John responds to Michael Fullilove's post about the 'global conservative movement' described by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

David Brooks' column suffers more from the sin of reading too much theoretical significance into what could easily be interpreted as ordinary old 'election cycle' change. On a number of scores the UK electorate seems to be growing tired of Labour, not least having been around for a long while; while the Cameroons (as some commentators rather fetchingly call them) seem to be getting their act together and looking plausible. In the Australian media one often sees this 'over-reading' on an almost daily basis which ignores the sheer contingency of events that drives political decision making. There is of course a proper place for trying to highlight key differences in approach between parties but it's probably a mistake to give them too much explanatory power — in some ways this is what 'the drive to the centre' has brought about.

Here's an interesting interview with Barack Obama about Zionism, Israel and the Palestinians. Obama is at his best here — highly articulate, reflective without being indecisive, and intellectually substantive.

It's catnip for wonks, and its one of the reasons Obama is so popular among political commentators — he speaks their language. The same phenomenon has been at work here in Australia, with the media lauding Kevin Rudd's grasp of Mandarin and his broader foreign policy experience. But at the level these leaders operate, I tend to think judgment and wisdom play as important a part as experience and subject-matter expertise. And on those grounds, the jury is still out on both men.

Will Hutton supplies the inevitable contrarianism to the US declinist thesis. It's a useful corrective, though as often happens in these debates, there is a straw man element to Hutton's argument. For instance, you'd be hard pressed to find Fareed Zakaria — the most prominent of the declinists (although we ought to come up with a less pejorative name, since Zakaria only argues America is in relative decline) — agreeing with Hutton's claim that 'the American economy is a busted flush'. Hutton says that's the 'fashionable view', though he supplies no names of those who hold it. Nor am I aware that anyone warning of the relative decline of the US against China would actually prefer this state of affairs, another Hutton inference.

Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, currently head of the International Crisis Group, has written an interesting op-ed about Burma and the 'Reponsibility to Protect' (R2P), a humanitarian intervention doctrine he helped create.

I'm inclined to think there is a case to be made that the responsibility to protect does apply to the present Burma situation. More...

David Brooks has a column in The New York Times entitled ‘The Conservative Revival’, which argues that American conservatives (who are on their way down) should learn from British conservatives (who are on their way up). It seems to me that Brooks is a little free and easy with his assessment of the state of the Tories: yes, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is looking vulnerable after last week’s local elections and Boris Johnson’s election as Mayor of London. On the other hand, the next general election is still years away and there are plenty of Tory weaknesses for Labour to exploit (including the Etonian background of much of the Opposition front bench). More...

Last year I was following the war crimes trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)* in The Hague. So when I visited a friend in Belgrade I was surprised to see the face of one of the Tribunal's most well-known accused, Vojislav Seselj, splashed over every available piece of billboard space in the busy capital. Despite the fact he is an accused war criminal and in custody in The Hague, Seselj remains President of the Serbian Radical Party, which won around 29% per cent of the vote in yesterday's Serbian elections. More...

The debate over America's decline and the emerging global order continues on the blogosphere (my previous post here), with the most interesting new contribution coming from Jim Manzi at The American Scene. He argues that what observers like Fareed Zakaria think is new about the global order — relative American decline against the rise of new Asian powers — is not new at all: 'US share of world GDP in 1945 is estimated to have been about 50%; this more than halved between 1945 and 1980.' As Manzi points out, we heard talk of US decline in the 1980s with the rise of Japan, and it came to very little. More...

My reaction to the Putin-Medvedev photo Michael blogs about was quite different. Medvedev's short overcoat was certainly a pretty daring choice in the constrained world of political couture, but I thought rather handsome. And it may have been intended as a message to the world that Medvedev is a younger, more modern and perhaps more European figure than the man he succeeds.

Similarly, I thought the Condoleezza Rice black leather outfit Michael refers to was a masterful bit of theatre. She wore that outfit only a month after being sworn in as Secretary of State, and it was a bold statement of self-confidence and renewal in that office. It's a shame she has reverted to the kind of pastel conservatism that would suit a much older woman.

Peter from Illinois writes about my camel export post:

Egad, sir. An undervalued resource, useable for meat and dairy, wool and fertilizer. Properly bred in Australia they might be domesticated for plowing. Gourmet restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne might feature them as a change of pace. At the race track they probably run faster than some of the nags I have wagered on.

Without wanting to sound too defensive, Peter, Australia did move beyond plowing with beasts of burden some time ago. And horrifying as it always seems to foreigners, many Australians (and their pets) enjoy kangaroo meat rather than camel.

UPDATE: Drastic action needed to cut feral camel numbers.

A few years ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice caused the world’s diplomats to choke on their Ferrero Rochers when she appeared at Wiesbaden Army Airfield in Germany dressed in a long black military-style coat and black leather boots.

Now another world figure, this time new to the global stage, has defied couture expectations. The front page of today’s New York Times features a photo of the outgoing and incoming Russian presidents. Vladimir Putin is wearing a standard-issue dark political overcoat, but his replacement and protégé Dmitri Medvedev sports something that looks like a car coat, which doesn’t even reach his knee. It’s the kind of thing you might see on Liam Gallagher; it’s hard to imagine a Soviet leader wearing it on the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square during the May Day parade.

The potency of the image from Moscow lies in its relationship to reality. Medvedev has just been sworn into a fearsome office, yet beside Putin he looks like a boy in short pants.

Last week I linked to Steve Clemons' Washington Note, where a debate was starting on the proposition that the US is in relative decline in global affairs, thanks to the rise of India and China. As Clemons said, the debate about American decline does seem to be high on the list of priorities among global 'big thinkers', with new books from Kishore Mahbubani and Newsweek's foreign editor, Fareed Zakaria (you can find a long extract from Zakaria's book here, and an interesting rejoinder here).

The best contribution to this debate I have read so far came overnight on Clemons' blog, from John Ikenberry. More...

• Two blog posts about China's middle class: the first notes the proliferation of luxury brand outlets to 'second tier' Chinese cities, while the second warns that you shouldn't read too much into luxury goods sales.
• I've just discovered Jotman.com, which looks to be one of the better English-language blogs about South East Asian politics. It carries a round-up of blog coverage of the Burma cyclone.
• Who is Bobby Jindal? A 36 year-old Indian-American governor who might just be John McCain's running mate.

Chris responds to my post of yesterday:

I have lived in the USA in three separate periods totalling some five years and spent most of my working life in some form of business relationship with US companies and people. I love them dearly but I also view them as the most devious bastards (term of endearment from an Aussie) on this earth. As a German friend of mine said when also working in Washington DC, ‘remember that Americans invented the game of poker’.

I would say that, yes, Americans are self-critical but in the context of an unwavering belief in their pre-eminence in most things. The display of humility you mentioned is more an indirect attempt to elicit your response, for at least two reasons: More...

CIA Director Michael Hayden recently gave a powerhouse speech about global trends, in which he says that one of the surest paths to an intelligence breakdown is a failure of imagination. It is indeed common for political experts of all kinds to assume that the future will look more or less like the present, with a few incremental changes of a similar kind to those already seen. Seldom do we anticipate (much less prepare for) radical change. And it's a tendency not confined to the political world: in a must-read interview, Google co-founder Larry Page expresses his frustration at failures of imagination.

In honour of this rather fascinating essay on The Godfather as a metaphor for American foreign policy, I present The Godfather in Five Seconds. Enjoy your weekend.

BTW, if you're wondering about my choice of title, it's explained here.

BTW 2: Judah Grunstein at World Politics Review calls the Godfather essay 'the most creative foreign policy analysis I've come across in a long time.' He has obviously never read this.

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) had this reminder that just over a year ago, the Court issued arrest warrants against two Sudanese: the former Minister of State for the Interior and a Janjaweed leader. They were charged with 51 counts of alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Both are free in Sudan and it’s not as if the Sudanese government doesn’t know where they are. In fact, cocking a snook at the international community and the people of Darfur, Sudan has appointed one of the accused Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs. More...

• Steve Clemons invites discussion on the next fault line in the American foreign policy debate: boosters versus declinists.
• Time magazine's China blog has analysis of Beijing's announcement that it will talk to the Dalai Lama.
• 'The DVD that will save America' is a year-old review of a great film I just got around to seeing. Idiocracy tackles a threat to the West far greater than terrorism, nuclear proliferation or financial meltdown: our own stupidity.
• Details in words and pictures of North Korean denuclearisation (pdf).

As Stephen Grenville pointed out on Monday, one of the reasons for the current global food shortage is growing prosperity. As people get richer they tend to eat more meat, and it takes eight kilograms of grain (or is that seven, or maybe 16?) to produce a kilo of beef. Whatever the exact figure, it is clearly always going to cost a lot more (in terms of nutrition) to raise an animal for slaughter than you will ever get back in meat. Unless, perhaps, you grow the meat in a lab.

Animal rights group PETA has just announced a US$1 million prize for anyone who can grow chicken meat in a lab and bring it to the market, without killing any animals. The use of cash prizes seems to be an increasinly popular way to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and for a lobby group like PETA, it is a refreshing alternative to the usual fixation on government intervention. More...

• More trouble ahead: The Dalai Lama has been named an honourary citizen of Paris, and will be in France during the Olympics. There are already signs of Chinese popular resentment against the French.
• Mind you, there is some respite for China: the Olympic torch has arrived in Pyongyang. Pro-Tibet protests are considered unlikely. (Correction: the torch arrives in Pyonyang on 28 April)
• Foreign Policy's Passport blog and UN Dispatch are co-hosting a blog 'salon' about the future of UN peacekeeping. 
• Cool video of a Russian fighter allegedly shooting down a Georgian unmanned air vehicle (UAV). Good information operations from the Georgians too, setting themselves up as victims of Russia's bullying.