03 September 2025
Dr. Parag Khanna
More than twenty years ago, I began traveling across Central Asia, especially the former Soviet republics colloquially referred to as the “Stans”. In college, I was so obsessed with the ancient Silk Roads traversing this region that my nickname became “Paragistan”. One major section of my first book The Second World (2008) investigated the growing geopolitical role of a nascent coalition – the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – which some mused was becoming “the NATO of the East”. This week, the SCO made a statement on the global stage, bringing together the leaders of more than a dozen member states spanning the corners of Asia. Indeed, it underscored the new strategic compass laid out in The Future is Asian (2019) in which I emphasized that Russia is as much “North Asia” as it is Eastern Europe. The next global order is not a distant apparition but it is already in place.
The same goes for how we think about the quality of states. As I pointed out this Spring in the “The Periodic Table of States” (featured in Foreign Policy magazine), neither bigger nor more democratic is necessarily better. Asian nations and smaller states get the recognition they deserve for their stateness and overall stability – a virtue in seemingly short supply in the West today.
Here again pretensions of ideological superiority won’t get anyone very far. Power and prestige emerge from harnessing the interlocking forces of geopolitics, geoeconomics and geotechnology for national advancement. As I argued in Hybrid Reality (2011), “the balance of innovation determines the balance of power.” The true contest of the 21st century is democratic versus authoritarian but simply old versus new.
Three fundamentally new drivers – the advance of AI, the demographic plateau, and rising climate volatility – must also be factored into our modeling of the complex global system today. As I argued in MOVE (2021), the winning societies of the future will be those that deploy technology for public benefit, attract skilled young workers, and invest in climate adaptation.
Look carefully around the world and measure these attributes before deciding where to move or invest.
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I look forward to your feedback on the above and interacting the coming months. Be sure to connect on LinkedIn and X for news, insights, and more.
All the best,
Parag
Read more here: https://www.paragkhanna.com/