How George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four predicted the global power shifts happening now

There’s nothing new about calling George Orwell’s most influential novel prescient. But the focus has usually been on his portrayal of the oppressive aspects of life in Oceania, the superstate in which Nineteen Eighty-Four is set. Today, however, a different feature – which as recently as 2019, some critics dismissed as “obsolete” – is getting more attention: its vision of a world divided into three spheres, controlled by autocratic governments that constantly form and then break alliances.