Parag Khanna’s book opens with a tidy triptych: the nineteenth century was Europeanized, the twentieth Americanized, and the twenty-first, he claims, “is being Asianized.” The Future Is Asian remains one of the most ambitious, pragmatic and optimistic books written on global politics in the past decade; ambitious yet pragmatic because the author, a Singapore-based strategist who once advised the US National Intelligence Council, covers Asia’s historical past, its dynamic present and its uncertain future in a single sweep. Seven years on, after a pandemic, a European land war, a fresh round of US–China trade hostilities, and the recent wild middle-eastern war of Iran, the book reads as something more interesting than a forecast; a hypothesis that the decade has been testing in real time.
Khanna’s Asia is deliberately oversized. It stretches from the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey in the west to Japan and New Zealand in the east, from Russia in the north to Australia in the south a system binding five billion people through trade, finance, infrastructure and diplomacy. The numbers he marshals for it are formidable. The region already accounts for roughly half of global GDP in purchasing-power terms and two-thirds of global economic growth. Of the estimated $30 trillion in middle-class consumption growth projected worldwide between 2015 and 2030, only $1 trillion is expected to come from today’s Western economies. Asia holds more than 60 per cent of humanity; nearly ten times Europe’s population and twelve times North America’s, along with 21 of the world’s 30 largest cities, Dhaka among them.
The book starts with Asia’s historical inheritance: the oldest religions and civilizations, philosophical advancement, archaeological depth and ethnographic variety. In the medieval period, Asia sustained the world’s great commercial arteries through the Silk Road and the maritime routes linking Asian ports. What Khanna calls Asia’s imperial expansions: the Byzantine, Sassanid, Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman empires dominated Eurasia for centuries, in political, economic and religious terms alike. That era lasted until Western powers arrived, colonized and exploited the entire region. Now, on Khanna’s reading, the wheel is turning back, again.
The reawakening
Khanna treats Russia as a power awakening from the tragic fragmentation of the USSR who still paying heavily under Western sanctions, but positioned, once they ease, to reclaim a leading place in Eurasia by turning east. China’s rise needs less qualification: by IMF purchasing-power measures, its economy overtook the United States in 2014. Turkey, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, are all strengthening investment ties with Asian partners rather than Western ones and the trade data bear Khanna out. Intra-Asian exports now exceed the continent’s trade with any outside region, and by 2018 the world’s two largest sources of outbound foreign direct investment were Japan and China. The 2017 Belt and Road summit anchors this story; Khanna describes the BRI as the most ambitious infrastructure undertaking in the history of humankind. Asia, in his framing, sees the West as a service provider Asia itself is the builder, with its own manpower to construct the coming world order.
A Chinese century?
The stock Western criticism that Asianization is a euphemism for Chinese hegemony is the charge Khanna most wants to dismantle. Asia, he argues, contains more functioning democracies than it is credited with, and its states prefer multi-alignment to any single patron; China is one civilization in a system too plural to dominate. The technological record, at least, supports this pan-Asian reading. In 2019, China for the first time overtook the United States as the top source of international patent applications, according to WIPO; yet seven of the ten largest corporate patent filers that year were Asian companies from three different countries, among them Huawei, Samsung, Mitsubishi Electric and LG. China surpassed the US in the volume of AI research in 2014 and channeled some $26 billion of investment into its AI industry in 2017, targeting a $150 billion sector by 2030. The Council on Foreign Relations expects Chinese R&D spending, already near $275 billion a year, to exceed America’s total after 2030 — but Japan ($176 billion) and South Korea ($70 billion) command formidable research budgets of their own. The consumer story is equally striking: an estimated two billion Asians belonged to the middle class in 2020, a figure projected to reach 3.5 billion by 2030 — when two of every three middle-class people on earth will be Asian. Since 2007, Asians have purchased more vehicles than any other region: China alone registered over 28 million light vehicles in 2018, against 17.2 million in the United States, and by around 2030 Asia is projected to buy as many vehicles as the rest of the world combined.
What the book gets right
Three strengths distinguish the book. First, it is a semi-academic work: Khanna weaves traditional and non-traditional socio-economic and political issues such as technology, commerce, natural resources into one argument, accessible without being unserious. Second, this book is not about China or Japan or South Korea, but about Asia: from Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the west, to Russia in the north, Vietnam and the Philippines in the east, and Australia in the south, the author touches nearly every country and shows how they are reconnecting with one another. Third, his treatment of the Belt and Road reframes it as more than Chinese investment; as the infrastructure of Asian cooperation, connecting the region for trade, business and exchange. But, in this anarchic world order this oversimplification is outdated, where China clashes with its all-neighboring countries all the time.
What the optimism overlooks
The book is well researched and organized. Yet its optimism carries blind spots, and hindsight has widened them. First, conflict: militancy in the Levant, unresolved border disputes across the region, Russia engaged in a full-scale war in Ukraine, and majoritarian, communal politics rising in India sit awkwardly within a narrative of convergence. And now, Iran is all out war with gulf countries making the global oil market volatile.
Second, the South China Sea: the ongoing confrontation between China and Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei with Beijing steadily militarizing artificial islands, cuts directly against the claim that nationalist leaders have set territorial disputes aside in favor of integration. Third, distribution: the gap between Asia’s richest and poorest is staggering; the continent contains both Qatar and North Korea and from Pakistan and Afghanistan to war-torn Syria and Iraq, and now Iran, and Lebanon and Egypt, economic disparity remains the region’s most combustible fact. Bangladesh’s 2024 mass uprising and continuing unrest in Balochistan in 2026 are reminders that growth without distribution breeds instability. Finally, Khanna’s admiration for Singapore-style technocratic governance leads him to underweight rights and accountability an omission his critics have pressed since publication.
The verdict
None of this makes the book wrong; it makes it incomplete in instructive ways. Its core wager that connectivity will outrun conflict remains live rather than settled, and the numbers suggest the economic half of the thesis is aging better than the political half. For readers in Bangladesh, which figures in Khanna’s universe both as a rising economy and as home to one of the world’s ten most populous cities, the stakes are anything but abstract. The Future Is Asian is encouraging and optimistic for Asians; plenty of conflicts and crises still lurk around Asia. Read it, seven years on, as a map rather than a prophecy, indispensable for the terrain it charts, misleading only if mistaken for the territory itself.
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Muhammad Irfan Sadik
MuhammadIrfanSadik is a researcher and currently serves as the Senior Foreign Policy Analyst at Youth Policy Forum - YPF. Sadik holds an M.S.S. and B.S.S. from the Department of International Relations at Jahangirnagar University. His research focuses on Intra-State Conflicts, Strategic Studies, International Security Studies, Disarmament, and International Arms Control and Maritime Affairs.
