And who does that leave?  Don’t look to Vladimir Putin, who is helplessly watching the ruble collapse and his economy slide.  And how about Hu Jintao, who presides over the authoritarian superstate that supposedly owns this century?  He cannot even stop his subjects from smuggling out billions of dollars a day to the outside.  As Tom Friedman, one of the apostles of American decline, wrote this morning, there is only one place that people are looking for answers at this moment.  “Only the U.S. can lead the world,” he quotes a South Korean official as saying. “We have never had a more unipolar world than we have today.”

That assessment is not quite right, because America was relatively more powerful in the moments immediately following the Second World War than it is today.  Yet the South Korean gets at a fundamental truth.  In Friedman’s “flat world,” America was being marginalized by globalization and authoritarian states were on the march.  In this worldwide crisis, however, no one feels the authoritarians have any answers.  In short, there is no nation but the United States to turn to, and that’s more true than it was six decades ago, when some thought the Soviets had a fine model.  “At no time in the last 50 years have we ever felt weaker, and at no time in the last 50 years has the world ever seen us as more important,” Friedman notes.

So as humanity turns from prosperity to poverty, Washington has an opportunity to put the international system back on course.  “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Ronald Reagan told us.  Yes, now would be an excellent time to do so.

So what does the Times do?  It issues a call for an agreement among the United States, Britain, France, and Russia — the four nations operating missile subs in the Atlantic — to assign cruising depths.  As the paper notes, this would be like restricting airplanes to certain altitudes.

This is a truly atrocious idea.  First, an agreement of this sort would be unenforceable. The collision occurred because missile boats are silent and essentially untrackable.  So how are we going to detect violations?  Second, collisions are extremely rare — this was the first between two nuclear subs — and NATO on its own could further reduce a low risk by ensuring closer coordination among its member states.  Third, the security of the United States depends on masking the location of its missile subs.  Therefore, the last thing we should be doing is giving adversaries a clue as to where we are lurking in the ocean.  Not every problem in this world requires a treaty.

I believe in arms agreements, and I believe the United States is at risk as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world.  But as long as they exist, we need to do all we can to ensure that nations wishing us harm cannot locate the six or so missile boats that are on patrol at any one time.  The existence of our nation critically depends on keeping them hidden.

Okay, Mrs. Clinton, time for an elementary lesson in economics.  It’s true our economies share an “interconnection” as you put it, but that does not mean we will share the same fate.  On the contrary, our economies are bound to move in opposite directions in the months ahead.

China earns large current account surpluses, and we run large deficits.  The current global downturn will, not surprisingly, treat us differently.  In the Great Depression, perhaps the closest analogy to what we are seeing today, the surplus countries had the hardest time adjusting.  Why?  Because they could not continue to sell their products to a slumping world.  And this pattern is repeating itself: even in the initial stages of the current crisis, the Chinese economy is manifesting severe problems.  January, for example, was the third consecutive month China’s exports fell.  Export falls are especially worrisome for Beijing because an extraordinarily high 38 percent of its gross domestic product is derived from sales of products abroad.  China, unfortunately for the Chinese, has an economic model particularly ill-suited to the current economic environment of plunging growth and trade.

The United States, unlike China, has the means to solve its own problems.  American consumers are cutting way back, which means our trade deficit is falling as imports decline.  As a consequence, our savings rate is increasing.  We may not be able to fund all our government’s need for cash at this moment, but we are moving in that direction.  And unlike China, we would do relatively well if the global economy fell apart.

I’m not arguing we should reject international commerce or adopt protectionist measures — in fact, I believe the opposite — but we do need to correctly understand our situation today.  So, Madame Secretary, we will not rise or fall together with China.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Yang was lying, of course.  But that’s not the point.  Clinton knew he was lying, and that’s not the point either.  The point is that Yang knew that Clinton knew he was lying but did not challenge him.  The Chinese, in short, were putting forth their version of reality and Americans were accepting it.  Minister Yang knew he had just humbled the United States.

“You know, a lot of international diplomacy is a head game,” Mrs. Clinton said on Friday before arriving in Beijing.  She’s right, and the Chinese have just outmaneuvered her.  She thought she could buy their good will by accepting an obvious deception.  They, however, interpreted her acceptance of their outrageous views as a sign of weakness.  As one Indian observer recently remarked, Beijing now perceives the United States to be “a beakless eagle.”  Abe Greenwald noted on Friday that the issue of human rights in China cannot be separated from the supposedly “broader issues.”  He’s correct because the Communist Party, which has yet to shed the mentality of its early years, only respects strength.

Mrs. Clinton has lost the initial round of the “head game,” so don’t expect Beijing to be cooperative in the near future.  President Obama’s diplomacy in China has just gotten off to a truly bad start.

The New Star, flying a Sierra Leone flag, was leaving Russian waters and apparently ignored warning shots.  What happened next is in dispute.  Moscow’s story is that the ship kept trying to outrun two Russian coast guard vessels, which eventually opened fire.   The Russians, it appears, fired more than 500 rounds at the bow and the stern of the New Star.  An early Interfax report claims the Chinese ship actually responded to the warning shots by turning around but then sank in rough seas.

In any event, the Chinese are outraged, the Foreign Ministry saying that Russia’s attitude was “hard to understand and unacceptable.”  Moreover, Beijing claims the Russian ships did not do enough to save the crew.  Moscow, for its part, says the New Star’s captain “behaved extremely irresponsibly” and “is fully to blame.”

The Chinese and Russian governments have many reasons to put this incident behind them.  They see the world in common terms and share many interests.  Both of them are deeply suspicious of the West and want to reorder the international system.  They share many friends.  They are developing trade ties.  They call themselves “strategic partners.”

But that’s only half the story.  Almost two decades of economic development have made both the Dragon and the Bear prosperous and, as a result, increasingly arrogant, assertive, and self-centered.  Now, the global downturn has shaken their economies especially hard and made their governments vulnerable.  So both Beijing and Moscow have reasons to create a foreign enemy to rally their restive populations.  Even as fraternal communists they were often trading barbs and sometimes gunfire.  And after this month’s New Star incident, they just might turn on each other again.

Is that so?  Perhaps he should have a conversation with his boss, Rick Wagoner, who continually maintains bankruptcy is not a good idea for vehicle companies.  Says the General Motors chief, “We don’t have any strategy or plan to file for bankruptcy.”

Of course that’s right – General Motors does not have a plan for anything other than accepting more Federal money.  On Tuesday, it asked for a $16.4 billion “loan,” a sum on top of the $13.4 billion approved in December.  And it will undoubtedly ask for more funds soon because, among other things, Americans are not buying vehicles, the United Auto Workers is not making meaningful concessions, bondholders are intransigent, and GM’s managers are idiots.  Today, David Brooks, in a column entitled “Money for Idiots,” writes that “sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent.”  Maybe that’s right, but, as Saab showed us today, there are alternatives to enormous and inadequate bailouts.  Oh, almost forgot: Saab’s bankruptcy filing immediately followed a rejection from the Swedish government for a bailout.

So perhaps we should conclude that what’s good for Saab is also good for General Motors.  And that, by the way, would also be good for the United States.

“It’s our desire to have more exchanges with the Chinese,” said Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, this week.  “We want to do more with them.”  That’s an extraordinarily bad idea, especially because the exchanges have essentially been one-way giveaways of information and know-how to the Chinese.  Yet Keating keeps on trying.  In 2007, he said the United States would be willing to help the People’s Liberation Army Navy — yes, that’s what they call it — build aircraft carriers. Now, he says the U.S. Navy would be willing to “work with” Beijing’s carriers when they are built.  In other words, he is willing to help the Chinese learn things that would take them years to figure out on their own.

Unfortunately, our admirals think they are so far ahead of the Chinese navy that they can afford to be generous with information.  Moreover, they have a seemingly unshakable belief that they can establish stable relations with the Chinese even though Beijing’s goal is to remove American forces from Asia and surrounding waters.  Our admirals apparently trust their goodwill gestures will be reciprocated when past years’ events show the opposite.

So here’s a newsflash for you, Admiral Keating: The Chinese are configuring their navy to sink your ships.  You can help them do that, but I suspect most Americans would not think this is a good idea.

So much for the easy part.  The next stopover is Seoul.  There, the secretary of state will have to confront one of the planet’s most vexing problems, North Korea.  No nation has ever had satisfactory relations with Pyongyang.  Consider the United States. Over six decades, the most abhorrent regime in history has, at almost every turn, bested the world’s strongest power.  Whether bearing carrots or carrying sticks, Republicans and Democrats have failed to accomplish all but minimal objectives.  Lack of achievement, unfortunately, is a bipartisan legacy.

Selig Harrison, writing in the Washington Post yesterday, unwittingly outlined how badly we have failed.  The Korea specialist correctly noted that Pyongyang has taken a hardline turn in recent months and then attributed the change in approach to Kim Jong Il’s stroke last August.  The medical excuse sounds a bit too convenient — it is more likely Mr. Kim never contemplated giving up his most destructive weaponry and recent negotiations on verification have flushed out his real intentions.   In any event, Harrison, perhaps America’s leading advocate of soft policies toward Pyongyang, suggested we just live with a nuclear North Korea.  Unfortunately, some in the Obama administration feel the same way.

Does Mrs. Clinton?  There are strategies for defanging Kim and taking away his arsenal of nukes — such as squeezing him harder and putting China on the spot for supporting Pyongyang.  When America’s top diplomat rolls into Seoul tomorrow, she will have to begin to tip her hand as to how she will deal with the seemingly impossible Kimist state.  Up to now, Clinton has gotten away with saying that a North Korean missile launch would be “very unhelpful” and repeating generalities about reaching out to Pyongyang — statements made yesterday from Tokyo — but that won’t be good enough when she is on Korean soil.  Maybe it’s not fair for the South Koreans to demand specifics so soon into her tenure, but no one should have expected Kim to give her time to formulate policy.

And when it comes to Washington’s Korea policy, she has to get it right the first time.  After all, the Iranians, about a year away from building a nuclear device of their own, are watching to see whether she can disarm Pyongyang.  Mrs. Clinton’s trip gets serious tomorrow.

In a sense, the pudgy revolutionary is right.  Yesterday’s referendum was a setback of enormous proportions for representative governance and capitalism in Venezuela.
Chavez evidently wants to be president for life, but in his public pronouncements he talks about leading the country until 2049, when he will be 95.  “Effectively this will become a dictatorship,” says opposition leader Omar Barboza.  Just about everyone agrees.  Now in control of the government, Boss Hugo can do what he wants.

Maybe.  The one thing Chavez cannot do is control the price of oil, which makes up 94 percent of his country’s exports and produces about half of the national government’s revenue.  His current budget assumes oil will average $60 a barrel, but it is now about $37.  Global energy markets have figured out that we’re in a severe and long downturn, so oil prices will stay low.  Even if producers can force prices up, they will be able to do so only with drastic production cuts, which will end up reducing proceeds to governments like Venezuela’s.  The problem is even worse than that for Chavez because his “21st-century socialism” has led to results that 20th century socialists would find familiar.  For instance, his state oil company, PDVSA, is laying off workers and cannot meet its payroll or pay bills.

Now that Chavez has even more power, he is bound to go overboard and bring his nation to ruin even faster.  The dominant narrative is that the global downturn is proof that capitalism must be tamed, so the world needs another lesson in the power of socialism to destroy wealth and ruin societies.  Let’s all join in thanking President Chavez, who will remind us why collectivism does not work.

Everybody’s talking about what she’ll be doing on the trip, but it’s just as important to say what she will not.  She will not, for instance, be going to two places that should have been on the itinerary: Canberra and New Delhi.  To her credit, Mrs. Clinton will be reassuring American allies Japan and South Korea by her visits there.  Yet she is not making the effort to go to the most reliable friend in the region, Australia.  In a time when Washington will need all the support it can get in Asia, the omission is a mistake, especially because Obama’s Washington needs to renew the ties that George W. Bush and John Howard, then prime minister, worked so hard to strengthen.  Skipping Australia is especially sensitive because Mrs. Clinton is going out of her way to visit Indonesia, with which Canberra has often had uneasy relations.

A bigger omission, in many senses, is India.  The most important foreign policy legacy of the Bush years will undoubtedly turn out to be the beginning of a strategic relationship with New Delhi.  The partnership of the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful one can be the most important force for peace and prosperity in the world.  The Indians do not want to be used by the United States, but they have so many common interests with Americans that the unspoken alliance is a natural one.

Instead of going to New Delhi, Mrs. Clinton is headed to the Chinese capital.  The stopover will produce a lot of nice words but no results, or at least none favorable to us.  Just weeks in office, the Obama administration has had insufficient time to think through its China policy or even name its ambassador to Beijing.  The best the secretary of state can hope for from her China stopover is that she leaves without making any blunders of lasting significance.

If she really wants to accomplish anything with the Chinese during her time in office, Mrs. Clinton should show them that the United States is prepared to work closely with the one nation they truly fear.  So the route to an effective China policy runs through New Delhi.  That’s just one of the many reasons why the new secretary of state should have gone there on her first trip.

Virtually every American pundit says an ailing United States has little leverage over a rising China.  That, in short, is wrong.  For one thing, China’s economy is extraordinarily dependent on exports: a staggering 38 percent of its economic output is derived from sales abroad.  Moreover, Beijing’s bulging surpluses have been built on numerous violations of its World Trade Organization commitments and predatory currency practices.  The Chinese, therefore, are extraordinarily dependent on Washington’s lax enforcement attitude.

Saying we have little influence over Beijing — China’s many friends love to repeat this mantra — is essentially unilateral disarmament on our part.  We have the weapons — figuratively speaking, of course — to get the Chinese to do the right thing.  It’s just that we have persuaded ourselves not to use them.

We want Beijing to, among other things, stop supporting genocide in Darfur, stop transferring nuclear weapons technology to Iran, and stop supplying rockets and other instruments of death to terrorists in the Middle East and Central Asia.  And yesterday, the Commerce Department just gave the Obama administration 266.3 billion reasons why we can do something about all these irresponsible acts-as well as a few others.

Undoubtedly, both of them came out with their gloomy statements so they could get what they wanted — more resources for lending in the case of the IMF and passage of the stimulus bill for the American president.  Yet that does not mean they are wrong.

Many analysts shy away from categorizing the downturn in stark terms.  They say, for instance, that economic indicators are not nearly as bad as they were in the 1930s.  Of course, they’re right, but that is only because we are in the initial stages of the crisis.

The irony is that if Messrs. Strauss-Kahn and Obama are right — and they are — then the relief measures they are seeking are inadequate.  The truth is that virtually nothing multilateral institutions or governments can do at this time can fix the fundamental causes of the downturn.  Governments can — and should — relieve pain by measures such as unemployment insurance, but all their grander schemes will only make things worse.  Government measures like President Bush’s TARP have created problems, and President Obama’s schemes are no more promising than his predecessor’s.  His costly stimulus bill will not stimulate — or its positive effects will be lost as the crisis gathers momentum — and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s bank plan is a disaster, and not just because he did not provide sufficient detail yesterday.

So agree with President Obama when he says this is no “run-of-the-mill recession.”   In fact, it is no recession at all.  And that’s why his government cannot do much about it for the next few years, perhaps for the next half decade.  Although Alan Greenspan is now discredited, we still believe in Greenspan-like figures implementing plans, making adjustments, solving problems.  Yet because the downturn is as severe as Strauss-Kahn and Obama have just told us, only “markets” — in reality, the world’s six billion people all trying to better their lot — can get us out of this.

There are some who think the United States, by not acting, hoped other nations would get involved in what Dyer calls an “anti-piracy gaggle,” the “biggest naval free-for-all in modern history.”  If that was our strategy, we have invited troublemakers — like Russia, China, and even Iran — into those troubled waters.

And in so doing we have intentionally abandoned our responsibility as the guarantor of the sea lanes and legitimized the role of our adversaries.  In short, we have not only marginalized ourselves, but we have also boosted the worst states in the world today.  This is not how the United States maintained order last century.

As Yale’s Paul Kennedy has written, some nations fail after “imperial overstretch.”  In our case, it looks as if Dyer may be right and we will fade away after empowering those who wish us harm.  We will not, as we hope, make autocrats responsible members of the international community by giving them a role in maintaining order.  We will just make them better able to accomplish their aims.

Khan sold nuclear technology to terrorist states Libya, North Korea, and Iran.  Yet that does not necessarily make him a terrorist, nor does it make his country a terrorist state.  What does, however, is Islamabad’s support for the ongoing series of attacks against India.  It appears, for instance, that the November raid on Mumbai was planned at the highest levels  of the Pakistani intelligence services, specifically the ISI, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.  Islamabad has long supported and protected Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the horrific attack, and Lashkar’s front organization, Jammat-ud-Dawa.  Pakistan is also behind terrorism in India’s Kashmir and in other parts of its rival.  Yet Pakistan is not one of the four nations-Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria-currently on the State Department’s list of terrorism-sponsoring states.

Nor is China, which has continually backed both Iran’s campaign of terror against Israel and Pakistan’s campaign against India.  The terrorists attacking Mumbai used Chinese equipment — the distinctively blue Type 86 grenades, manufactured by China’s state-owned Norinco, which has continually supplied terrorists operating inside India.  China has given Pakistan most of the ordinance that the ISI gives to terrorists.  Almost all of the sophisticated communications equipment used by terrorists in India, especially Kashmir, is Chinese-made and was routed through the Pakistani army, which acted as a conduit.  Training the Chinese give to Pakistani personnel is leached to terrorists-with Beijing’s knowledge.  Furthermore, China blocked U.N. sanctions against and censure of Lashkar and Jammat in April and May 2006, May 2007, and August 2008.  And Beijing has worked with terrorist groups, including the Taliban, outside South Asia.

If we are serious about fighting all terrorism, then we need to add Pakistan and China to the State Department list.  And if we’re not serious, we will surely lose the global struggle.  How can we prevail if we cannot even identify our adversaries?

The move is just the last of a series of Russian initiatives to reclaim leadership in Central Asia and comes on the heels of a major victory for the Kremlin.  On Tuesday, Kyrgyzstan’s president, speaking from Moscow, announced his country was expelling the United States from the Manas air base, a vital link in the supply of NATO forces in Afghanistan.  The Kremlin insisted that Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s base-closure decision had nothing to do with Russia providing Bishkek $150 million in aid and $2 billion in loans as well as forgiving $180 million of its debt.  The Russians have always resented the presence of American forces in what they believe should be their sphere of influence, and now they are tightening their bonds in the region to exclude others.

“One Cold War was quite enough,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously said two years ago as he tried to damp down tensions with Moscow.  Unfortunately, we don’t get to determine whether there will be another multi-decade struggle with the Kremlin.  There is one going on at this moment whether we choose to recognize it or not.

Are we completely clueless?  We still have a we-are-the-only-superpower view of the world and maintain a we-can-afford-to-ignore-hostile-acts approach.  The conciliatory tactics of the last few years failed to achieve a sustainable relationship with Moscow, so the change I can believe in is recognizing that our engagement policies have failed.  In short, we need to understand that Moscow, through a byproduct of its initiatives, is indirectly aiding the Taliban, and we should treat the Russians accordingly.  The watchword for the coming years should be “reciprocity.”

The Taepodong-2 is thought to have a range of a little over 4,100 miles, which means it can reach Alaska.  A 1998 Taepodong test ended with debris falling in that state or just off its coast.  The version on the train undoubtedly has a much longer range.  So if you live in Washington, Oregon, or California, now would be a good time to see if anyone will sell you insurance for scrap metal falling from the sky.  A few years ago, some analysts thought a new version of the Taepodong could then hurl several hundred pounds up to 9,300 miles, enough to reach most of the rest of the United States.  Of course, we won’t know how far North Korea’s missiles can fly until we witness a successful test.

Korea experts are saying Pyongyang is trying to get the attention of an Obama administration distracted by Gaza and the deepening global downturn.  Perhaps that is what Kim Jong Il is doing.  Yet his miserable regime is always improving its missiles, whether or not his relations are worsening with Washington, as they now are.  Ari Fleischer, when he was President Bush’s spokesman, said: “Technology and time mean that regimes like North Korea will increasingly have the ability to strike at the United States.”

And it’s not just the regime in Pyongyang that we should worry about.  Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his country put its first domestically produced satellite into orbit.  At this moment, we do not know if the claim is accurate, but a U.S. defense official, speaking anonymously, confirmed that the Iranian missile did in fact reach space.

Premier Wen wants Obama to call, but the American leader doesn’t have to.  We already know how the Chinese are going to make their decision regarding purchases of American debt.  There are two parts to the Chinese premier’s answer.  The first is “China’s own need.”  Up until the global crisis, 38 percent of the Chinese economy related to export sales.  In 2007, the last year for which figures are available, all but $5.9 billion of China’s overall trade surplus or $262.2 billion related to sales to the United States.  So China is forced, as a practical matter, to recycle its export earnings into dollar-denominated assets if it wants to keep selling into the American market.

The second part of Premier Wen’s answer is “keep the security of our foreign reserves and the value of them.”  Beijing is sitting on top of substantial unrealized losses on its purchases of American equities, and it would also have had unrealized losses on its purchases of non-Treasury debt had the Bush administration not rescued Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  So, to avoid even more losses, the Chinese appear to be restricting their purchases of American debt to the safest instruments around, obligations of the U.S. Treasury.

As American consumers buy less and save more-imports fell a record amount in November and registered a large fall in the last quarter of last year-China will have fewer dollars to invest in Treasuries.  Chinese purchases of American debt will drop accordingly.  Premier Wen is trying to cloak Beijing’s investment of its dwindling export earnings in mystery, but the basic economics is easy to understand.  So, Mr. President, don’t call Mr. Wen and make concessions in the hope he’ll buy more debt.  Just pull out your calculator.  After you make a few assumptions about trade, you will be able to estimate how much the Chinese will buy this year.

South Korea never signed the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, so that document could not have been covered by the North’s announcement.  Today, Pyongyang called the armistice a “useless peace of paper.”  Yet it need not have bothered: in August 2006 North Korea issued a statement declaring it “null and void.”

Analysts assume that today’s statement is just a bid to get President Obama’s attention. But that may not be the case because Kim Jong Il looks as if he is getting a bit desperate.  He is in bad health, the concept of a succession to a younger-generation Kim is in doubt, his economy has been shrinking since 2006, and there is another severe food shortage.

Mr. Kim and his father have a history of using violence to upset status quos they thought to be unacceptable, so continually ignoring Pyongyang may not be the best strategy for us, especially at this crucial moment.  We have always let the Kim family pick the time and place for its next provocation, and that is what the current Kim could be doing now.

So if we want to keep the peace on the Korean peninsula, some nation needs to explain to Mr. Kim that his inflammatory words are unacceptable.  Of course, there is no better party to do that than the guarantor of the geopolitical order, the United States of America.

There is no shame in being pursued by Beijing if your name is Tenzin Gyatso — in which case you’re also known as the Dalai Lama.  But if you’re Benjamin Yeung, also known as Yang Rong, then you have not led such a noble life, and many think you could be a bit shady.  So if you go by the name Bill Clinton, you shouldn’t be accepting large amounts of cash from fugitives from countries that can affect the future of the planet.

In late November, Bill Clinton agreed to submit future speeches for review by State Department ethics officials and, where appropriate, White House counsel.  It looks as if the system broke down just a week after being put in place.  And if you’re Mrs. Clinton and want to avoid further embarrassment, you can either resign or file for divorce because one thing’s for sure — Bubba is not going to change.

Iran?  Landlocked Afghanistan is indeed a troublesome spot, and NATO needs to employ more resources.  Yet the solution is not to invite every troublemaker-big and small-in the region to lend a hand.  Sometimes you just have to go out and defeat your enemies by yourself.  Yes, the mullahs have no love for the Taliban, but the idea of allying with Iran is just absurd.

For most of China’s Chinese, the Ox’s year will be worse.  Stock markets are sinking, property prices are crashing, and economic output is shrinking.  No economy is falling faster than China’s at this moment.  For tens of millions of Chinese, there will be no jobs after the long break to mark the beginning of the year.

The country has been plagued by strikes, protests, and insurrections for more than a half year but especially since October.  “The crisis in the West is purely economic,” said labor rights activist Li Qiang this month.  “But in China it’s a huge political problem.”

The Communist Party’s senior leaders undoubtedly view the coming months as especially precarious.  This year, the country will see an unusual number of sensitive anniversaries.  March 10 is the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Tibet.  Each year monks march to commemorate the event, and in a few months security forces will go on special alert to prevent any demonstrations against Beijing’s abhorrent rule over this minority.

April 25 will see the tenth anniversary of the surrounding of the Communist Party’s leadership compound in Beijing by approximately ten thousand adherents of the Falun Gong faith.  The protest, which shocked Chinese leaders, was followed by a murderous crackdown lasting years.

May 4 will be the 90th anniversary of what is probably the most important demonstration in modern Chinese history.  On that day in 1919 students rallied in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square against the decision, made at Versailles, to give Germany’s possessions in the Shandong peninsula to Japan instead of back to China.

May 4 will be followed by June 4, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.  Tiananmen is still an open wound for the Communist Party and the country as a whole.

And four months after that comes the 60th anniversary of Mao’s founding of the People’s Republic on October 1.  The Party will put on a massive military parade — reminiscent of those in Moscow’s Red Square — to show off its growing might.

Any of these anniversaries can be used by angry Chinese citizens as an excuse to air grievances against the Party.  In a time of severe economic downturn — the first in memory for most Chinese — anything can happen during the Ox’s reign over the Chinese calendar.

The Trade Act doesn’t mandate anything more than negotiations once a country has been branded a currency manipulator.  Yet as Geithner also noted, Obama, while a senator, called for “tough legislation to overhaul the U.S. process for determining currency manipulation and authorizing new enforcement measures so countries like China cannot continue to get a free pass for undermining fair trade principles.”

The Bush administration approached China gingerly on trade and had relatively little to show for its polite and deferential approach.  The Chinese have lots of experience intimidating foreigners, and they were certainly successful with past administrations, which seemed to lose their swagger when approaching the Grand Celestial Court in Beijing.

These days, Beijing is not so fearsome.  Its economy, for one thing, is decelerating at an alarming rate.  Yesterday, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that China’s growth in the fourth quarter of last year was 6.8 percent.  Yet in reality it was closer to zero, and in December the economy probably shrank.  The slide is dramatic, considering that growth in 2007 was, according to newly revised official numbers, 13.0 percent — and it may have been higher than that due to poor sampling procedures that did not capture the results from small producers.

Not surprisingly, senior Chinese leaders are in a panic about the drop-off in economic performance.  Should the Obama Treasury label China a currency manipulator in April, they will undoubtedly huff and puff, but we should refuse to cower.  At this moment Beijing’s leaders know they need us more than we need them.  The stability of their regime depends on prosperity, and prosperity depends on access to the American market.  The United States, on the other hand, has the resources to fund its own debt, especially since American savings rates are increasing as consumption falls.

Will Obama trigger a trade war with China?  No one wants one, of course.  But no one in Washington should shrink from defending the American economy.  Beijing, after all, has never shed its mercantilist thinking, and now it is trying to protect its domestic market with currency and other barriers.  We need to speak plainly about this, and Geithner’s statement is a good start toward a sensible trade policy.

The Pentagon’s assessment sounds about right.  The Mexican government is fighting a brutal war with drug barons, who are also fighting each other.  Last year 5,300 Mexicans were killed in the various struggles, some shot in public, many beheaded or mutilated.  Tijuana, the sprawling city opposite tranquil San Diego, and Juarez, across El Paso, are littered with bodies each morning.  President Felipe Calderon, to his credit, deployed the army in the battle in 2006, but he has nonetheless been losing ground to the cartels, which now control large parts of the country.  Earlier this month Stephen Hadley, then national security adviser, stated that the violence even threatened Mexico’s democracy.

And our nation is also endangered.  “Mexico could represent a homeland security problem of immense proportions to the United States,” the Pentagon report notes.  Drug violence has already spilled over the almost 2,000-mile border, the world’s most frequently crossed international boundary.  “There is a wave of barbarity that is heading toward the U.S.” said one Mexican.

Whether or not Mexico is a failed state, we need to work with Mr. Calderon for the good of both of our countries.  “The more secure Mexico is, the more secure the U.S. will be,” the Mexican leader said as he met Mr. Obama in Washington before he took office.  There are many international challenges for the United States, but perhaps the most pressing is the one closest to home.

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist, thinks American financial institutions are carrying $3.6 trillion in credit losses.  Of that amount, half belongs to banks and broker dealers.  “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion,” he noted.  “This is a systemic banking crisis.”

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has yet to figure out how to deal with what could be the complete failure of the American banking system.  There are many proposals on the table – Roubini predicts nationalization and many suggest the creation of a “bad” or “aggregator” bank for toxic assets – but the magnitude of the problem makes fashioning any solution difficult.  There are, however, valuable lessons from past crises, domestic and foreign.

The first lesson is that a series of partial bailouts don’t work.  Why?  Because, when bankers suspect that more help is on the way, they don’t have the incentive to change imprudent practices.  So the next bailout should be the last one.

Second, government attempts to merge weak institutions into strong ones in times of crisis just create more weak ones.  Bank of America’s absorption of Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo’s takeover of Wachovia – both arranged under government pressure – has now created problems for the survivors.  This tactic may work in normal times when one institution flounders, but it can bring down the whole system when, as has been the case for the past half year, the dislocations are systemic.

So what should we do?  It’s time to accelerate the liquidation of the weakest institutions and make sure the survivors are not so large that they become “too big to fail.”  This solution could take years to implement, but, given the severity of the downturn, there are no promising shortcuts.  In any event, it will take even longer for the rest of the economy to absorb overcapacity, a precondition to general recovery.

The remedies can no longer be piecemeal.  And the time for more fumbling in the dark is over.  We probably have only one more chance to get the financial system right.

Whether or not the Russian president intended to be the first foreign leader to test Mr. Obama, he has issued a challenge that cannot be ignored.  Medvedev has just poked us in the eye, and it’s time to poke him back.

Our recent policy of indulging the Russians has only encouraged the type of aggressive behavior we had wished to avoid.  So, it is time to change course and tell the world we will sell weapons to Georgia and defend it with American troops if necessary.  And when should we do this?  Preferably in the speech to be delivered a few moments after noon tomorrow.

Well, I suppose that’s possible, Tom, but this course of action will not solve problems.  The bankers didn’t cause current economic troubles.  Yes, they made imprudent choices, but those bad decisions were virtually inevitable once trillions of dollars of excess liquidity flooded the international financial system.  Banks, important intermediaries in that system, took advantage of the easy money, extended credit freely, earned billions, and grew like crazy.  “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance,” Charles Prince famously said when he was still Citigroup’s chief executive.  And those that didn’t dance were then punished by the market.

Now, of course, the music has stopped.  Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, hoping to stimulate lending, has shoveled billions into the banks, but they’re reluctant to part with the new-found cash from the government.  And Friedman’s proposal will not make credit available either.  Why?  Who wants to make new bad loans?

At this moment, the world has too many iron ore mines, car factories, and luxury good retailers.  Governments can try to stimulate their economies, but they will not succeed.  We will see genuine recovery only once excess capacity has been closed down.  In short, we have just experienced a bubble of grand proportions, and, despite what politicians may say and pundits may write, economies will need to become smaller.  “No amount of stimulus will work without a healthy banking system,” Friedman wrote this morning.  Yes, but there cannot be a healthy banking system without a healthy economy.  And there won’t be a healthy economy until there is wrenching change.

The Great Depression ended only when demand picked up due to the need to rearm and fight a global conflict.  Unless Mr. Obama wants to wage a worldwide war himself, he will succeed in creating the conditions for prosperity only when he can look Michelle in the eye and say, “Honey, I shrunk the economy.”

Due to U.S. and UN sanctions, Iran has had to resort to using front companies to source components for its various weapons programs.  Now, as in the past, Chinese companies have been willing to make sales, both prohibited and otherwise, to the Iranians.  Virtually all of these companies are owned by the Chinese government, and that raises the issue of Beijing’s culpability.

Many excuse Chinese officials, arguing they cannot control all the country’s factories, especially now that their managers are expected to run profitable operations.  Yet China is still a one-party state that can, when it applies itself, track down a wanted dissident to an upland hamlet a thousand miles from Beijing.  It is inconceivable that the Chinese government does not know about sales across China’s borders of sensitive items from its own enterprises to a country like Iran.

Especially when the sales are continuous.  This decade, the United States has, on numerous occasions, sanctioned Chinese missile-related sales to Iran.  Washington, however, refuses to do anything effective about them, like imposing meaningful penalties on the Chinese central government itself.  Instead, we announce slap-on-the-wrist measures on its low-level instrumentalities.  In these circumstances, Beijing officials know we’re not serious about defending ourselves, so they continue to sell items to Iran.

We have the power to stop these sales, but we are refusing to do so.

To accomplish this task, Xinhua will almost double the number of its bureaus so that it will have offices in almost every country, CCTV will add Russian and Arabic channels, and People’s Daily will launch an English-language edition of its Global Times tabloid.  Most ambitious of all is Xinhua’s plan to begin a worldwide 24-hour news channel on the model of Al Jazeera.

Should the United States grant access to the new Xinhua channel?  Perhaps we should ask a broader question: Should we allow any Chinese media-television programming, books, newspapers, or magazines-here?

We are an open society, of course, protected by the First Amendment, the core of our civil liberties.  Yet as the Supreme Court has noted, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”  Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, the Chinese government views the United States as an adversary in much the way the Soviet Union once did.  And although its acts are more subtle than those of Cold War-era Moscow, Beijing constantly works to undermine the United States.  So there should be room for legislation that prohibits Chinese media from the American market.

What would be the justification for such a prohibition?  The United States, for example, could block the media of countries that block our media.  The Chinese central government prohibits access to Voice of America and Radio Free Asia and severely restricts CNN and other privately owned networks, of course.  Yet at the same time, CCTV is allowed to distribute its English and Chinese programming on cable in the United States.

Therefore, Chinese media access to the United States is, among other things, a trade issue.  The buzz word is “reciprocity,” and we should think about demanding it.

The currency is not the only thing disintegrating:  Since Robert Mugabe won the election in June-he was the only candidate-the country itself has fallen apart.  Famine, disease, government failure, societal collapse-Zimbabwe has got it all.  Now citizens, due to various factors, are dying in large numbers. Douglas Gwatidza, chief of Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights says, “The whole country is turning into some kind of giant mortuary.”

Analysts correctly point out that the multi-decade misrule of the above-mentioned Mr. Mugabe is responsible for his country’s plight.  Yet this is not just the problem of one bad autocrat.  Of course, the country’s form of government is the fundamental problem.   It’s not that Zimbabwe needs a better dictator; it needs to have none of them.

Democracy seems to have been stagnating in recent years, as the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2008 Index of Democracy suggests.  The EIU survey indicates that the global financial crisis could even threaten the very concept of representative governance in some parts of the world.  Yet so far the general downturn is hitting the autocracies especially hard, potentially undermining the stability of hardline societies from Iran to Venezuela.  Even the governments of the two largest authoritarian states, Russia and China, are now at risk.  “The crisis in the West is purely economic,” says Li Qiang of China Labor Watch.  “But in China it’s a huge political problem.” As it is in Putin’s increasingly repressive domain.

General prosperity, in the wake of the fall of Soviet communism, made all dictators appear strong.  Now, however, we are seeing the inherent weaknesses of authoritarianism.  “Until the tide goes out you don’t know who’s swimming naked,” said Warren Buffett in better times.

The tide is receding, and Mugabe is playing out his last days in power.  Whether their problems are of longstanding nature-such as Zimbabwe’s-or of newer vintage, autocracies appear to be in jeopardy.  We should be thinking at this time of how to get rid of them all.

The reason I do not agree with your analysis, however, is that President Bush essentially gave up opposing Iran at the same time he denied Israel’s request for weapons, equipment, and overflight rights.  Moscow and Beijing expressed their opposition to his attempts to stiffen UN sanctions, and Mr. Bush then acceded to the Russians and the Chinese.  After Washington capitulated–that is, unfortunately, the best word for it–the stopping of Israel was tantamount to acceptance of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

I could be wrong–and I hope I am–but I believe Obama’s approach of renewed engagement with the mullahs is unlikely to succeed at this late date.  The only tactic that can disarm the theocracy short of conflict is mobilization of our military followed by the issuance of a harsh ultimatum, and I don’t see the new president following this course of action.

President Bush agreed to cooperate with Russia and China with regard to North Korea, but his diplomacy failed to stop Pyongyang from becoming a nuclear power.  He then tried this same general approach with Iran.  Unless Mr. Obama attempts something drastically different, the result will be another radical regime armed with the most destructive weapon in history.

For now, American efforts, secret and otherwise, have not persuaded the Iranians to give up their bomb program.  As the Times report suggests, covert operations can at best buy only a little time.  And Bush efforts in recent months to obtain Russian and Chinese cooperation for tough Security Council sanctions have failed.  That hasn’t deterred President-elect Obama, who said in an interview today that he will “move swiftly” to engage Tehran.  Of course, he feels a political imperative to make an effort to talk to the Iranians, not only because he famously said during the primaries he would do so but also because new leaders never feel they can start their terms with coercive solutions.

Yet the Iranians are not stopping their uranium enrichment just because the American political calendar demands a whole new round of time-consuming discussions.  By taking a military solution off the table, the Bush administration has placed great pressure on Obama’s diplomacy to succeed.

At this point, diplomacy is just not that promising.  The Iranians “have the cookbook,” as Mohamed ElBaradei put it in September.  The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency has identified the main problem with nonmilitary solutions: the Iranians already have all the technology to make a nuclear device.  All they lack are “ingredients.”  With a few more spins of their centrifuges-now numbering about 5,000-they will have enough uranium for a warhead to fit atop their missiles.

In December, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israel is thinking about how to attack Iran without Washington’s help.   At this point, military force is the only realistic option to stop the mullahs from possessing the most destructive weapon on earth.

Did we try to apprehend the Somalis once they released the ship and its crew?  No, we did not.

We didn’t?  We didn’t do anything to stop the perpetrators even though we were close enough to record the events on film.

We should have captured or killed the Somalis instead of idly observing their chance drowning. Every pirate has now realized that the mightiest nation in history has, by its own hand, made itself weak and ineffectual.  This wasn’t “restraint”-it was paralysis.

And why should we care?  Because every rogue leader, dictator, and autocrat has also watched events off the coast of Somalia and learned the same lesson.

We may not deserve what happens next, but we should not be surprised when it occurs.

Pakistan, as consequential as it may be, is not America’s most important external-agenda item.  That honor goes to either Russia or China, which have the most potential to either support or undermine the international community.  The outgoing national-security adviser, however, cannot speak frankly about either Moscow or Beijing because President Bush was not able to do so.  As a result, Hadley’s summary of eight years of Bush diplomacy failed to describe the world as it is.

This is not to say Pakistan is not a problem.  Militants in its tribal areas destabilize Afghanistan, Pakistani terrorists launch attacks against India, and Islamabad’s technicians still appear to be disseminating nuclear technology.  So fixing Pakistan–not easy under the best of circumstances–would go a long way to solving critical problems.

Yet Pakistan, which often acts to further Beijing’s objectives, is more of a symptom than the disease.  The real challenge of American foreign policy is getting its relations with the authoritarian powers right.  Condoleezza Rice, first as Hadley’s predecessor and then as the nation’s chief diplomat, understood that.  She was at times able to achieve friendly relations with the Russians and the Chinese but failed at something far more important–moving them in constructive directions.  We don’t need to be friends with Moscow and Beijing.  We just need to get them to do what we want.

If we get Russia and China right, almost everything else, including Pakistan, should fall into place.  If we fail to win Moscow’s and Beijing’s cooperation–and so far we have not been overly successful in this regard–then everything will remain difficult.  So Hadley should have cut out the generalities and self-congratulatory assessments in his speech, which means he would have had to scrap most of his text, and concentrated on what is important.

Hadley said almost nothing about China and very little about Russia.  So why did anyone bother to turn up to his talk?  Washington, as others have said before me, just likes to listen to itself.  That’s not good enough these days.

Iran purchased the 122mm rockets that hit Israel.  We know this because Tehran’s version of the same 122mm weapon does not have sufficient range to hit the Israeli areas that came under bombardment last month.  And where did the mullahs buy these longer-range instruments of destruction?  That would be the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing always says it is a responsible arms manufacturer and cannot control where its weapons are used.  Is that so?  If you wanted to give the Chinese the benefit of every doubt–you shouldn’t, but that’s another story–you could argue they could not have known that Pakistani terrorists would choose to use China’s specialized blue grenades, manufactured by state-owned Norinco, in the November attacks in Mumbai.

But you can’t make the same argument about the rockets manufactured by China’s state-owned Sichuan Aerospace Industry Corp.  And why not?  The Chinese have been deeply involved in Iran’s use of the weapons it has purchased from them.  They have, for instance, been supplying the Iranians with small arms and the components for roadside bombs and have worked with Tehran so that these items could be put into the hands of insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan without interdiction.  In view of the long and close relationships with its Iranian customers on even purchases of small items, it is inconceivable Beijing did not know how its big rockets would be used.  Chinese officials might not have known that Hamas would fire one off at a school in Beersheba on December 31, but they had more than just an inkling they would be directed at citizens in southern Israel.

Washington calls China a “responsible stakeholder” in the international community.  It’s not.  It is a state sponsor of terrorism even though it is not on the State Department’s terrorism-sponsorship list.  Beijing is complicit in Gaza.  The White House needs to say this out loud because its behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the Chinese is not working: China is continuing to supply Hamas.  And the United States is looking the other way.

So, Mr. Hogan, thanks for raising a critical issue.  Beijing must answer for its actions–and Washington needs to explain its silence.

Krugman is right.  We are already in another downturn rivaling the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Yet he is undoubtedly wrong when he assumes the Federal government has the ability on its own to prevent it.  Krugman correctly shows that Ben Bernanke’s supply of enormous amounts of liquidity has not stopped the fall of the economy but then argues fiscal spending is the answer.  The Times columnist, in short, takes it for granted that there is an answer that is solely within the power of our government.

The massive Federal spending Krugman proposes will ease the pain for a while, but, as the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson shows this morning, this solution may ultimately make things worse.  Spending will increase the Federal deficit, which will have to be funded by debt.  Interest rates could rise as the Treasury tries to sell the debt, and higher interest rates will slow–if not choke–the economy.  Excessive Federal spending could also cause a “panicky flight” from the dollar, which would be a catastrophe for just about everyone.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent another global depression?  Yes, there is.  As noted by many analysts, Americans spend too much and the Chinese save too much.  The obvious solution is for Americans to export to the Chinese, which would put an end to the world’s two most important economic imbalances: the American current account deficit and the Chinese current account surplus.

Unfortunately, Beijing, beginning late last July, decided to try to export its way out of the crisis that it saw coming.  The measures the Chinese then adopted, such as driving down the value of their currency, also had the effect of closing off their domestic market to imports.  Unless President Obama takes drastic steps to open up the Chinese market–the Bush administration’s patient approach was mostly ineffective–the global economy will continue to trend downward.

So Krugman, despite his Nobel Prize in economics, is wrong.  We don’t have to spend a dime to solve the global crisis.  Mr. Obama merely needs to pick up the phone and talk to Hu Jintao in terms the Chinese president understands.  It is as simple–or as difficult–as that.  If we do not change China’s mercantilist outlook in a hurry, we should prepare ourselves for the greatest depression the world has ever known.

Why did the Chinese decide to proliferate nuclear weapons technology?  “They did so deliberately with the theory that if nukes ended up going off in the western world from a Muslim terrorist, well that wasn’t all bad,” Reed says, citing a decision made by Deng Xiaoping in 1982.  “If New York was reduced to rubble without Chinese fingerprints on the attack, that left Beijing as the last man standing.”

Reed is correct when he points out that China has been a rogue nuclear state for a long time.  In fact, China was helping Pakistan build a bomb as early as 1974, long before Deng took power in 1978.  So, for more than three decades, the Chinese have been spreading the world’s most destructive technology to Islamic fanatics.  We can understand why Beijing would wish us harm, yet it is difficult to comprehend why successive American administrations, especially those of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have failed to speak out about Chinese proliferation, even when Beijing had been caught red-handed.

These two presidents, as powerful as they were, may not have had the means to stop China’s transfer of nuclear technology, yet they failed to sanction Beijing or even speak out about what was happening.  Both of them were responsible for many failures during their times in office, but these are by far the worst.

Washington evidently believes that, if we do not criticize the Chinese in public, one day they will eventually stop proliferating.  As Reed notes, many younger officials in Beijing realize the lunacy of their country’s pro-proliferation policies-he suggests they don’t want to incinerate Los Angeles because they can’t then sell us sneakers-but at this time there is no consensus in the Chinese capital to change course from Mao’s and Deng’s policies.  By the time China becomes a responsible nuclear power, it will undoubtedly be too late.

By refusing to oppose those who wish us harm, we are creating the conditions for our own destruction.

True, Fidel Castro brought a measure of equality to the country and important advances in education and healthcare, yet he imprisoned and oppressed his fellow citizens and then impoverished them.  After a half century, the record of the Cuban regime is one of failure.  The best measure of society is that so many Cubans have left or want to leave.  Leninist politics and Marxist economics are to blame.

Of course, the Castros, first Fidel and now Raul, blame the United States and especially the American embargo, which they say has had a $92 billion impact on the island in the 46 years it has been in place.  The embargo is, in one sense, hard to justify.  After all, we embrace governments posing far greater threats to the international community – China and Russia, for example – or ones that are substantially more repressive – Saudi Arabia immediately comes to mind.  Moreover, the embargo is harsh enough to create real sympathy for the Castro brothers but is too weak to kill off their regime.  When George W. Bush leaves office in a few weeks, the Castros will have outlasted ten American presidents.

The election of Barack Obama has given hope to many that a fresh approach will lead to better relations with the Havana regime.  During the primary campaign he famously promised to talk to Cuba’s government unconditionally, and it appears he will lift some family-travel and cash-remittance restrictions on Cuba.

The problem, however, is that it is unlikely that Raul will take substantive steps to reform either the economy or the politics of the island.  To date, he has only been willing to remove some of the visible prohibitions that have irked Cubans, such as the ban on staying in tourist hotels and owning cell phones, and implement half-hearted land measures.  Whatever Obama does – short of toughening the embargo so that it becomes airtight – will not substantially change the behavior of the regime because its leaders remain unrepentant.

So until both Castros are gone, the best thing we can do is take our cue from Carlos Gutierrez.  “To suggest unconditional dialogue with the Castro brothers would only signal that the conditions in Cuba are acceptable,” the Commerce Secretary, a Cuban-American, wrote this week in the Washington Times.  “If the United States does not continue to stand for the ideals of freedom and human rights and against the many guises of tyranny and oppression, who will?”

Did you follow that?  Dionne apparently has trouble making coherent arguments, but I nonetheless suspect his ultimate conclusion is correct.  After all, September 11 did not end the prosperity of the post-Cold War period, and the events of that day did not affect, in a meaningful way, that many individuals around the world.  This year and next, however, appear to be watershed years.  The global downturn promises to touch most everyone’s life and substantially change the geopolitical landscape.

Of course, it is exceedingly difficult to make accurate pronouncements about the historical significance of ongoing events.  Perhaps in fifty years we will be able to conclusively mark the beginning of the current century.  Yet events today do have an end-of-era feel to them.

The assumptions most of us made at the beginning of this year–about the continuation of globalization, the resurgence of India, the rise of the authoritarian states, and the general maintenance of geopolitical order, just to name a few of them–all seem so, well, 20^th century.  Almost all of us were guilty of extrapolation a half year ago.  Now, many recognize the possibility of–or even predict-discontinuous change.

The world, as it changes, is always in transition.  Yet at some points in history we pass not only from one day to the next but from one period to another.  We could be approaching one of those moments.  In fact, I think we are.

Change has generally meant progress, and today we live in the best time in history.  Never has humankind created and consumed so much, possessed as much knowledge, or had so much power to accomplish its aims.  If we were confident about the future at the beginning of this year, we had good cause for optimism.  As more than six billion people strived to better their lot, the world looked as if it would continue to get better.

Yet further progress, however probable it once appeared, is not foreordained.  Next year, which looks as if it will be marked by economic failure and its inevitable geopolitical consequences, could start a time more consequential than any of us can imagine at this moment.

Although results in these types of polls are typically unrepresentative of the population as a whole, the clear message for President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is that a large segment of the Russian populace values strong leaders.  That’s understandable for a nation that collapsed into pieces last decade after losing a multi-decade struggle to the West and its allies.

Nonetheless, the clear message for us is that we should start seeing Russia as it sees itself.  The Russians obviously hold values we find abhorrent.  That should, at a minimum, make us rethink the nature of our cooperation with them and their government.

We should remember we tried working with Stalin once.  Maybe Putin is no communist dictator, but he is reasserting hardline rule when he is not trying to destabilize the international community.  It’s time to take a fresh look at him and his Russia.

The proponent of the clash-of-civilizations thesis-first propounded in a Foreign Affairs article and then a book-adopted a decidedly gloomy view of the trend of history.  “In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic,” he wrote in his seminal work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.   “They are cultural.”  In Huntington’s world, “flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings.”  As civilizations clashed, the Harvard professor believed American dominance of global affairs would end early this century.

Huntington’s views were often compared to those of Francis Fukuyama, who saw geopolitics in an entirely different light.  History ended, he argued in his landmark 1992 book, titled, aptly, The End of History and the Last Man.  Events continued to occur, Fukuyama noted in a later essay, but by the last days of the Cold War “the evolution of human societies through different forms of government had culminated in modern liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism.”  There was no place else for humanity to go-we had finally reached the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”  In short, Fukuyama not merely interpreted history-he abolished it.

If Fukuyama’s triumphalism fit the mood of the last decade, Huntington’s dour views seemed to do so this one.  September 11 restarted history for us because, in that moment, paradigms appeared to change.  The post-Cold War period ended.  A new one began.   We saw in the plane hijackings that day an attack by Islam on the West and a confirmation of Huntington’s views about civilizations going to war with each other.

We have witnessed the best moment in history, as Fukuyama has suggested.  We have since seen civilizations clash, as Huntington described.  During this year, we witnessed the pace of events accelerate.  The world appears more uncertain and turbulent now, and there is a feeling in the air that eras will change once again.  One wonders what happens next.

1. Russia’s signaling in September of its willingness to provide nuclear technology to Venezuela, thereby raising the prospect of a South American bomb.

2. The failure this month of the six-party talks to disarm North Korea, an event highlighting the general collapse of American anti-proliferation policy.

3. Iran’s test firing of missiles in the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, reminding the world of the importance of keeping the Persian Gulf open.

4. The Iraqi parliament’s ratification last month of the agreement to keep American troops in the country until 2012, a sign of the success of Washington’s recent policies.

5. The successive devaluation of the ruble, signifying the spreading of the global financial crisis.

6. The October signing of the U.S.-India nuclear pact, an event symbolizing the growing ties among the Pacific democracies.

7. The summit between Russia and China in Beijing in May, a cementing of relations among the authoritarian states.

8. Last month’s Mumbai attack, which is now leading to growing hostility between New Delhi and Islamabad.

9. The passage in September of the Security Council’s toothless resolution on the Iranian nuclear program, a clear indication of the failure of multilateral action to stop one of the gravest threats to international stability.

10. Russia’s August invasion of Georgia.

And what if mercenaries from the United States took part in the fighting?  As an initial matter, American citizens are generally free to roam the world and do what they want, even oppose the army of a large authoritarian state.  More important, it’s not as if defending an endangered democracy is the crime of the century.

So here is my message to any gringos who were with the Georgians this summer: “Thank you for helping a small country.”

By the way, why can’t the State Department say that?

The best moment of 2008, as far as Dubya is concerned, is a perfect reflection of this resolve to do the right thing: his refusal to bend to calls for global financial regulation last month.  He invited the G-20 to Washington in the middle of a worldwide panic, let 19 other world leaders talk for a few hours, and then ignored what they had to say about putting in place a world government for banks, investment houses, hedge funds, and assorted financial institutions.  It was a magnificent display of statecraft that the world will soon come to appreciate.  You have President Bush to thank that Nicolas Sarkozy and ten thousand European regulators are not now running your neighborhood bank.

And what was the worst Bush moment of this year?  In my book, it was when Dubya let Vladimir Putin “stand strong.”  The Russian strongman provoked the Georgians and invaded their country.  President Bush may or may not have been able to stop the Russians from grabbing Georgian territory, but he definitely let Putin humble the Atlantic Alliance.  The response of the United States and NATO was, in a word, abject.  Putin – not Bush – was the one who let it be known that he could not be changed.  And so he won, and the international community lost.  Along with the Georgians, we will bear the consequences, perhaps for years.

Bush, in a few words to Ms. Strassel, has laid out the principles by which America should engage others, especially now that autocrats are working to remake the world in their own image.  In these consequential times, the President will be judged by the sentiments he expressed so well a few days ago – as will his successors.

The premise is that the United States is not going to be fighting major conflicts in the foreseeable future.  Unfortunately, that’s an assumption we should not make.  After all, history teaches us to be wary: both World War II and Korea started for us with surprise attacks.

The Times also assumes that no big power is going to take us on.  Is that so?  China, with a rapidly modernizing military, wants Taiwan and islands belonging to others in its surrounding seas.  Moreover, it is configuring its military to fight us.  Moreover, a desperate North Korea continues to covet South Korea.  And is it really inconceivable that an aggressive Russia will try to grab more neighboring land?

As the Times points out, we need to win the two wars we are fighting.  But we also need to be able to fight and prevail in the conflicts that are already foreseeable.  Building Cold War-era weapons systems-that’s the way the Times generally characterizes them-are expensive, but they are not nearly as costly as fighting the next major war.  We may have to do that if our adversaries think, due to the degradation of our capabilities, they might prevail.  This is blindingly obvious-except to the New York Times and all the others who think major war is a thing of the past.

Did the Secretary of State just call herself an idiot?  It sure sounds as if she did.  Ms. Rice would say – now that her diplomacy has failed – that she entered into agreements and extended benefits to Pyongyang not as the result of trust but as goodwill gestures.  And as she pointed out, North Korea has not produced plutonium since 2005 and has been disabling its only working reactor.

Unfortunately for her, the record also shows that Christopher Hill, her chief negotiator, tried to obtain a deal with Pyongyang by not insisting on a detailed protocol for the verification of its various disarmament pledges.  When word leaked out what Hill was up to – he had refused to publicly discuss the provisions he had negotiated in secret – just about everyone, from conservatives to members of the proliferation community to liberal analysts, expressed either outright hostility or deep misgivings.  Nobody has approved of the Bush administration’s North Korea policy in the last six months.

“This is a process that still has a lot of life in it,” Ms. Rice said of the efforts to disarm Kim Jong Il’s renegade state.  She would be just about the only person holding that opinion.  The most recent round of the six-party talks, held in Beijing this month, was a complete failure.  North Korea, in short, did not budge on committing to writing its verification promises, the whole purpose of the negotiating session in China.

Secretary Rice can argue that she was not too trusting of the North Koreans, but that’s not the point.  The point is that the administration, in eight years, has failed to eliminate Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.  President Bush has made just about every mistake in the book.  He was too soft when he should have been hard and too hard when he should have been soft.  He switched policies when circumstances demanded consistency.  He allowed his superpower country to be humiliated by a puny adversary on various occasions.  And if he did not trust the North Koreans, he did something just as bad or worse – he trusted the Chinese.

In any event, North Korea detonated a bomb and became a recognized nuclear power on his watch.  His legacy is that, through an inept Korea policy, he has encouraged the Iranians to go full speed to building a bomb on their own.  President Bush will be able to talk of many important accomplishments in office, but in eight years he has also set the stage for unimaginably horrible events in the Middle East.

So far, the demonstrations, confined to outlying areas, do not threaten Prime Minister Putin’s rule.  Yet turbulence in the periphery foreshadows turbulence in the center. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were undone by low oil prices, and the current autocrat could be next.  The Wall Street Journal puts it this way:  “The prospect of further unrest poses what could be the biggest challenge yet to the authoritarian system built by Mr. Putin.”

Putin’s Russia did not take the opportunity afforded by high commodity prices to build a more sustainable economy.  So Russia rode the energy wave up, and it is now riding the wave back down.  Moscow, therefore, has had to continually raid its foreign exchange reserves-the third largest in the world-to defend a rapidly depreciating currency.  The Russians, which once had grand aspirations for the ruble, are devaluing it weekly.

Moscow’s economic problems could not have come at a better time for us.  Putin was using new-found strength to erode democracy at home, undermine Russia’s neighbors, and disrupt global stability.  He revealed himself as a dangerous-and reckless-force.

For too long Washington has adopted an indulgent attitude towards Russia.  Putin continually issues incredibly hostile words, and our leaders choose not to notice.  For example, yesterday, the President said we should reduce tensions with Moscow because we have a “common interest” with Russia.

We do?  We may have common interests with the Russian people and with Russia’s neighbors, but we have nothing in common with Moscow’s leaders.  They apparently think we are locked in a zero-sum game with them, and we should agree on this one point.  So let’s borrow some recently forgotten wisdom from Ronald Reagan.  With regard to the Kremlin, our policy should be that we must win and they must lose.

Will 2009 be any better?  The embattled South Korean held out little hope as he listed current challenges: Somali anarchy, Zimbabwe’s crisis, Afghanistan’s crisis, the crisis in the Middle East, and the global financial crisis, in addition to general problems like poverty and climate change.  Worst of all, nations are not cooperating with the United Nations, he noted.

And we should be surprised?  For the first time in more than a century, the world’s financial architecture and its geopolitical structure are falling apart at the same time.  And as this happens, the authoritarian regimes are banding together.  Each of them, in its own way, is working to change the existing system and replace it with something more to its liking.

We can expect the hardline states to undermine global order, but what makes this period especially dangerous is that the United States and its partners are not willing to confront them.  Prime Minister Putin can invade a neighbor, destabilize others, and proliferate nuclear technology throughout the Middle East with nothing more than an expression of mild concern from the White House.   President Hu Jintao can implement beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies and receive nothing but praise from Treasury Secretary Paulson.

Ban Ki-moon had 350 meetings with presidents, prime ministers, and other government leaders last year and traveled 250,000 miles-ten times around the world-without real accomplishment.  Yet he gets a free pass for ineffectualness because he is supposed to represent all member states, which means his job is to be inane and inoffensive, and because he has no authority.  Yet Western leaders can at least speak out to defend their nations and their values.  With the occasional exception of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, they choose to stay quiet.  Have you heard President Bush talk about the “freedom agenda” lately?

In 2008, Western leaders “engaged” the autocrats and saw the world crumble.  In 2009, they have the responsibility to switch course, raise their voices, and accomplish not only what is feasible but also what is necessary.  And if they fail to do all that must be done, we will see more than just uncertainty and turbulence.

The resolution is being hailed as a show of the international community’s resolve to go after the bandits that have taken more than 60 ships this year, including two yesterday.  Yet what is the value of the UN action?  If a nation has the consent of the Somali government, there is no need for Security Council authorization.  And there’s one more question: Does Somalia have a functioning government to give consent?

The Security Council, if it wanted to be a constructive force, would have declared Somalia an international zone and allowed member states to conduct military actions against the pirates without the consent of the Somali government.  If it is important to fight piracy – and it is – we should be prepared to pursue pirates wherever they are found, whether on the high seas or in Somali territory.  It would be great if the UN provides legal cover for necessary military action, but, if it cannot, the United States should ignore this failing institution.

There is no reason for other nations to look to us if we allow ourselves to be humiliated by pirates, as is happening today.  We should either do whatever it takes to get the job done or not even try.  Piracy may be a complex issue, but there is a simple solution.  And obviously, that solution is not found in the halls of the Security Council.

We are perhaps months from entering a true deflationary spiral, but the trend of weakening consumer sentiment is clear.  This, the Christmas shopping season, is the last time of year we should see prices soften.  Presents should be flying off the shelves, but it seems, among the national retailers, only down-market Wal-Mart is prospering.

Frankly, I don’t blame American consumers.   They can see that Washington is not up to the task of getting us through the global financial crisis.  Most people here, exercising common sense, don’t support the auto bailout, as Jennifer Rubin points out today; President Bush’s 130 million stimulus checks earlier this year were both expensive and ineffective; and Henry Paulson has completely lost his way with the $700 billion bailout.  Steve Forbes has called Paulson “the worst Treasury secretary we’ve had in modern times,” but he was charitable in adding the last three-word qualifier.  Paulson has managed, through his botched handling of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers rescues, to scare off foreign capital that might have made his rescues of AIG and Citigroup unnecessary – or at least less expensive.  A list of his mistakes in the last six months would be book-length.  The members of the Obama team can’t help but do better, but I am sure they will somehow manage to make things worse.

So until Washington can display some competency handling the economy, don’t expect consumers to express a vote of confidence by going into the shops.  Look for a few more drops in the CPI soon – and perhaps deflation in America.

I disagree.  So far, China’s principal plan to strengthen its “growth and recovery”- actually to stop an alarming decline in its growth rate – has been to increase its exports.  And its principal tactic for this purpose has been the lowering of the value of its currency to preserve price advantages for its exporters.  It halted the appreciation of the renminbi in July.  The plan, part of a package of export incentives, is evidently working.  Last week, Beijing announced that November’s trade surplus is a monthly record.  In the first week of this month, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, extended the export campaign by driving down the value of the currency almost one percent in one day in an apparent warning to the international community that it will continue to seek unilateral trade advantages.

Is Beijing’s plan sound?  Perhaps the most fundamental cause of the global financial crisis is the existence of imbalances in the two most consequential economies today – China is running enormous trade surpluses and the United States is running gargantuan deficits.  This imbalance is largely the result of Beijing’s exclusionary trade practices, some of them violations of its World Trade Organization promises (such as its discriminatory auto parts tariffs that were just ruled illegal).

Chinese officials can succeed in keeping out imports, but a victory in doing so will be Pyrrhic.  The way back to global equilibrium – and therefore sustainable prosperity for the Chinese – is for China to permit imports so that global imbalances will be unwound as soon as possible.  Beijing, however, has decided to keep its internal market to itself.

As long as it does so, global prosperity will remain elusive.  And as long as the downturn continues, global consumers won’t be buying Chinese goods at the pace needed to sustain the Chinese economy, which is especially dependent on exports.  About 38 percent of China’s economic output relates to products manufactured for sale to other nations.

Zoellick, instead of issuing bromides from Beijing, should start speaking clearly about China’s predicament.  If he stopped handing out free passes to China at his press conferences, everyone – especially the Chinese – would be better off.