DJ: So perhaps it's wrong of us to focus exclusively on China. But if America follows this prescription, what happens to the rest of humanity?

DM: It's in the world's interest for the US and Europe to get it right. By that I mean that they continue to be the leaders of innovation and technological development because they are the leaders now — the places where the most entrepreneurial spirit and innovators are. 

DJ: But also human rights and democracy.

DM: Absolutely, but I simply do not think you can shoehorn democracy and governance into countries. Africa is a classic example of this. The 1980s saw a big groundswell for democracy and the big aid push: the attempt to link aid to democracy. I don't think you can do that. You need to get the economics right. That is what people will rally around. It doesn't matter if you're in Rwanda and you're Tutsi or Hutu, you will clash if you don't have something in common, and economics is brilliant at giving people something in common. We all want the same thing: we want our children to have good lives, to have clean water, roads and so on. I  think the big mistake has been trying to superimpose political systems when you don't have a critical mass, a middle class on the ground who are able to hold governments accountable. We'll see how that plays out in China. 

Part of the problem is that over time the US is going to have to decide what to do in terms of underwriting public goods. Now there is a view out there that says the US is actually providing employment by having all these military people in Iraq and Afghanistan but I just think American society is going to have to make a decision between underwriting global goods and improving its own education. That is something for the American public to decide. I don't know when the last gong will be heard and people realise how bad the educational standards have become. 

DJ: One final question to you, Niall. You talk more in your book than Dambisa does about Islam and why Islam didn't make it in the way the West did as a kind of matrix for the take-off. But Islam today is very dynamic, demographically and culturally too. It is very assertive and becoming more and more significant here in Europe. How do you see that playing out? Is it not conceivable that if we look a few decades ahead we will have by then China, a very wealthy but also somewhat stagnant society, while all around it are rapidly growing Islamic countries?

NF: This is a hugely important issue and it means we've just got to take a couple of steps back and look not just at a world of economic giants but also demographics and cultural dynamics. Sam Huntington had some things wrong in his Clash of Civilizations but he had more right than almost all the other post-Cold War commentators. The vision of the future that we got from Brzezinksi or Fukuyama or Mearsheimer was actually a less accurate vision than the vision in the Clash of Civilizations. And I think that core notion,  that after the Cold War there's Western civilisation — although I feel that's two civilisations as Europe and the US drifted apart — there's China, and then the other big player will be Islam, is about right.