Turning to the matter at hand, however, I will second John in my personal admiration and friendship for Kishore Mahbubani. I will add that Kishore loves to play the provocateur, and his analysis of Asia's inevitable rise and America's imminent decline should be read in that light. He has already ruffled the feathers of many of his former colleagues in the Singapore foreign office, some of whom are giving speeches warning against "Asian triumphalism."

From my point of view, triumphalism goes before a fall in both East and West, so Kishore should be wary of Asia's catching America's disease.

But three quick points in response to Kishore. First, he talks about the "West," but what he really means is the U.S. In his book he ignores Europe almost completely - that conglomerate of 27 nations, 500 million people, and a GDP of $16.8 trillion (although we should really now measure GDP in Euro, fast becoming the world's second reserve currency) - an amount estimated to be 30% of the world's GDP.

When he does mention Europe, he dismisses it as yesterday's news. That's a huge mistake. The subtitle of Kishore's book is "The Irresistable Shift of Global Power to the Asian Hemisphere." But if the world is divided into two hemispheres, one of them Asian, then the other is the transatlantic hemisphere, which includes Europe (all the way to Russia and really to the Urals), North America, Central and South America, and Africa. If I look down the decades of the 21st century, I wouldn't exactly count that hemisphere out, particularly as trade and investment increasingly flows north-south as well as east-west.

Second, although Kishore is right to say that it is essential to reform global institutions - the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the G-8 - to give Asia full representation and say, he conveniently overlooks a critical fact. The vast majority of the calls for reforming these institutions are coming from Western scholars and officials. One of the key blockers of the last round of proposed Security Council reforms from 2004-06, which would have finally brought in India, Brazil, South Africa, and other developing countries was China - Kishore's no 1 example of the power shift to Asia - because it could not countenance the idea of Japan joining the Security Council.