No crisis is uniformly global.  The suffering and the opportunity that a "global" crisis entails are always unevenly distributed across countries, and unevenly across the population inside any one country.  That said, one can nevertheless argue that we-not the old royal "we" but, more presumptuously, the new global "we"-are in January 2009 experiencing the latest of four dramatic changes that major parts of the world have undergone over the last twenty years.

Revised and updated as of late January 2009, this paper was originally presented at a conference on "Refreshing Thai-U.S. Relations" held in Thailand on 8-9 January 2009.