If you had to define “globalisation” with an image, what would it be? A container ship from China stuffed with toys and T-shirts? A programmer tapping at a keyboard in Bangalore? A plane circling gloomily over Heathrow airport?

Most people’s pictures of globalisation are to do with economics, technology and business. But before markets, modems and manufacturers could do their work, political changes had to take place. The foundations of the globalised business world are political – and so are the biggest threats to the system.

The challenge to the globalisation consensus comes from below. Political elites in the US, Asia and Europe are struggling to convince citizens that globalisation is not just a game that benefits the rich. If the argument is lost in any of the major world economies, the political consensus that underpins globalisation could unravel.

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There are some events that change the world in an instant: the fall of the Berlin wall; the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square; the aeroplanes flying into the World Trade Center.

So far, there have been no such defining moments in 2007. Perhaps we should be grateful for that, since world-shaking events are often sudden acts of shocking violence. But it makes it both trickier and more interesting to carry out my annual end-of-year exercise – listing the five most important events of the past 12 months. Nonetheless, I intend to try. If you want to make sense of world affairs, it is useful to identify the most significant events. Also, I like making lists. So here goes:

January: the surge. It is too soon to tell whether US President George W. Bush’s decision to increase the number of American troops in Iraq will go down as the moment when the US began to turn the situation around; or just a last, failed throw of the dice. The big questions still have to be answered. Is a civil war in the offing? What will happen when America withdraws its extra troops?

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I recently wrote a column on the political consequences of $100 oil, which drew quite successfully (I thought) on an earlier discusssion on this blog. So I would like to repeat the experiment.

There is no shortage of analysis of the global economic consequences of the falling dollar. But what about the global strategic consequences? Over the long term, a feeble currency is usually both a symbol and a cause of national decline. I’m not sure you can yet read anything too profound into the current movements in the currency markets, although Hugo Chavez is doing his best.

Still, even in the here-and-now, I think there could be political ramifications to the falling dollar. Off the top-of-my-head, here are four possibilities:

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On my first visit to Burma in the early 1990s, I met an elderly man who had fought with the British in the second world war – and who rolled up his sleeve to show the scars left by a Japanese machine gun. The old man was scathing in his contempt for his country’s military government. But when I asked him if he wanted tougher sanctions against Burma he looked alarmed: “No,” he protested, “we are far too isolated already.”

Fifteen years have passed since then and the military junta is still in charge – and once again has resorted to murderous repression in the streets. The western world is aghast. At a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week, Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, got a wry laugh when he announced that something must be done, but he had no idea what that something might be. Under such circumstances, “something” usually turns out to be economic and political sanctions.

Pushing through new sanctions would be an understandable reaction to the horrifying sight of the Burmese military massacring its own people. But sanctions would probably achieve nothing in the short term – and be actively damaging in the long term.

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Tuesday was the big day at the UN General Assembly. Global leaders rushed to the podium, one after the other. We had the heads of government of South Africa, Indonesia, Germany and many others. But it was clear who the big three were - Bush, Sarkozy and Ahmadinejad. Bush because of his job, Sarko because he is still a novelty - and ADJ because he says outrageous things and is at the centre of a gathering international crisis.

It was fascinating to sit through an entire Ahmadinejad speech and press conference for the first time. I thought he pulled off the difficult trick of being simultaneously boring and sinister. Boring because he goes on and on about religion. I don’t know why this surprised me - it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, after all. But the religious rhetoric is usually wisely edited out of the compressed version of his remarks. Having to listen to it all in full, is a bit like being trapped on the doorstep by a Jehovah’s Witness. On the other hand, I also found his performance sinister because it is clear that he is genuinely obsessed by Israel. These are not stray remarks, forced out of him. He can’t keep off the subject.

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This is the big week at the UN General Assembly. But it’s already clear who the star of the show will be - Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president of Iran. Ahmadi-Nejad is often portrayed as a dangerous simpleton. But he has played the PR game with masterful precision, since his arrival in New York.

Today (it’s still Monday night in New York), he limbered up for his appearance at the UN General Assembly by talking to an audience at Columbia University, in upper Manhattan. He was greeted with screaming headlines. The New York Daily News splash was "The Evil Has Landed" - with a sub-title -"Hate spewing Iran prez speaks today at Columbia.". For good measure, the paper ran an editorial accusing Columbia of "Monstrous Idiocy". Perhaps intimidated by all this pre-publicity, Columbia’s president - Lee Bollinger, (a champagne socialist?) - spoke for 10 minutes before the Iranian president and accused him of being a "petty and cruel dictator." This played into Ahmadi-Nejad’s hands. He mildly rebuked his host for being discourteous - and smilingly dodged all difficult questions about Israel or the Holocaust. The only moment when he appeared genuinely ridiculous was when he denied the existence of homosexuality in Iran.

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Earlier this year I got an e-mail from a reader accusing me of combining the “worst qualities” of Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. My offence had been to write a column suggesting that it would be a bad idea to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. This, apparently, meant that I was in favour of the annihilation of Israel (hence Hitler) – and also that I was a pathetic coward (Chamberlain).

This kind of rhetoric is not unusual. As I write, Columbia University in New York is being accused on television of “hosting Hitler”, because it has invited President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran to speak on campus.

Personally, I found being compared to Chamberlain particularly offensive. There are few more damaging taunts than to be compared to the British prime minister who tried and failed to appease Hitler at the Munich summit of 1938. In the US, in particular, the ghost of Chamberlain is regularly brought out to frighten those who are deemed insufficiently resolute in confronting the enemy of the moment. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the lessons of Munich were invoked by President George W. Bush and any number of neo-conservative commentators.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican, was at it again during this month’s congressional hearings on Iraq. She reminded her audience that: “Neville Chamberlain genuinely believed that he had brought ‘peace in our time’ by washing his hands of what he believed to be an isolated dispute in ‘a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’. That country was Czechoslovakia and Chamberlain’s well-intentioned efforts … only ensured that an immensely larger threat was thereby unleashed.” The lesson was clear. Confront evil regimes as soon as possible.

The remainder of this week’s column can be read here (FT.com subscribers only). Comments can be made below.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the Wikipedia discussion. I was reassured by the general consensus that using Wikpiedia is not the journalistic equivalent of putting on the dunce’s hat. As for the general discussion of Web 2.0 - very useful.

For anyone wondering what happens next, let me explain how I hope to use all this stuff:

I tend to have a list of topics that I hope eventually to write newspaper articles about. The idea is that at some point something happens in the news which makes my idea seem relevant - at which point, I pounce. Alternatively, if nothing much is happening in the news, I have an excuse to delve into my bag of general themes. So I will wait for my moment with the Web 2.0 stuff. And - in the meantime - if people feel inclined to contribute further thoughts to that discussion thread, so much the better.

Among the other topics that I’ve been planning to write about for ages are American "imperialism"; democracy promotion (was it a bad idea, etc…) and my personal hatred of Bono. Over the next few weeks, I’ll start discussions on all of these themes.

But first, empire:

Generally people who talk about "American imperialism" do not mean it in a nice way. But I was struck, during the run-up to the Iraq war, by the overt flirtation with the idea of empire among certain American policymakers and intellectuals. There is Ron Suskind’s now famous quotation of an unnamed senior Bush administration official, who allegedly said: "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Charles Krauthammer in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 2004 salivated that "this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world - acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain’s".

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Conspiracy theorists who would like to believe that the invasion of Iraq was all about oil will be tempted to fork out £17 for a new book - "Oil Wars" (Pluto Press). The editors carry the stamp of academic respectability - they hail from the LSE and Stanford. And they definitely flirt with the "war for oil" thesis.

The book’s introduction starts with a very suggestive quote from Paul Wolfowitz - "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." Infuriatingly this quote is not footnoted. I would love to read it in context.

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Being asked to discuss "the world in 2020" without hesitation, deviation or massive banality is a difficult task at the best of times. It is an even more daunting when you are expected to perform at 7.45 in the morning. But that was the fate that befell me this morning, when I took part in a seminar organised by the Centre for European Reform, a think tank and Accenture, a consultancy.

Fortunately, the hard work had been done by Mark Leonard, who has just been appointed as the head of a new think tank - the astutely-titled European Council on Foreign Relations, which is being funded by George Soros. Leonard - whose stock-in-trade is to think BIG - has just produced a new pamphlet called "Divided World: The struggle for primacy in 2020". You can find a summary of its argument here; and if you feel inspired to buy it, try here.

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