The world is facing epic change. How will we cope?  An America
survey shows that US hegemony is over and that the centre of
power is moving firmly to the east  Late last week came the
announcement from the intimidatingly named National Intelligence
Council (the 'leading American intelligence organisation') that
the end of American hegemony is imminent; that the unipolar
world will, before long, cease to exist; that new locations of
power are emerging.  The shift has been heralded for some time,
if not by the US authority that provides 'unvarnished'
intelligence to US policy makers; so we already have an idea of
what those new locations are. Nevertheless, I found myself
scouring the report in the paper to see if my country of birth
had been mentioned. In the third paragraph, like characters in a
frequently perused novel, I found the emerging economies of
India, Brazil and China, which, predictably, seem to be a source
of a great deal of the anxiety.  Two things, however, gave this
fairly unsurprising assessmen