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28 november 2010, the day of the new world order

Driving home from my sister's 40th birthday party in london, we caught one of those excellent but rare documentaries that light up a subject and cram a lifetime's understanding into 30 minutes. I'd recommend listening to what really happened in copenhagen in full, but the story is most startling for its geopolitical climax. It shows that my call then (20 dec) was on the money. Denmark dismally failed in the usual host's duty of bringing forward a compromise at the right time to get momentum and seal an agreement, and at the end of 2 weeks, and indeed of 2 years negotiations beforehand, as the world's leaders flew in, there was nothing for them to sign. The programme gets insiders to paint the remarkable picture of obama actually negotiating a text himself in a sweaty room, with merkel, sarkozy, brown and 35 or so other nations' premiers. But several were missing. Upstairs, china, south africa, brazil and india were negotiating their own text, and blocking anything else. Eventually obama excused himself from the world as we know it meeting and gate-crashed the (now-christened) BASIC nations, where he quickly agreed to drop what had been the central tenet of the 2 year negotiation, the aspiration for a legally-binding agreement, in return for a clause on monitoring. To the astonishment of the rest of the world, and not a little fury, he then went to the press with the deal that had been done - and copenhagen was duly wrapped up. One would expect that experience to weigh very heavily on obama in his understanding of who is on the real top table if america is seeking to keep its place as the world's leader.

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