The air that people breathe in many Chinese cities has become dangerously polluted. Their food supply is subject to constant contamination scandals. Now it appears that not merely stagnant ponds but the water people draw from deep underground is already tainted.

If you didn't know better, you might have thought in 2003 and 2004 that U.S. government strategy was being set by people trying to make enemies rather than friends in the Arab-Islamic world. And if you didn't know better, you might think that the Chinese government's approach to the Olympics is being set by people trying to make the country look bad.

I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.

For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.

Every previous era looks innocent.

Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.

Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.