Entering A Danger Zone

THERE IS A STRONG POSSIBILITY that within the next ten years the United States and china will go to war against each other. That is the assessment of geo-political analysts Hal Brands an Michael Beckley in their intriguing but alarming new book: Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China". That is to say, the coming conflict between the U.S.A. and China. The threat of a war between the two superpowers will peak during the next decade, and of course can still be avoided, although there is no curent indication that either nation is willing to do what is necessary to avoid catastrophic war. The rivalry between Chian and the U.S. is of course decades old, dating to long before the Chinese communist revolution of 1949. Tensions and animosities between the two countries has noticeably increased during the past few years, as anyone wo follows the news and current events has observed. China's behavior has been increasingly aggressive and acrimonious, and has included a huge military build up larger than any since World War Two, expansion of Chinese control over the South China Sea, China's rapid industrialization and commercialization of its economy, which includes a large amount of intellectual property theft from American sources, which the United States has repeatedly protested. China is acting like an emerging superpower or empire determined to fulfill what it considers its destiny of domination of the international order, economically and militarily. For several decades the United States has been the world's only true superpower, and the threat of a rising China will force the U.S. to respond, either by accepting China's rise, or opposing it. People who closely study the history and politics of nuclear weapons generally consider it a miracle that no atomic bombs have been used in war since Nagasaki in 1945, and most agree that it is nearly inevitable that nukes will be used in the future, unless the world acts quickly and effectively with international agreement to remove them as a global threat. Currently, eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world seems only a remote possibility. The looming global catastrophe of climate change and environmental collapse, and international competition rather than cooperation for increasingly scarce resources, together portend poorly for our (humanity's) future, immediate, and long range.