The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

THE FUTURE IS ASIAN is written by Parag Khanna, Managing Partner of FutureMap (a scenario planning and strategic advisory firm) with degrees from Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. Discussing commerce, conflict and culture in the 21st century, Khanna argues that a “megaregion” representing 40% of global GDP is clearly of increasing importance. He begins with a review of Asia’s historically great empires and then praises today’s technocracies, particularly Singapore and China. Offering potential for better understanding due to an Asian perspective (Khanna was born in India and lives in Singapore), the author comments further on the tension between economic growth and individual liberties. Throughout, Khanna encourages readers to focus less on individual countries and more on the interconnectedness “spanning Saudi Arabia to Japan, Russia to Australia, Turkey to Indonesia.” 

This text will certainly be of interest to our students, several of whom were engrossed in the recent CQ Researcher report on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a project which Khanna describes as “the equivalent of the mid-twentieth-century founding of the United Nations and World Bank plus the Marshall Plan all rolled into one.” In addition, there are chapters on “Why Europe Loves Asia but Not (Yet) Asians” and “Asians in the Americas and Americans in Asia.”  There, Khanna points out that “in 2010, Asia officially outstripped Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants into the United States” and “a quarter of all US businesses are Asian owned.”  The information on international students is also fascinating with identifiable changes – “increasingly taking their US educations back home” – since the start of the Trump presidency. THE FUTURE IS ASIAN is itself based on solid research, containing graphs and statistics, plus extensive notes and an almost twenty-page bibliography.