Published in The New Statesman, October 2021

I like the magazine’s new look. What’s more, you boast an impressive line-up of contributors, and the line sketches make them look younger. In many respects this redesign puts the New Statesman in the top rank of the international media I rely on. But there is one missed opportunity. It feels like a current affairs perspective that is still stuck in a transatlantic, liberal-democratic bell jar.

The future lies in the Indo-Asia-Pacific in every sense – demographically, economically, geopolitically – and it needs the contribution that the New Statesman has to offer, just as much as you need the reality check to the bell jar of the West that the region presents. If liberal social democracy cannot engage with this region, it is in danger of becoming an increasingly irrelevant Eurocentric view of the world.
Peter Davis, Auckland, New Zealand