Brazil has become a major player in the aerospace industry; India has developed a huge and enormously capable software industry; China has demonstrated its scientific and engineering capability by putting a man in space.What does it take for a company, or a nation, to succeed in such a world? The UK's future has to lie in high value-added products and services, competing on innovation, design, flair, quality and speed to market. This provides enormous opportunity, but fuels intense competition. Highly developed, industrialised economies such as those of Western Europe have always recognised that low-skilled, labour-intense jobs would move elsewhere. What can now be seen is that it isn't just low added-value industries that are under threat. The next two decades will see tremendous economic growth: much of it from the four potentially huge economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, where growth will outstrip the G7 economies combined.

We need partners, allies and goodwill to deliver on our interests round the world. The real warning in the statement from our retired diplomats is that we cannot expect goodwill from the rest of the world if we stick too close to a US president who is too fond of confrontation with his enemies and too little interested in listening to his allies.. He decided to try writing because "I did not want to die having done nothing with my life."In the early 1950s, he got involved with a group of young writers, including Gilbert Sorrentino. The mistake was not in making the attempt, but in refusing to admit that President Bush was not listening. Our Prime Minister has been short-changed in the trade off, and Britain is in danger of being damaged by a special relationship which under Bush has become a one way street.America will still command respect and get its way because it is a hyperpower. The American people themselves may sensibly make it easier to do so by putting in a new president who can make a fresh start But Britain is no superpower. A year later he finds that Bush expects him to step up the British units for an occupation of Iraq more violent than either of them had anticipated and also to swallow support rather than pressure for Israel in the peace process.Blair was right to try to influence Bush and correct to recognise the trade off between being given private access in return for public support.

This imaginative interpretation has failed to convince rebel diplomats and I suspect would also be unconvincing to Ariel Sharon whose objective in going Washington was to derail the road-map.There was at least a balance of sorts in Tony Blair's position when he went to war. He recognised that an invasion without UN authority would be controversial to Arab opinion, but he offered the promise that it would pave the way for pressure on Israel to make progress on the road-map. If this is true, it is all the more extraordinary that President Bush then strolled out into the Rose Garden and gave Ariel Sharon all he had asked for.Downing Street now finds itself in a bind of its own making. They cannot publicly dissent from President Bush's policies without advertising they have been unable to influence him and thereby undermine the whole case for joining his war on Iraq.