Authors: Brad Glosserman, CSIS, Peter Walkenhorst and Ting Xu, Bertelsmann Foundation

The most recent sign of the global order’s age and obsolescence was the BRICS summit held in New Delhi on 29 March 2012. Even though the group of countries that make up BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will not reorder global politics, their determination to articulate the grievances of emerging states should not be ignored.

Take, for example, their call for a new development bank to complement the World Bank by placing greater emphasis on the needs and priorities of developing economies as those nations themselves see them. Read more…

Author: Brad Glosserman, CSIS, Washington DC

‘No, thanks’.

That, in summary, is Hugh White’s response to the recent announcement that the US would be sending marines on permanent rotation to Darwin.

White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the ANU, one of Asia’s most distinguished strategists, and a former Australian deputy secretary of defence. And he has been making the case for strategic reorientation in Canberra for a couple of years now. Read more…

Author: Brad Glosserman, CSIS, and Robert Madsen, MIT

Since the inauguration of the Hatoyama administration in Tokyo last September, US-Japan relations have resembled a slow-motion train wreck. The Hatoyama government’s desire to ‘rebalance’ Japan’s foreign policy and to forge ‘a more equal relationship’ with its ally have triggered alarms and raised fears of a rupture, rather than the recalibration that everyone professes to want. But those fears are misplaced. Japan in fact has no viable alternative to its alliance with the United States. The real danger is that the current troubles might do lasting damage to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently described as a ‘truly indispensible’ partnership.

There are many, generally well-known, reasons why the alliance will almost certainly survive this difficult period. Read more…

Author: Brad Glosserman

According to conventional wisdom, the global economic crisis is accelerating the transfer of power and influence from the West to Asia. The United States has been particularly hard hit by the downturn and America’s loss is China’s gain.

The Group of Eight industrialized nations, the traditional locus of power, has been fatally wounded. In the future, goes the argument, the most important forum will be the Group of 20.

If this analysis is correct, it suggests that another fundamental shift in global economic activity is due. Western demand will no longer serve as the primary engine of growth. Instead, Asian nations will abandon export-oriented economic models and embrace domestic consumption to generate growth. That will put in train another set of ‘knock-on effects,’ the most important being the development of social safety nets that no longer oblige their citizens to save so much of their income and instead encourage them to consume.

Read more…