Joshua Cooper Ramo is the managing director of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm based in New York. His most recent book is The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do about It. In an influential paper called “The Beijing Consensus” in 2004, published by the Foreign Policy Centre in Britain, he described the Chinese model of economic development and its attraction for developing nations. Ramo is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, and is a former assistant managing editor and world section editor of TIME.

Writing in the Cairo Review