“Thunder from the East: The steady rise of India and China’s great-power ambition run parallel to the West’s decline”, Open the magzine, January 23, 2026
“HISTORY HAS COME FULL CIRCLE. ASIA LED the world for millennia—economically, scientifically and culturally. Now, after centuries of contact, both pleasant and unpleasant, with the West, Asia is again set to be the world’s leading economic engine. The next twenty five years leading up to 2050 promise to dwarf the technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, themselves the most technologically fertile in human history. During those 200 years—1800-2000—mankind transformed the planet. Seminal inventions were made: electricity, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, antibiotics, computers, and the internet.
By the middle of this century, life will have changed even more fundamentally. Pathbreaking discoveries in life sciences and GenAI will transform society. Hyperspace travel will bring the mysteries of deep space and time closer to human understanding. Telecommunications will achieve speed and multidimensional interactivity unimaginable today. Just as the concept of self-driving cars and neural implants that allow thoughts to govern physical actions would have been incomprehensible to the citizens of 1900, the still undiscovered technologies of this unfolding century are impossible for us to predict or even conceive.
Three countries will exert a centripetal force on world affairs in 2050: the US, China and India. Europe will be rich, but the unwinding of the Atlantic alliance will neuter its global influence. That leads us to a fundamental question: the balance sheet of Western civilisation. On the positive side of the ledger are the philosophical insights of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, the genius of Pythagoras, the wisdom of Greece, the muscularity of Rome, the literature of Shakespeare, the art of Leonardo da Vinci, the science of Louis Pasteur and the universities of Yale and Harvard in the New World that lent lustre to an embryonic, evolving West……”
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