LONDON — Just as one picture can tell more than a thousand words, so also one event can tell more, and provide a bigger shock, than a thousand written messages.

The almost unprecedented events of recent days, with banks collapsing worldwide, financial markets in turmoil, share values plummeting and the American political grass roots in revolt against its administration and against the whole official Establishment, send a message more vivid than countless warnings, speeches, articles and lectures.

It has been pointed out for a decade or more that the true sources of power and influence in the world have shifted, both geographically and politically, thanks to the vast impact of the information and communications revolution, but this obvious message has until now strangely eluded political leaders in the West, and especially in America and Western Europe.

Both American and European politicians have continued to talk about world leadership, as though it was theirs by rights, and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have continued to assume that their powers to order and control global events were undiminished. In the real world, first economic and financial, and now political power, have been fast draining away from the elites on both sides of the Atlantic — in Washington as well as Brussels.

Two huge forces have been at work driving this process for some years now:

First, America and much of Europe, especially Britain, have become debtors, borrowers and spenders, trying to carry on living at yesterday's high standards in the face of today's reality — namely that they are ceasing to be either the richest or the most competitive parts of the globe.

Increasingly, it is the fast-growing and high-saving Asian nations and the cash-rich oil producers of the Middle East (plus Russia) who have had to come to the financial rescue of Western financial institutions, with the process accelerating in recent days. Massive Japanese stakes in American banks like Morgan Stanley, for example, and Chinese stakes in British banks (Barclays) are vivid demonstrations of this.

Second, power has not only slipped away from Western governments to the East and other capitals such as Delhi, Beijing, Moscow and Tokyo; it has trickled away from governments generally as the fantastic dispersal of information and knowledge has empowered billions of logged-on personal computers users and mobile telephone owners, thus creating a new worldwide network of influence and power outside any national government's control.

This is a centrifugal power that can be concerted, organized and directed for good or for evil, as the tragedy of 9/11 showed. It is not a question of new empires arising as old ones fall, as it would have been in 19th- or 20th-century terms.

There is no new "Rome" to displace Washington's dominion. Instead, the microchip has given birth to a complete asymmetry of force, command, authority and economic muscle. The smallest group or cell under control of no one state or government can now become coordinated, weaponized and empowered to challenge the mightiest traditional military force.

To its amazement, America's leadership has discovered that its titanic defense spending, missile arsenal and 13 carrier fleets cannot maintain its influence and ensure it gets its way. Although size and weight have increased, vulnerability has not diminished. Flabby international obesity has replaced giant global weight. Pax Britannica came and went, and now Pax Americana has truly gone as well.

That this has been happening for a while was obvious to many outside Western government and ruling circles. The piling up of public debt, the weakness of the dollar and the huge accumulation of gold and dollar reserves in Asian central banks were all clear signs that the world had changed radically.

Now the shock waves have truly broken the illusion and the situation is plain for all to see. Wall Street no longer rules. The very American technological knowhow and genius that gave the U.S. its predominance has been used to bring about its downfall, with endless computerized machinations turning prudent banking and money management into a toxic nightmare of complex uncertainty.

There is a school of optimistic thought that this means power has been handed to a new united Europe, with its more socialistic inclinations in contrast to raw American capitalism. But this vision, too, is flawed. To be sure there have been some strange role reversals within the European circle, with Spanish interests now taking over most of British home finance (did the Spanish Armada win after all?), and the East and Central European countries, once so backward, now show more spark and dynamism than struggling France or Britain.

But the big money, and the big influence, have moved eastward, away from the Atlantic sphere altogether. It is a measure of the upside-down state of affairs that the country best insulated against the financial contagion is Iraq — simply because it is still basically a cash economy and its banking sector remains unreconstructed and primitive.

Can the Western nations and their policymakers now adjust to this grand bouleversement? Can they trim their extravagance and indebtedness, restore financial prudence, and behave as humble and respectful partners rather than as haughty rulers within the global network?

To do so will require not a return to socialism, as some have called for, but an advance to realism — to the realization that the global financial system is no longer a Western monopoly to which the world must dance in obedience.

To understand that will be the beginning of wisdom, providing the best chance for the painful and slow return to balance and stability worldwide.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords (www.lordhowell.com).