For the sensitive globally conscious citizen today, with climate change looming and a financial system that has broken down, it is often easy to assume that we’re heading in the wrong direction. “We’ve become addicted to pessimism,” writes Esquire editor in chief David Granger in a recent editorial. That’s why it’s so refreshing—and enlightening—to hear the sophisticated optimism of “grand strategist” Thomas Barnett, whose new book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, may be the perfect antidote for the doom-and-gloomism that often defines our cultural zeitgeist.

In this feature interview from the upcoming issue of EnlightenNext magazine, Barnett explains to executive editor Carter Phipps why he thinks that things are better today than they ever have been. Combining a futurist’s sense of hope and optimism with a historian’s sense of sobriety and context, Barnett argues that despite its bad rap, the widespread globalization of Western-style capitalism and democracy over the past half century may actually be the most unifying, progressive, and liberating force in human history.

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