•These countries are the ones that will provide the hormone of growth. Isn’t it?

If you look at the next three years’ global growth, 100 per cent of it will be provided by the emerging market nations. Western Europe will shrink, United States will either stay flat or will shrink, Japan will shrink, China will grow 6-8 per cent, India will grow 5-7 per cent. But that growth will be the only substantial growth in the global economy. Then if you think about cash in a credit-starved world system, who has got cash? The Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudis, not the Americans, not the Europeans. So if you need money you have to go to emerging markets. If you need growth you have to go to the emerging markets and if you need legitimacy increasingly you have to go to the emerging markets.

•And maybe if you need jobs you have to go to emerging markets.

It may well start happening. They may well be the engines of growth.

•After your book on the post-American world, you have been called a declinist.

Many people have called me a declinist. But I think that the basic idea I was trying to point out is the tectonic shift in the global structure of power. America, as you know Shekhar — you have read the book — does pretty well, and I am an optimist about America’s place. Yes, it won’t dominate quite the way it has for the past 20 years, but that was totally unnatural. No country has ever dominated the international system like that. It will be the leading power. But in a world of equals. And in a world of increasingly assertive equals.

... contd.