The challenge of our time: how to assure world order

We live in a world of grave uncertainty. Because we are confused by too much volatile information, we rely on experts to interpret for us how to understand history and how to read the future. Former US secretary of state and Harvard academic Dr Henry Kissinger is well positioned to fill that role. His new book, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History, is in my view, the definitive book on national security, geopolitics and statecraft for the 21st century.

In 1972, US president Richard Nixon, with the advice of Kissinger, undertook a masterstroke in 20th-century diplomacy by opening up to China to counterbalance the threat of the Soviet Union. Within two decades, the Soviet empire collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A quarter of a century later, the US-China rapprochement propelled China to become the world's second-largest economy, but the US now considers China a rival, creating cold war version 2.0, with a strange mix of competitors and allies.

World Order is an instant classic - a tour de force through diplomatic and imperial history of how Rome, Britain and the US rose to become No1. The US did so through superior geography, technology and the legacy of democratic rule of law forged from the ashes of European internecine wars. It is the heir to the European imperial tradition, and defends it with the world's most sophisticated military.

The North Atlantic alliance comprises US, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. They account for 18 per cent of the global population, 38 per cent of the landmass, but actually the bulk of the oceans.

But the unipolar situation is only temporary, because of the rise of the non-North-Atlantic economies in terms of population and GDP. Kissinger warns his countrymen that as the dominant superpower, America is forever ambivalent as to its strategic choices. It can either impose its own moral values on the rest of the world or play a balancing act between its enemies and friends, to maintain its superior position.

America has to choose between being principled (about its democratic ideals) or being practical to follow the classic British skill of "divide and rule". It cannot afford to do both. By drawing the lines of "friend or foe" starkly in moral terms, the US is in danger of isolating itself, because its allies may not always agree on every issue.

However powerful America is, it cannot alone turn back the tides of change from demographics, religion, globalisation and technology.