•What about the EU, won’t it be pivotal to this emerging world order, as some argue? And what about the BRIC 2050 scenario?

Of course the EU is and will be a powerful economic force, but it won’t be a coherent influence on the rest of the world. Parag Khanna gets it wrong, I think, when he projects the EU, the US and China as the Big Three. The EU is not going to make clear decisions, that’s the nature of the beast. It’s an aggregate of 27 countries and still counting. It’s an economic force, mainly. And I don’t think one can make these large predictions about the grand future.

•You write that ‘if India and China develop as Japan did, it would destroy the planet’. How will environmental responsibility be shared in the next decade?

I think the new American president, whoever it may be, would do well to start by committing the US to making real cuts in greenhouse emissions. It might be possible to then bind China into undertaking a similar exercise — and China in turn can use this external obligation to bring about a change it desperately needs. That’s less true of India, which is in a much earlier state of economic development, it would be harder to persuade India into accepting a higher-cost path. There’s a stronger case for financial incentives and technological transfers to enable India to take a greener route. So it’s in India’s interests to differentiate itself from China instead of being side-by-side on these issues.