"China and Europe will meddle in America's backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe's southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China's growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call 'the second world.'

The new multicolor map of influence -- a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence -- is a very fuzzy read. No more "They're with us" or "He's our S.O.B." Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia's Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides.

. . .

I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind. Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations (as in Bali in December) -- and need to see more of in the areas of preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states -- is a far greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric but the responsibilities they fulfill."

--Parag Khanna

READ

Parag Khanna's 'Waving Goodbye to Hegemony", New York Times Magazine, January 2008