Essential reading: Waving Goodbye To Hegemony 2008

I recall being interested in this article, Waving Goodbye To Hegemony, when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine on January 27, 2008, but it being quite long, didn't read the whole thing at the time. I've done so now and have to recommend it as some of the most insightful thinking on world power shifts I've encountered in the past decade.

Author Parag Khanna provides - in a surprisingly small package for the density of detail and intelligence - a grand overview of the three current superpowers, the European Union, China, and the United States, and of the swing (nation) states of the "second world" whose ties to these three are going to shape the next century and beyond.

I hope this has been assigned as reading in colleges and high schools around the world as it provides an excellent new view which illustrates how very much the world has changed since the cold war and will continue to change, particularly in the next decade.