These are interesting times in our globalised world.

The German Finance Minister�s statement to the parliament, �The US will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system. This world will become multi�polar� with the emergence of stronger, better capitalised centres in Asia and Europe, Mr Steinbr�ck told the German parliament. � The world will never be the same again.�  Implies that the world will have to accommodate additional financial power centres.

The following article in the New York Times,  �Land of Gandhi Asserts Itself as Global Military Power� reveals that not only the financial power centre but also the raw military power centre is also being outsourced to one of these two new Asian entities or emerging empires with tacit approval from the current sole superpower �Uncle Sam�.   This is an excerpt.

� MUMBAI, India � The Mumbai, an Indian warship, was slicing through choppy monsoon seas one recent morning when a helicopter swooped in overhead. Commandos slithered down a rope, seizing control of the destroyer. It was a drill, Indian soldiers taking over an Indian ship. But the purpose was to train them to seize other countries� ships in distant oceans, a sign of a new military assertiveness for the world�s second-most-populous nation�.

�India sees itself in a different light � not looking so much inward and looking at Pakistan, but globally,� said William S. Cohen, a secretary of defense in the Clinton administration who in his new role as a lobbyist represents American firms seeking weapons contracts in India. �It�s sending a signal that it�s going to be a big player.�   India is buying armaments that major powers like the United States use to operate far from home: aircraft carriers, giant C-130J transport planes and airborne refueling tankers. Meanwhile, India has helped to build a small air base in Tajikistan that it will share with its host country.

It is modern India�s first military outpost on foreign soil. India also appears to be positioning itself as a caretaker and patroller of the Indian Ocean region, which stretches from Africa�s coast to Australia�s and from the subcontinent southward to Antarctica. �Ten years from now, India could be a real provider of security to all the ocean islands in the Indian Ocean,� said Ashley J. Tellis, an Indian-born scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who has also been an adviser to the Bush administration. �It could become a provider of security in the Persian Gulf in collaboration with the U.S.  I would think of the same being true with the Central Asian states.� �India,� he added, �is slowly maturing into a conventional great power�.

It appears as in the case of shrewd, Uncle Sam's toxic asset adoption policy where the toxic asset is being socialized to spare the pain on the perpetrators, Uncle Sam�s toxic diplomacy cum statecraft is also being outsourced on to the second most populous nation and the rest of the world is being asked to bear the ultimate cost.

The sovereignties of smaller nations are trampled upon with impunity by these empires and the populace of the weaker nations have to bear the ultimate cost with imposed puppet regimes to tow their line or have to bear sanctions and even instigated regime changes to accommodate the whims and fancies of the reigning empires.  

Yes, the world will never be the same again. The powers that be (or the brains behind them) must come to realise that even the smallest of smaller nations and peoples are entitled to enjoy their sovereignty as equal to any other power. Slavery is not in vogue anymore.  Enough is enough of that nonsense of power centres dictating to the rest of the humanity on how to live.  We all can plainly see the collateral calamity staring on us by these disastrous policies of military assertiveness and instigated divide and rule tactics projected on smaller peoples and nations.

In addition, on this colossal US financial meltdown with its collateral overflow on the world economy, in � The Times� the journalist  �Anatole Kaletsky�  in his article �Save the world? ..� has more to say on the incompetence that led to this disaster.  This is an excerpt.

�The Emperor has no clothes. If you want to know why American capitalism is on the brink of disaster, but also want to understand what will save it, then log on to the C-Span congressional website and watch the interrogations of Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, by the Senate and House banking committees.  Until last week, I was in a minority of one in arguing that Mr Paulson was personally responsible for suddenly turning the painful but manageable credit crunch that had been grinding away 18 months in the background of the US economy into a global catastrophe.  Mr Paulson's appearances on Capitol Hill, marked by the characteristic Bush-era combination of arrogance and incompetence, are turning my once-outlandish view into conventional wisdom: Henry Paulson is to finance what Donald Rumsfeld was to military strategy, Dick Cheney to geopolitics and Michael Chertoff to flood defence�.

The amoral policies espoused by these major powers which impinge on the free will and sovereign right of  smaller nationalities to live as equals in peace with dignity prove beyond doubt that the emperors have no moral clothes as they are only interested in propagating their own self interests at the cost of smaller nations and nationalities.