Over the past few years, I have often found myself frustrated with the limitations of my view of the world, with the relative narrowness of my perspective on our current political moment. I am, for better and for worse, a citizen of that part of the world we call the West, and as someone who can read with any degree of fluency only in the English language, my view of the world is largely, and necessarily, informed by the media of the anglophone West.

And so even on those occasions when I do read about the affairs of the world beyond Europe and America, it tends to be mediated through a resolutely western perspective. There are times when I experience this as a frustration with whatever media outlet I happen to be reading – as I did, for instance, earlier this week, reading The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman’s tortured and frankly moronic comparison between the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Minneapolis and Hamas in Gaza. More often than not, though, it’s a frustration with myself for paying attention to the wrong things, in the wrong places.

And neither do I, as a writer, exonerate myself from any of this: my columns in this newspaper are necessarily informed by what I am reading and thinking about, and therefore tend to reflect the very narrowness with which I find myself frustrated.

This sense of wanting to look farther afield, to reorient my perspective, is informed by a growing sense that the world is changing with perplexing speed, and that the poles of global power are shifting. It is perhaps the most obvious possible thing to observe,........

© The Irish Times