The world’s most important relationship

Earlier this week, as the US returned President Barack Obama to the White House for another four-year term, China’s Communist Party gathered in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to orchestrate a once-in-a-decade leadership transition.

The world’s great superpowers, economic and military, renewed themselves and their very different administrations in very different ways.

Americans, Democrat or Republican, are happy that their leader was chosen after a democratic vote, though whether a process that cost something north of $2bn can be truly democratic is doubtful. This extraordinary expenditure has been mocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who called the election a “battleground for capitalists” and suggested “democracy has become a system where the minority rules over the majority”. It should worry any democrat that Ahmadinejad’s assertion cannot be dismissed easily.