At the second annual Penguin Lecture on Monday, the last British Governor of Hong Kong and former chairman of the Conservative party Chris Patten made a strong case that the world was entering an age of multilateralism -- but one in which American power was still indispensable.

Neither the 'civilian' power of the European Union nor the rise of China and India removed the need for a powerful, popular America to make things happen, according to Chris Patten. Multilaterism, he added, "simply doesn't work without the US." The Bush administration had squandered America's moral authority through "reckless unilaterism" -- and yet, he believed that America's soft power -- the power that emerges from perception, was recoverable. America's hard power, emerging from its military superiority, was "unassailable." This was a good thing: the world needed a strong US to remain prosperous and safe as it faced the new century.

Patten, a well known liberal internationalist, said that one of his primary concerns was that while the challenges of the new century were global challenges, global infrastructure to tackle them wasn't sufficient. Terrorism, drug trade, pandemics, and above all climate change -- the last requiring, he said, negotiations bigger and more complex than those at Versailles that ended the first world war or at Yalta ending the second -- needed close international co-operation, even if such organisations as the United Nations might seem outdated. The solution was not, he said, to attempt to "trash them", something he accused former American envoy to the UN Josh Bolton of doing with "joyless enthusiasm". Instead, the dark side of globalisation (a phrase he said he riffs on in his book "What Next") requires a close look at both outdated international architecture and what he implied was the world's archaic and overdone respect for national sovereignty.

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