Seven Years On, Is the Future Still Asian?

The Future Is Asian * Parag Khanna
Parag Khanna’s book opens with a tidy triptych: the 19th century was Europeanized, 20th Americanized, and the twenty-first, he claims, "is being Asianized." The Future Is Asian remains one of the most ambitiousand optimistic books written on global politics in the past decade; ambitious yet pragmatic because the authorwho 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,European land war,US�"China trade hostilities, and the recent wild middle-eastern war of Iran, the book reads as something morethan a forecast; a hypothesis that the decade has been testing in real time.
Khanna's Asia is deliberately oversized. 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 southa system binding five billion people through trade, finance, infrastructure and diplomacy. The numbers are formidable: the region accounts for roughly half of global GDP in purchasing-power terms and two-thirds of global growth. Of an estimated $30 trillion in middle-class consumption growth projected by 2030, only $1 trillion is expected from Western economies. Asia holds over 60 per cent of humanity, and 21 of the world's 30 largest cities, Dhaka among them.
The book starts with Asia's historical inheritance, its oldest religions and civilizations, and a medieval order in which the Silk Road and Asian maritime routes anchored trade under empires from Byzantium to the Ottomans; before Western powers arrived, colonized and exploited the region. On Khanna's reading, the wheel is now turning back.
The reawakening
Khanna treats Russia as a power awakening from the tragic fragmentation of the USSR who still paying heavily under Western sanctions, but it will 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. Khanna describes the BRI as the most ambitious infrastructure 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 credited, and its states prefer multi-alignment over any patron. The technological record partly supports this: in 2019 China overtook the US as the top source of patent applications, yet seven of the ten largest patent filers that year were Asian, from three countries. It also leads in AI research and is projected to out-spend America on R&D after 2030, though Japan and South Korea remain major spenders too. Asia's middle class, two billion strong in 2020, is projected to reach 3.5 billion by 2030, and the region has out-purchased every other in vehicle sales since 2007.
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, but hindsight has widened its blind spots. First, conflict: militancy in the Levant, border disputes, Russo-Ukrainian war, far-right politics in India, and Iran's war with Gulf states sit awkwardly within a narrative of convergence. Second, the South China Sea: China's confrontation with Vietnam, the Philippines and others, compounded by Beijing's militarized islands, cuts against the claim that disputes have been set aside for integration. Third, distribution: the gap between Asia's richest and poorest is staggering from Qatar and North Korea, and Singapore and Pakistan and domestic economic disparities in China, India and Malaysia remains highest.
Gen-Z uprisings in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia and unrest in Balochistanin 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 of governments.
The verdict
None of this makes the book wrong; it makes it incomplete. Its core wager that connectivity will outrun conflict still remains, 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 account both as a rising economy and as home to one of the world's ten most populous cities, the stakes are still abstract. The Future Is Asian is encouraging for Asians, though plenty of conflicts still lurk around the region. 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.