Talk of war is getting louder in the West. The German minister of defense proclaimed this month that Germany has to rebuild its army, as did his British colleague. At the start of the war in Ukraine two years ago, the Western media depicted the Russian military as hopelessly ineffective, outdated, and corrupt. Yet in […]

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“I see potential in Asia going from strength to strength, and not just in terms of business opportunities and economic development but in imagining a new planetary future.” – Sohail Inayatullah, UNESCO chairman in futures studies Nearly 100 years ago, in 1924, German diplomat Karl Haushofer introduced the term “Pacific age.” Haushofer anticipated the emergence […]

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Central banks and financial institutions around the world are working on the internationalization of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The global network will be able to process cross-border payments in real time. The next step could be the “tokenization” of all tradable assets, anything from equities and real estate to gold. In the coming years, […]

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The fear of artificial intelligence is largely a Western phenomenon. It is virtually absent in Asia. In contrast, East Asia sees AI as an invaluable tool to relieve humans of tedious, repetitive tasks and to deal with the problems of aging societies. AI brings productivity gains comparable to the ICT (information and communications technology) revolution […]

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In the 1980s, the American futurist Lawrence Taub developed a macro-history based on Hindu cosmology that shows a path to the end of the notorious caste system. His book The Spiritual Imperative Sex, Age, and the Last Caste maps actual linear history to the Varna cycle that forms the basis of Vedic cosmology, the root […]

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Democracies have had a dismal start in the 21st century. Opinion surveys around the world show a counter-intuitive trend: Citizens of democratic nations are more pessimistic about the future of their countries than people living in quasi-democratic or one-party states, often by wide margins. Similar trends can be seen when people are asked about the […]

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In 2012, the American political scientist Graham T Allison argued that the US and China were on a collision course for war. Allison claimed that fear of China had led the US to fall into the “Thucydides trap.” Allison was referring to the Greek historian Thucydides, who chronicled the war between Sparta and Athens. Thucydides […]

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Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both. – Fritjof Capra In 1975, the American physicist Fitjof Capra published the first edition of his best-selling book The Tao of Physics. Capra described the parallels between the ancient Chinese notion of Tao and the subatomic world of particles revealed […]

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In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his widely cited paper “The End of History?” Fukuyama argued that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a victory of liberal democracy over authoritarianism and the end of (ideological) history. The rest of the world would inevitably follow the only path left: Western liberal democracy. From a Western, 1990s […]

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Metamodernism, an intellectual movement that emerged in Europe about 10 years ago, has an ambitious goal: formulating a response to a world “that feels like it’s unraveling through climate change, culture war, bio-precarity, political corruption, and myriad economic failures.” The metamodernist community, many of them intellectuals in their 40s, share a concern about the ideological, […]

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For the last 500 years, a new dominant currency – or reserve currency – has emerged in Europe roughly every hundred years. During the colonial era, Portugal, Holland, France and England all had their turn. The change from one dominant currency to the next was typically accompanied by wars and social upheaval. For much of […]

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“We are in a world of irredeemable paper money – a state of affairs unprecedented in history.” – John Exter (1910-2006), economist and central banker Central banks around the world have been on a gold-buying spree. Gold purchases this year have reached 673 metric tons, more than the total amount purchased in any full year […]

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In its long history, Europe has rarely been as united as it has been during the current Ukraine war. Nearly all European countries support Ukraine, as do their mainstream media. Dissenting views are rare, as are anti-war protests of the kind we saw during the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.    Equally notable, European […]

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Why is the United States concerned that Germany buys its energy from Russia? The US has no objections to Germany buying its computers from China, its motorbikes from Japan, and its cheese from the Netherlands. The last four US presidents – Bush II, Obama, Trump and Biden – had little in common but they were […]

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In the past 10 years, China has built more than 100,000 kilometers of roads and railways in Africa. The massive project is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, a China-led global network of physical and digital infrastructure. Among the African BRI projects is the completion of Trans-African Highway 5 (TAH5). The highway connects Dakar […]

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“If Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.” – Time magazine, “Putin Man of the Year” in 2007 Admire him or despise him, Russia’s president has put […]

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The consciousness-raising hippie movement in the West during the 1960s led to growing interest in Eastern spirituality. While the movement largely dissolved in the 1970s, its spirit lived on in the New Age Movement. Millions of people embraced meditation and personal growth. But society as a whole became more polarized, more conservative, and less equitable. […]

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Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is erecting a new Iron Curtain in Ukraine, deep in the heart of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine’s eastern border, 2,000 kilometers from Berlin, was on a longitude just east of Moscow. In 1943, Adolf Hitler’s army shifted it to a few hundred kilometers past […]

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Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, has been dreaming of a “Great Reset” of the global system. He has argued that Covid-19 and the climate crisis showed that no country is an island and that more global coordination in every domain is required. A Great Reset would enable us to reimagine the […]

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China is rolling out its central bank digital currency (CBDC), the most radical change in money since the Chinese introduced paper money 1,000 years ago. Some 270 million Chinese have already downloaded the CBDC digital wallet from banks and private payment providers. The back end of the system is provided by the central People’s Bank […]

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