Sweeping changes are underway in the realm of global geopolitics, but you'd never know it listening to today's presidential candidates. By the year 2000 Americans are likely to put foreign policy at the top of the list of their concerns, as the Euro-Mideastern region replaces the Asia-Pacific as the new danger zone for U.S. interests. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, author of The Logic of World Power and other books on foreign affairs, is a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Foreign policy ranks dead last in voter priorities in this year's presidential race, according to the polls. But four years from now expect a 180 degree turn as growing turbulence in the Euro-Mideastern region combines with sustained economic boom in the Asia-Pacific to transform the global geopolitical environment as we know it.

By far the best indicators of where we're heading can be found by looking at the past -- at the World War II period when President Franklin Roosevelt first gave legitimation to the notion of "one world" linking up the Atlantic and Pacific regions. One world thinking then came to shape U.S. policy during the post-war rivalry with the Soviet Union and China.

However, whereas the U.S. and the Soviet Union never went to war, the U.S. fought two wars in the Pacific, one directly involving China (Korea) and the second indirectly involving it (Vietnam).

Why the difference? One obvious reason is that the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons whereas China did not. But another is economic. One doesn't need to be an economic determinist to realize that economics underlies a lot of what accounts for peace or war. Western Europe was just beginning its fast upward spiral of economic growth, fueling hopes in Washington for an "embourgoisement" of the Soviet Union. However, East Asia -- even Japan -- was still poor and revolutionary. No expert ever imagined that within 25 years Japan would become an economic superpower.

Some people, including President Eisenhower, calculated that the Soviet Union could be undermined by capitalism. Events proved him right. Yet not even those who saw China's revolution as basically benign believed that China could achieve a modern economic system within 100 years.

U.S. policy makers' one-world thinking held that the bait of gaining big new economic wealth by linking up with the West would entice the Soviet Union to leave that revolutionary ocean which China still preached would wash over and drown the capitalist West. The split of U.S. views on the two Communist superpowers led to two very different forms of U.S. policy. Until Nixon suddenly switched directions on July 15, 1971, U.S. policy towards Russia was to push rivalry towards cooperation, while that towards China was to push rivalry towards war.

Today, despite the talk about the U.S. winning the Cold War, Russia and China still remain the big world powers marginal to the world system. Japan and Germany, because of their economic preeminence, remain the two big inside powers.

In recent years, however, new economic waves are rising out of East Asia, causing the biggest reassessment of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. So if the logic underlying post-war U.S. policy still holds, in the years to come U.S. relations with China should improve while those with Russia worsen.

While East and South Asia with half the worlds population are plunging headlong into economic growth, the prospects for Russia, the Middle East and even Western Europe are far less bright. The Russian economy is doing somewhat better but boom is still a long way off. In the Middle East, Shimon Peres' dream of a common market that could raise all economic boats died with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, an apostle of Israeli self-reliance. And in Europe, already high unemployment continues to rise and even mighty Germany faces mounting economic problems.

By the year 2000, Asia's economic boom will still be in full swing and China will have emerged with greater power and presence than ever before in its history. Japan will remain the high tech industrial and financial power house of the region, a unified Korea will become the region's third major economic and political power. There will be trouble in East Asia but the U.S., by virtue of its political and military power, will play the key stabilizing role -- much as it did in the Euro-Mideastern region throughout the Cold War era.

In the Euro- Mideastern region, by contrast, as political turbulence spreads, the U.S. role will be mainly political and military. Already now in a military expansion that recalls that in East Asia in the 50s and 60s, American troops are increasingly fanning out in the Balkans and the Mideast.

Today's presidential candidates offer few hints of the sweeping geopolitical changes going on right now -- particular our relations with Russia and the rising dangers in the Euro-Mideast region. But it won't take long for the political debate to catch up with where the geopolitical vectors are moving.