Brace for a shattering shock. Westerners will discover within a generation that the fleeting 200-year era of Euro-American dominance is over.

“The Asians are coming back and the chemistry of the 21st century will be completely different. You will have to make choices,” said Kishore Mahbubani, the prophet of Eastern ascendancy and Singapore’s former UN ambassador. The rules of the world order will be set in the East. International law will mutate. The financial institutions and global trading structure will be run by China and India. Westerners will have to adapt, nolens volens, to the Confucian-Hindu way of doing things.

That, at least, is the argument. Doubters say the world has been waiting for the Asian century since Marco Polo. Something always seems to intrude. Usually autocracy.

Prof Mahbubani’s new book – Has the West Lost It? – asserts that the West has made a string of unforced errors since the end of the Cold War.

“It is a paradox: the US has the best universities in the world, and the best think tanks, and yet has the worst strategic thinking,” he told The Daily Telegraph, speaking at the Ambrosetti forum on global affairs and finance at Lake Como.

These blunders accelerated the shift in power already under way as developing Asia was going through an economic leap forward of red-hot intensity. Donald Trump has compounded the damage. Unlike most works of this genre, his book is not an indictment of everything the West stands for and every sin committed over a quarter millennium. Prof Mahbubani says Asia owes a huge debt of gratitude to Euro-American civilisation.