Decades don't usually have the courtesy to begin and end on the right year. The social and cultural revolution that Western countries think of when they talk of the 'Sixties' only got underway in 1962-63, and didn't end until the Middle East war and oil embargo of 1973-74. But this one has been quite neat: the 'noughties' began with Islamist terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, and ended with a global financial melt down.
The terrorist threat to the West was minor, but the West's hugely disproportionate and ill-considered response was a key factor in the great shift that defines the decade. The 'war on terror' and all the rest did not deter a Muslim Nigerian student from trying to blow up an airliner over Detroit last Saturday. It motivated him to do so. But it also accelerated the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West.
That shift was happening anyway. When China and India are growing economically three to four times as fast as the West, it's only a matter of time until they catch up with the older industrial economies.
In 2003, however, researchers at Goldman Sachs predicted that the Chinese economy would surpass that of the US by the mid-2040s. By the middle of this year, they were predicting that it would happen in the mid-2020s - and this year, for the first time, China built more cars than the US. That acceleration is in large part a consequence of the huge diversion of Western attention and resources that was caused by the 'war on terror'.
Prestige is a quality that cannot be measured or quantified, but a reputation for competence in the use of power is a great asset in international affairs. After the centuries-old European empires wasted their wealth and the lives of millions of their citizens in two 'world wars' in only 30 years, their empires just melted away. Nobody was still in awe of them, and they lacked the resources to hold onto their colonies by force.
Something similar has happened in the past decade to the US. Unwinnable wars fought for the wrong reasons always hurt a great power's reputation, and wars fought amid needless tax cuts, burgeoning deficits and financial anarchy are more damaging if the country's power depends heavily on a global financial empire.