It is "tectonic", but it is not the kind of seismic upheaval that registers on the Richter scale. You are experiencing, as you read this, one of the three great global power shifts of the last 500 years, writes Fareed Zakaria, the respected host of CNN's Sunday morning programme GPS, and Editor-at-Large of Time magazine.

The first shift was the rise of the western world in the 15th century, which created the dominant world capitalist system. It gave us modernity in agriculture, industry, science, technology, commerce, etc., which impacted upon every aspect of our daily lives.

The industrialisation of the US in the late 19th century, and the gradual decline of Europe was the second great shift. And now, the third shift in the modern era is "the Rise of the Rest" of the world.

But the great, challenging shift in trade, economics, politics and culture is not coming solely from modernisation in the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

It is the birth of "a new world in which countries in every region of the globe are becoming more politically stable, economically strong, culturally confident and as a consequence, they are asserting themselves on the world stage".

Zakaria's categorisation of modern history, in his recently updated, The Post-American World into three strict periods may conflict with many historians, but to dwell there is to lose the essence of his penetrating analysis.

The emerging world, he writes, is fundamentally different from the multi-polar order, dominated for over 100 years by the US and western Europe.

It is also different from what he calls "the bi-polar duopoly" world of the Cold War in which the two powers, US and the USSR, reacted to each other's every move. We, in the Caribbean, can still recall the impact of such moves in the American invasion of Grenada in the early1980s.

Since of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been an American imperium, a uni-polar world which, to its own advantage, promoted the concept of globalisation, consequently changing the dynamics of the world economy dramatically.

That expansion has been tectonic, as it gestates today's international order. Emerging now is "a new world in which countries will seek their own solutions and their own path, and the United States will have neither the economic means, nor the influence to impose a solution", he writes.

Americans are worried about what they see as a decline in their global influence, and this is demonstrated in the concentrated attacks of right-wing conservatives and fundamentalists on the Obama presidency.

Like the devotees in Hitler's Third Reich, they believe the American Eagle was given divine authority to rule the world for 1,000 years.

So they worry about China's appetite for world resources, which is matched by its growth rate, which dipped to 8.1 per cent, the lowest since the spring of 2009.

Americans are concerned, too, about India, hence they talked about the "Rise of Asia", but now other countries across the globe — significantly 30 nations in Africa, two-thirds of the continent — are experiencing growth rates, previously unimagined.

"While they had booms and busts, the overall trend has been unthinkably upward. Even the economic rupture of 2008 and 2009 could not halt, or reverse this trend; in fact, the recession accelerated it.

"While many of the world's wealthy, industrialised economies continued to struggle with slow growth, high unemployment and overwhelming indebtedness, through 2010 and beyond, the countries that constitute "The Rest" rebounded quickly," he says.

Nonetheless, he is not pessimistic about America, and maintains that it will thrive for decades, because of its unique economic, political and cultural advantages.

Growth takes place whenever a challenge evokes a successful response that, in turn, evokes a further and different challenge, the British historian Arnold Toynbee once observed.

There is no reason why that process should not be repeated indefinitely in civilisations, Toynbee added. His statement was not intended to motivate Americans, because he went on to warn that the majority of civilisations, as a matter of historical fact, have failed.

What does all of this mean for us in Trinbago?

While "The Rest" grows, we have a Minister of Finance caught in the denial of reality — a refusal to acknowledge the unpleasant data of Trinbago's economic Depression.

So he experiences existential anxiety from the words, "stagnant", "slump," "depression," "recession", and worse "dump". His answer is spend... spend...and spend, again as he searches for his "greater flexibility and turnaround".

The political stability that accompanies such turnaround is thrashed again by an unbridled Attorney General, who forays into the constitutional territory of both the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police to clear the Works Minister of wrongdoing in a police bribery investigation.

So while "The Rest" of the world is on the march, finally, Trinbago's political leaders seems bent on imprisoning us, as Naipaul wrote, in "the Third World's Third World".

• Keith Subero, a former Express news editor, has since followed

a career in communication and management