians are killing one another. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment

It is impossible to breathe in a country where the air is permeated with hatred. Much hatred has always been followed in history by much blood. What awaits my country? Transformation into a gigantic version of Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region?

Once again, the dictatorship is calling on its subjects to defend the homeland, mercilessly exploiting the propaganda of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Russia’s rulers have stolen my people’s oil, stolen their elections, stolen their country. And stolen their victory.

Syrian official and activists said government troops pushed into areas in the central province of Hama and south of Idlib in the boldest multipronged attack on rebel-held areas, benefiting from the Russian air cover. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Moscow

has mainly targeted central and northwestern Syria, strategic regions that are the gateway to Assad's strongholds in Damascus, and along the Mediterranean coast where Russia has a naval base.

The Islamic State group is not present in the areas where the ground fighting is underway.

he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)

It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.

Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.

A risk associated with Thucydides’s Trap is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.

The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”

More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.

Note that Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.

However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be—none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.

Four of the 16 cases in our review did not end in bloodshed. Those successes, as well as the failures, offer pertinent lessons for today’s world leaders. Escaping the Trap requires tremendous effort

Lee Kuan Yew, the world’s premier China watcher and a mentor to Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in March, the founder of Singapore put the odds of China continuing to grow at several times U.S. rates for the next decade and beyond as “four chances in five.

Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?

Could China Become #1? Manufacturer: Exporter: Trading nation: Saver: Holder of U.S. debt: Foreign-direct-investment destination: Energy consumer: Oil importer: Carbon emitter: Steel producer: Auto market: Smartphone market: E-commerce market: Luxury-goods market:   Internet user: Fastest supercomputer: Holder of foreign reserves: Source of initial public offerings: Primary engine of global growth: Economy: Most are stunned to learn that on each of these 20 indicators, China has already surpassed the U.S.

In 1980, China had 10 percent of America’s GDP as measured by purchasing power parity; 7 percent of its GDP at current U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 6 percent of its exports. The foreign currency held by China, meanwhile, was just one-sixth the size of America’s reserves. The answers for the second column: By 2014, those figures were 101 percent of GDP; 60 percent at U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 106 percent of exports. China’s reserves today are 28 times larger than America’s.

On whether China’s leaders are serious about displacing the United States as the top power in Asia in the foreseeable future, Lee answered directly: “Of course. Why not … how could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?” And about accepting its place in an international order designed and led by America, he said absolutely not: “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.”

As the United States emerged as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere in the 1890s, how did it behave? Future President Theodore Roosevelt personified a nation supremely confident that the 100 years ahead would be an American century. Over a decade that began in 1895 with the U.S. secretary of state declaring the United States “sovereign on this continent,” America liberated Cuba; threatened Britain and Germany with war to force them to accept American positions on disputes in Venezuela and Canada; backed an insurrection that split Colombia to create a new state of Panama (which immediately gave the U.S. concessions to build the Panama Canal); and attempted to overthrow the government of Mexico, which was supported by the United Kingdom and financed by London bankers. In the half century that followed, U.S. military forces intervened in “our hemisphere” on more than 30 separate occasions to settle economic or territorial disputes in terms favorable to Americans, or oust leaders they judged unacceptable

When Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s fast march to the market in 1978, he announced a policy known as “hide and bide.” What China needed most abroad was stability and access to markets. The Chinese would thus “bide our time and hide our capabilities,” which Chinese military officers sometimes paraphrased as getting strong before getting even.

With the arrival of China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, the era of “hide and bide” is over

Many observers outside China have missed the great divergence between China’s economic performance and that of its competitors over the seven years since the financial crisis of 2008 and Great Recession. That shock caused virtually all other major economies to falter and decline. China never missed a year of growth, sustaining an average growth rate exceeding 8 percent. Indeed, since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China

What Xi Jinping calls the “China Dream” expresses the deepest aspirations of hundreds of millions of Chinese, who wish to be not only rich but also powerful. At the core of China’s civilizational creed is the belief—or conceit—that China is the center of the universe. In the oft-repeated narrative, a century of Chinese weakness led to exploitation and national humiliation by Western colonialists and Japan. In Beijing’s view, China is now being restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests.

Last November, in a seminal meeting of the entire Chinese political and foreign-policy establishment, including the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi provided a comprehensive overview of his vision of China’s role in the world. The display of self-confidence bordered on hubris. Xi began by offering an essentially Hegelian conception of the major historical trends toward multipolarity (i.e. not U.S. unipolarity) and the transformation of the international system (i.e. not the current U.S.-led system). In his words, a rejuvenated Chinese nation will build a “new type of international relations” through a “protracted” struggle over the nature of the international order. In the end, he assured his audience that “the growing trend toward a multipolar world will not change.”

Given objective trends, realists see an irresistible force approaching an immovable object. They ask which is less likely: China demanding a lesser role in the East and South China Seas than the United States did in the Caribbean or Atlantic in the early 20th century, or the U.S. sharing with China the predominance in the Western Pacific that America has enjoyed since World War II?

At this point, the established script for discussion of policy challenges calls for a pivot to a new strategy (or at least slogan), with a short to-do list that promises peaceful and prosperous relations with China. Shoehorning this challenge into that template would demonstrate only one thing: a failure to understand the central point I’m trying to make

What strategists need most at the moment is not a new strategy, but a long pause for reflection. If the tectonic shift caused by China’s rise poses a challenge of genuinely Thucydidean proportions, declarations about “rebalancing,” or revitalizing “engage and hedge,” or presidential hopefuls’ calls for more “muscular” or “robust” variants of the same, amount to little more than aspirin treating cancer. Future historians will compare such assertions to the reveries of British, German, and Russian leaders as they sleepwalked into 1914

The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation

Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.

China’s economy depends heavily on cheap coal-fired electricity, and the country has a history of balking at outside reviews of its industries. China has also been plagued by major corruption cases, particularly among coal companies.

Domestic and external pressures have driven the Chinese government to take firmer action to curb emissions from fossil fuels, especially coal. Growing public anger about the noxious air that often envelops Beijing and many other Chinese cities has prompted the government to introduce restrictions on coal and other sources of smog, with the side benefit of reducing carbon dioxide pollution.

The climate deal will be a substantial, if rare, bright spot in a wide-ranging summit meeting that is expected to be dominated by potential sources of friction between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi.

The president plans to raise a number of contentious topics on Friday, White House aides said, including cyberattacks on American companies and government agencies, China’s increasingly aggressive reclamation of islands and atolls in disputed areas of the South China Sea, and Mr. Xi’s clampdown on dissidents and lawyers in China.

Under a cap-and-trade system, a concept created by American economists, governments place a cap on the amount of carbon pollution that may be emitted annually. Companies can then buy and sell permits to pollute. Western economists have long backed the idea as a market-driven way to push industry to cleaner forms of energy, by making polluting energy more expensive.

American administrations were often stocked with Southerners in key positions like secretary of state, secretary of the navy and president, and they refused to take serious action against the foreign slave trade. Thus they tacitly allowed the Stars and Stripes to be used as a cover. In the absence of a treaty the British were reluctant to interfere with American shipping; only American naval ships could stop this practice, and even when they acted officers would usually detain a ship only if slaves were on board (thus ships heading to Africa, even if they were obviously slavers, were let go).

The use of the American flag ended only after the Civil War began. In 1862, with Southern politicians finally gone from national politics, the United States at last signed a treaty with the British providing for mutual right of search on the high seas, an equipment clause and joint Anglo-American joint courts (called Courts of Mixed Commission) for adjudicating detentions. The fact that those courts never heard a single case detracts not at all from their impact.

most economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest. “The faster China grows, the higher grain prices go, the more people in China or India who upgrade to meat, the higher the tendency for Africa to starve,” he said.

Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”

Grantham, the public face of a company that manages more than $100 billion in assets, the very embodiment of a high-finance insider in blue blazer and yellow tie, has serious doubts about capitalism’s ability to address the biggest problems facing humanity.

When he reminds us that modern capitalism isn’t equipped to handle long-range problems or tragedies of the commons (situations like overfishing or global warming, in which acting rationally in your own self-interest only deepens the harm to all), when he urges us to outgrow our touching faith in the efficiency of markets and boundless human ingenuity, and especially when he says that a wise investor can prosper in the coming hard times, his bad news and its silver lining come with a built-in answer to the skeptical question that Americans traditionally pose to egghead Cassandras: If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?

Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” he said. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”

“Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”

“E.D.F. is educating people that dealing with climate change will be good for the economy and job creation. One of Jeremy’s insights is that we can make headway on the market side because higher commodity prices will enforce greater efficiency.”

Grantham says that corporations respond well to this message because they are “persuaded by data,” but American public opinion is harder to move, and contemporary American political culture is practically dataproof. “The politicians are the worst,” he said. “An Indian economist once said to me, ‘We have 28 political parties, and they all think climate change is important.’ ” Whatever the precise number of parties in India, and it depends on how you count, his point was that the U.S. has just two that matter, one that dismisses global warming as a hoax and one that now avoids the subject.

Grantham, who says that “this time it’s different are the four most dangerous words in the English language,” has become a connoisseur of bubbles. His historical study of more than 300 of them shows the same pattern occurring again and again. A bump in sales or some other impressive development causes people to get excited. When they do, the price of that asset class — South Sea company shares, dot-coms — goes up, and human nature and the financial industry conspire to push it higher. People want to hear good news; they tend to be bad with numbers and uncertainty, and to assume that present conditions will persist. In the financial industry, the imperative to minimize career risk produces herd behavior.

So it’s news when Grantham, who has built his career on the conviction that peaks and troughs will even out as prices inevitably revert to their historical mean, says that this time it really is different, and not in a good way. In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” he argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic history.” The market is “sending us the Mother of all price signals,” warning us that “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”

here’s the short version: “The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”

When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

Grantham is taking the Malthusian side in an ongoing debate about growth and commodity prices­. The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities.

He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”

“Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”

If one is to dismiss the role of Chritianity, one should at least take on the extremely rich literature associated with such names as Edward Grant, Toby Huff, James Hannam, and others, of which Morris shows not even a minimal awareness.

Morris's emphasis on a common cultural humanity is consistent with the officially established academic ideology of "diversity" (see Peter Wood's book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept), which is intended precisely to do away with the notion that Western nations have a distinctive, particular identity.

The argument that the Scientific Revolution was made possible by the "requirements" for new knowledge occasioned by travel and exploration across the Atlantic is true only in the sense that this was part of a much wider set of institutional and intellectual developments with a long background history. Geography always matters; it is always there, but there is no way one can draw a neat line of causation from geographical mobility and colonization to Newtonian physics. For a far better line of argumentation, see the newly release, and more intelligently argued _Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution_ (2010), by Toby Huff.

geography has shaped the development and the distribution of power and wealth in the world over the last 15,000 years, but at the same time the development of societies has changed what the geography means across this period. This is the core thing in the book."

next it is the British who are passively required to become inventive: "As the 18th century goes on, the British, in particular, find that the new wealth coming in from the new market economy is pushing up wages, making it rather difficult for the British to compete with some other European countries in their manufactures. The British, in particular, start facing the need to mechanize production and, ideally, to tap into new energy sources."

My view is the opposite; the Europeans who colonized the Americas and made revolutions in all spheres of life, in ancient, medieval, and modern times, were the most active, restless humans on earth. (And I might add that this disposition was nurtured by the geographical landscape of the European landmass which runs from the Pontic steppes all the way to the Atlantic). Morris's argument on British good luck in the possession of coal and colonies comes from A. G. Frank and Pomeranz; this is how Morris, apparently, integrates the long term and the short term, and, in this respect, goes beyond Diamond.

He finds it a bit alarming that Americans speak of decline as if it were a terrible thing; after all, "if you just substitute America and China, you get really remarkably similar kinds of things." It makes no difference if the US or China is the dominant power in the world.

This way of thinking is conterminous with Morris's geographical determinism and his claim that humans are all the same regardless of cultural background, religious beliefs and intellectual life. Americans and the Chinese are practically (in terms of what matters, economic growth and biological longevity) the same, or at least similarly enough that their difference don't really make much of a difference.

Yet another twist in that geography theme is that it changes meaning with changing technology. The Mediterranean Sea was at first an impediment to travel as were the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but once a technology had been created for coping with these natural impediments, they became highways for commerce and war. The same idea can be applied to many other things.

The deadline is the first milestone of a deal to rid Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal by the middle of 2014.

Western powers said only Syrian government forces could have carried out the attack, but President Bashar al-Assad blamed rebel fighters.

Under the international disarmament plan, US satellites and Chinese surveillance cameras are to track the progress of Russian armoured lorries as they carry the chemical weapons from 12 storage sites in Syria to Latakia, on Syria's Mediterranean coast.

Danish and Norwegian cargo ships will then transport the chemicals to a port in Italy, where they will be loaded on to the US Maritime Administration vessel MV Cape Ray and taken out into international waters before being destroyed by hydrolysis.

reports that the European ships are docked in Limassol, Cyprus on the day they are supposed to be escorting Syria's most dangerous chemicals out of the country.

The vessels left Limassol on Saturday but turned back on Tuesday after the hazardous containers failed to arrive for collection in Latakia. Now the plan is to refuel in Limassol before returning to sea in the coming days.

Co-operation on the chemical weapons removal programme was seen by many of those involved as a potential catalyst for broader peace negotiations in Syria.

Failing to meet this ambitious target, our correspondent adds, will demonstrate the difficulties involved in operating in a country with constantly changing frontlines - even with an international mandate and co-operation from President Assad.

"A number of external factors have impacted upon timelines, not least the continuing volatility in overall security conditions, which have constrained planned movements," a statement said.

The joint mission also noted that the Syrian government had met the 1 November deadline to destroy critical chemical weapons production equipment, which meant it could no longer weaponise the chemical agents at its storage facilities.

But deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf also acknowledged that it was a "complicated process", adding: "As long as we see forward progress, that what's most important here."

activists said a missile fired by government forces hit a bus in Aleppo, killing at least 10 people.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the dead included two children and that the missile was fired from a plane.

So, oddly, liberal supporters of abortion rights are allied, on this issue, with the conservative descendants of Confederate veterans. Both argue that license plates are private, not state, messages and are therefore protected.

We don’t agree. We think that Texas was right to reject the Confederate plates, but that North Carolina should have issued the abortion rights plates.How can this be? Are we merely siding with liberals in both cases? No.

Under constitutional doctrine, when private individuals express themselves, the government cannot discriminate based on their opinions. But when government is speaking (as in messages on public monuments, for example) it can and in fact must pick and choose.

Texas rightly sought to avoid the perception that the state was speaking in a way that is contrary to constitutional values like equal protection under the law. It wanted to avoid even the risk of seeming complicit in official nostalgia for the institution of slavery.

Why is the North Carolina case different? Unlike in the Texas case, there is no strong government interest in denying pro-choice messages. The right to terminate a pregnancy is currently enshrined in law; the government does not have an important interest in preventing citizens from advertising their existing rights.