Rapid technological advances, globalisation, unparalleled demographic changes and the rise of China and India as superpowers mean that we are entering an unprecedented age. Rob Shapiro employs his immense experience in international politics to sketch a blueprint for the coming fifteen years, tracing the path combined global forces may lead us. This is neither hopelessly idealistic nor a tale of woe and Armageddon: Shapiro is persistently lucid, penetrating and even-handed in delineating the world as it stands and predicting the way it will walk.