SOME ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER, how perhaps might Kipling view his lines? Europe and Asia, 'two strong men'- at least potentially - still stand at 'the two ends of the earth'. But it is an earth that has surely shrunk to a mere shadow through the growth of modern communication - the jumbo jet, the satellite and the Internet. He would certainly not have seen the United States as a third great 'pole', standing between East and West and with a power head and shoulders above any other, as once had Britain and its Empire. Much has been written and said about the tripolar nature of today's world; North America, Asia and Europe. Such tripolarism should not be seen as a return to 'balance of power' politics, with its implications of military potential, but rather as a means of strengthening the linkages - political, economic, security, cultural and scientific - required for the common good between three important centres of economic activity. However, such tripolarity, by embracing almost all of the world's richest countries and leaving out most of the poorest, leads almost inevitably to aggravating the prosperity divide between Noah and South.
