(MONEY Magazine) – Well, the new millennium is here, and the world is finally one. Technology has united us, and the tyranny of distance has been overthrown. One world, one love. I know this because on New Year's Eve, I sat home in New Jersey watching Peter Jennings welcome the year 2000 as it dawned in Singapore, Cairo and Ulan Bator. Also, somebody got a look at my AT&T calling-card number recently and used it to make calls to Senegal and Sri Lanka.

The rap on globalization is usually what the United States is doing to the world in the name of free trade, viz. that guy from France who's always whining that his homeland has become infested with McDonald's restaurants. But there is a new side to globalization: America once virtually owned the world, but lately the world has been striking back. A few worrisome examples:

--Used to be, the U.S. colonized the minds of kids worldwide via Mickey Mouse and Sesame Street. Now our youth are prey to the likes of Pokemon, Harry Potter and the Teletubbies. My own 2 1/2-year-old son, a red-blooded American boy, is in complete brain thrall to Thomas the Tank Engine, a kids' show (and accompanying line of toys) originating not in good old Hollywood but in that show-biz wasteland, Great Britain.

--One of the new leading lights in that most American of all musics, bluegrass, is a guitar player from Genoa, Italy named Beppe Gambetta, who appears onstage wearing double-breasted blazers, alligator loafers and cologne.

--In December, a hacker stole 300,000 consumer credit-card numbers from an online music retailer. More felonious American ingenuity? We've always produced the most imaginative crooks. Not anymore. This dude appears to be operating out of Latvia, Bulgaria or Russia.

--According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the ratio of live turkeys imported last year to the number exported was 3 to 2. That is to say, in 1999 many of the birds served on the quintessential American holiday were foreign-born.

When U.S. consumers are at the mercy of some larcenous clown in Latvia, you know we've entered weird new water. So now that the American Century is over, we must look ahead to the global future not with our characteristic confidence but with anxiety. Hey, French guy who hates McDonald's: We feel your pain.

--PETER CARBONARA