Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation offers a long-winded analysis of the shrinking American hegemony in this week's New York Times Magazine. For those afraid of 7,500-word big-think pieces on geopolitics (please teach me to not read these things), Khanna basically argues that the new world order -- mostly due to US inattention to global transformations these past few years while we were distracted in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is comprised of three superpowers, China, Europe and the US, and the conflicts aren't over ideology or religion but intellectual and economic influence.

The author marshals many solid examples, and the picture, though far from bleak, reveals darkening skies for America's current status as the world's only superpower.

It's a lot to bite off, and it flies in the face of more conservative views of the foreign policy future. The visuals that accompanied the piece seem dramatic in comparison to the story and the recommendations buried deep below 15 pages of text. (The piece is excerpted from a book, which I imagine could be longer still!) America as a tiny, alternately missing or microscopic bit of the world leaves a desperate impression. The real story is much less so. Khanna writes that these three superpowers, which he calls the Big Three will do battle over their resources, friendships and customers of the remaining nations in a decades-long struggle for hegemony over the Second World, incidentally the title of his forthcoming book:

The Big Three are the ultimate “Frenemies.” Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell’s 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others’ terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America’s backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe’s southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China’s growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call “the second world.”

His analysis goes on like this for a while, repeating the tropes of supermodel Giselle Bundchen wishing to be paid in Euros (she didn't) and Jay-Z name-checking the EU currency in his comeback record as reasons why Europe, with its business-focused expansion and post-imperial organizing model, is a logical counterpoint to the US and China, rather than Russia. Russia is poor-mouthed, Islam is rarely mentioned, and smaller nations with surprisingly large impacts -- Venezuela, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey -- are presented as the powerful second-world nations who will be the major consumers in a new "geopolitical marketplace."

It is in this analogy -- where the nations of the world will be shopping for a new global best friend -- that Khanna's piece really finds its focus. He asserts that to make America an attractive commodity in this new global market, the next president should:

• "Channel your inner JFK," and leave the American interest, and all the accompanying bluster, by the wayside. American values, "democracy" and all the rest should be set aside in the interests of selling what America can do for these second-world consumer-nations.
  
• Reorganize the State Department to match the DOD's organization of the world into regional commands.
  
• Boost substantially the number of Foreign Service Officers, student exchanges, Peace Corps volunteers and the like, using corporate partners (see below).
  
• Create a "diplomatic-industrial complex," incorporating business into the functions of government like they do in Europe and China.
  
• Convene a G-3 of the big three and don't dictate the agenda.

Khanna offers these conclusions almost as an afterthought, and it seems to me there would be far more analysis in the book version. He sees this rundown as a move to restore American competitiveness in the marketplace and then, in the final paragraph, introduces the idea he's been subtly undermining throughout, that American exceptionalism could be proven if we're chosen by enough consumers. To this listener, though, American exceptionalism is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Khanna's piece, and all its graphic treatment, seems to vacillate between "the war is lost" and "who cares anyway?" I found it unfulfilling, especially when useful treatments of these recommendations -- the solutions, not endless retellings of the problem -- would have been much more rewarding.