The first decade of the 21st century has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the relative prestige of different political and economic models. Ten years ago, on the eve of the puncturing of the dotcom bubble, the US held the high ground. Its democracy was widely emulated, if not always loved; its technology was sweeping the world; and lightly regulated "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism was seen as the wave of the future. The United States managed to fritter away that moral capital in remarkably short order: the Iraq war and the close association it created between military invasion and democracy promotion tarnished the latter, while the Wall Street financial crisis laid waste to the idea that markets could be trusted to regulate themselves.

China, by contrast, is on a roll. President Hu Jintao's rare state visit to Washington this week comes at a time when many Chinese see their weathering of the financial crisis as a vindication of their own system, and the beginning of an era in which US-style liberal ideas will no longer be dominant. State-owned enterprises are back in vogue, and were the chosen mechanism through which Beijing administered its massive stimulus. The automatic admiration for all things American that many Chinese once felt has given way to a much more nuanced and critical view of US weaknesses - verging, for some, on contempt. It is thus not surprising that polls suggest far more Chinese think their country is going in the right direction than their American counterparts.

But what is the Chinese model? Many observers casually put it in an "authoritarian capitalist" box, along with Russia, Iran and Singapore. But China's model is sui generis; its ­specific mode of governance is difficult to describe, much less emulate, which is why it is not up for export.

The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy. This is most evident in the area of infrastructure, where China has put into place airports, dams, high-speed rail, water and electricity systems to feed its growing industrial base. Contrast this with India, where every new investment is subject to blockage by trade unions, lobby groups, peasant associations and courts. India is a law-governed democracy, in which ordinary people can object to government plans; China's rulers can move more than a million people out of the Three Gorges Dam flood plain with little recourse on their part.

Nonetheless, the quality of Chinese government is higher than in Russia, Iran, or the other authoritarian regimes with which it is often lumped - precisely because Chinese rulers feel some degree of accountability towards their population. That accountability is not, of course, procedural; the authority of the Chinese Communist party is limited neither by a rule of law nor by democratic elections. But while its leaders limit public criticism, they do try to stay on top of popular discontents, and shift policy in response. They are most attentive to the urban middle class and powerful business interests that generate employment, but they respond to outrage over egregious cases of corruption or incompetence among lower-level party cadres too.

Indeed, the Chinese government often overreacts to what it believes to be public opinion precisely because, as one diplomat resident in Beijing remarked, there are no institutionalised ways of gauging it, such as elections or free media. Instead of calibrating a sensible working relationship with Japan, for example, China escalated a conflict over the detention of a fishing boat captain last year - seemingly in anticipation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment.

Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy. The elites worry about the example of democracy in Thailand - where the election of a populist premier led to violent conflict between his supporters and the establishment - as a warning of what could happen to them.

Ironically for a country that still claims to be communist, China has grown far more unequal of late. Many peasants and workers share little in the country's growth, while others are ruthlessly exploited. Corruption is pervasive, which exacerbates existing inequalities. At a local level there are countless instances in which government colludes with developers to take land away from hapless peasants. This has contributed to a pent-up anger that explodes in many thousands of acts of social protest, often violent, each year.

The Communist party seems to think it can deal with the problem of inequality through improved responsiveness on the part of its own hier­archy to popular pressures. China's great historical achievement during the past two millennia has been to create high-quality centralised government, which it does much better than most of its authoritarian peers. Today, it is shifting social spending to the neglected interior, to boost consumption and to stave off a social explosion. I doubt whether its approach will work: any top-down system of accountability faces unsolvable problems of monitoring and responding to what is happening on the ground. Effective accountability can only come about through a bottom-up process, or what we know as democracy. This is not, in my view, likely to emerge soon. However, down the road, in the face of a major economic downturn, or leaders who are less competent or more corrupt, the system's fragile legitimacy could be openly challenged. Democracy's strengths are often most evident in times of adversity.

However, if the democratic, market-oriented model is to prevail, Americans need to own up to their own mistakes and misconceptions. Washington's foreign policy during the past decade was too militarised and unilateral, succeeding only in generating a self-defeating anti-Americanism. In economic policy, Reaganism long outlived its initial successes, producing only budget deficits, thoughtless tax-cutting and inadequate financial regulation.

These problems are to some extent being acknowledged and addressed. But there is a deeper problem with the American model that is nowhere close to being solved. China adapts quickly, making difficult decisions and implementing them effectively. Americans pride themselves on constitutional checks and balances, based on a political culture that distrusts centralised government. This system has ensured individual liberty and a vibrant private sector, but it has now become polarised and ideologically rigid. At present it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America may have an inherent legitimacy that the Chinese system lacks, but it will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern. During the 1989 Tiananmen protests, student demonstrators erected a model of the Statue of Liberty to symbolise their aspirations. Whether anyone in China would do the same at some future date will depend on how Americans address their problems in the present.

The writer is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order, will be published in the spring.

There are more laws and international treaties designed to protect human rights in conflict zones than ever before. Yet civilians continue to pay the ultimate price, with women and children frequently caught in the crossfire. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian casualty for every eight or nine military casualties, said Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who played a key role in helping his country overcome apartheid, served as the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and became a household name in 2009 for his controversial fact-finding mission after an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. During World War II, the ratio increased to 1-to-1. Today, after what was, Goldstone said, a "very bloody century," every combatant casualty is matched by nine civilian deaths.

What explains this? Goldstone joined Stanford historian James Campbell and Peter Berkowitz, a political scientist, to grapple with this paradox as part of Stanford's Ethics and War Series, co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

One reason behind this seeming disconnect is that gaping anomalies remain in the international legal system. It is a "very recent development that international laws have been designed to protect civilians and civilian objects," said Goldstone. Another cause of the paradox is that the most critical issue in determining whether the death of a civilian constitutes a war crime is highly subjective. The so-called principle of proportionality, defined by the Law of Armed Conflict, requires that parties refrain from attacks resulting in excessive civilian casualties. But it is up to "reasonable commanders" to judge whether such violence is justified, said Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Compounding the problem is that in many of the nations where crimes against civilians may have been committed, there is little interest or even open hostility toward allowing international fact-finding missions to make an assessment. Moreover, many of the transnational organizations designed to help protect civilians simply fail to do so. Goldstone said the UN should be commended for assisting the injured in Gaza but "stands condemned for ignoring the plight of Tamils."

A better system might include requiring greater education in military affairs for human rights lawyers, Berkowitz said. Goldstone's report on the Gaza conflict, Berkowitz argued, failed to properly evaluate whether the civilian cost was a military necessity, noting that Goldstone did not assess whether "reasonable" Israeli commanders had intended to avoid civilian casualties. A better understanding of military procedure, Berkowitz suggested, might have helped Goldstone and others in a similar situation make that kind of assessment.

The United States may also have a role to play in filling in the gaps in the international justice system. Campbell said that the Geneva Convention of 1949, which extended legal protection to war victims, was largely an American construction. Indeed, Berkowitz said that America has "special burdens" to spread liberal democracy across the world. However, the U.S. was reluctant to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by 194 U.N. nations that would protect women and children, said Helen Stacy, a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

How some of these issues will be resolved is still an open question. Human rights laws are complex and evolving, said Campbell. "Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law," he said. The important part was that the legal system continues to grapple with these issues. The struggle toward an effective system of international justice is being "waged in our country," he said, "in dialogues like the ones we are having today."

With 2011 already off to such a wet start in many parts of the world, concerns of what flooding will do to food prices and availability in the coming months are starting to creep into the news. In Sri Lanka, flooding has devastated rice crops, and in North Dakota, heavy rain and snow is already threatening the spring wheat crop. And all this after last summer's Russian drought and heat wave helped drive global wheat prices higher.

But while farmers have always had to contend with the vagaries of the weather, a question of increasing importance is how agriculture will be affected by the climate changes projected to occur over the next century. Many scientists are studying which regions of the world may be impacted the most by increasing temperatures and changing precipitation regimes, and what is bound to happen to the supplies of the world's biggest cash crops, like wheat, corn, rice and soybeans.

A new report, The Food Gap, was released last week from the Universal Ecological Fund, and it has muddied the waters even further. The report reviews how global climate change will affect the fate of crop yields and food prices in 2020. Unfortunately, the report actually misinterpreted the connection between atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and expected global temperature increases - despite the fact that recent reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences clearly identify the most current peer-reviewed understanding of this. The food study suggests that within 9 years, average global temperatures will be an average of 2.4°C warmer than during preindustrial times - or almost 1.5°C warmer than it was just last year.

This exceptionally high temperature projection is completely baseless, as NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt explained on the RealClimate blog - it's more likely that the planet will experience this kind of temperature change over 100 years, not merely one decade. Nevertheless, a number of news outlets published stories on the report's projections of how this dramatic climate change could impact the global food supply by 2020. Some publications posted corrections to their own stories, but I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and examine climate change and food security in 2020 and beyond. I spoke with Stanford University's David Lobell, who studies how climate change affects crop yields and food prices. He helped clarify what the current research says about climate change and food security.

Read the full interview here.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates’ January 6 announcement of major budget and program changes at the Pentagon was a watershed: it canceled several multi-billion dollar weapons programs, redirected $100 billion from old programs to new ones, and laid the groundwork for reducing the active-duty size of America’s ground forces after a draw-down in Afghanistan. But in light of the rumors that Gates will step down sometime this year, his remarks soon after the announcement also helped to consolidate one particular aspect of his reformist legacy: managing our nation’s vast military weapons budget.

Gates has navigated the Byzantine relationships that weave throughout the government and the private sector, including his own office, the military services, the Congress, and the defense industry. Over the last four years, he has personally assumed control of  the Pentagon’s resource allocation process. His legacy will be an instructive playbook for several reasons.

First, accountability for the development and production of major programs stops with the Secretary; delegation does not means abdication. Gates has earned similar plaudits elsewhere: he took personal responsibility for the earliest and most public crisis of his first year, the unacceptable conditions at Walter Reed. As steward of the nation’s defense budget, he has been equally unflagging. When he lost faith in the Joint Strike Fighter’s program management, he dismissed the officer in charge and replaced him with a hard-charging 3-star general to signal the seriousness of attention with which weapons costs and performance must be treated. This, in stark contrast to business-as-usual at the Pentagon, where civilian subordinates negotiate with the military services, with the Secretary investing personal resources in only a handful of the most publicly-contentious programs.

Second, timing matters, and Gates uses timing for a crucial purpose: to promote transparency and a public dialogue about his decisions. He puts distance between his Pentagon announcements and the annual roll-out of the President’s budget request.  Although his changes will be reflected in the President’s budget, these pre-announcements allow him and the military to initiate a conversation about military spending early, and before the President’s name is affixed to it. His adroit sensitivity to timing does the nation a real service, allowing us to focus on and debate how we equip our armed forces independent of the vast competing priorities on the political agenda. 

These two lessons have led to a critical third: the importance of a constructive and open relationship with Congress. Congress has not and will not go along with every Gates proposal. But Gates realized early on that working with Congress on the often vexing troubles associated with our nation’s military-industrial complex carries far more advantages than drawbacks. His ability to generate consensus on controversial program decisions, such as halting production of the F-22 and canceling the development of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, were against-the-odds triumphs over pork-barrel politics. 

Every Secretary of Defense faces a similar budgetary conundrum as Secretary Gates currently does—the need to control defense spending while maintaining a first-rate and adaptable force—but the record of cutting unnecessary programs is mixed at best. Though Dick Cheney won praise for canceling the Navy’s egregiously over-cost A-12 stealth aircraft, his attempt to terminate the Marine Corps’s V-22 Osprey stalled in Congress. Even the A-12 kill was a pyrrhic victory, as his decision sparked such intense litigation that the legal dispute over the aircraft’s cancelation persists to this day, 20 years later. Indeed, the Supreme Court heard one aspect of the case this week. 

Donald Rumsfeld took full advantage of rising defense budgets to direct investments in the critical areas of space, missile defense, ISR, but transformation in theory became addition in practice. The defense budget needn’t have been cut as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raged, but the Pentagon was too slow to adapt to actual war-fighting needs. Rumsfeld successfully canceled the Army’s overweight artillery system known as Crusader, but his relationship with Congress, even Republicans, was often strained, and his personal oversight of hundreds of billions of dollars in over-cost and under-performing weapons was episodic at best. 

All the technology and weapons programs in the world will not win a war: only an expertly trained military with top leadership can do that. But Secretary Gates will leave a legacy of vigilance over our nation’s weapons of war. His successor would do well to emulate it.

CDDRL is now accepting applications to our interschool Senior Honors program from eligible juniors focusing on democracy, economic development, and rule of law subjects in any university department. Qualified applicants will demonstrate sufficient depth and breadth of democracy, economic and social development, rule of law, and human rights or justice course work. They should hold a grade point average (GPA) of at least 3.5 at the time they apply and must maintain this GPA throughout the program. Admitted students must be able to attend the CDDRL Honors College in Washington, DC tentatively scheduled for September 11-17. Applications are due in the CDDRL office by February 25 at 5:00 pm and students will be notified of admission to the program by March 11. For additional eligibility and program requirements, please reference the link below.

Today's world abounds in international courts, laws, and tribunals, yet war is becoming more brutal, more transnational, with mounting civilian casualties. Helen Stacy, FSI senior fellow and Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, notes that "civilians, often women and children, who played no role in the conflict – these are the people who suffer first, last, and in the middle." Stacy recently moderated a panel on Civilians in War Zones, that included Richard Goldstone, former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, history Professor James Campbell, and Peter Berkowitz, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, as part of this year's Ethics and War series.