The middle east faces the very real possibility of an Islamic equivalent of the Thirty Years War. Things are already starting to look grim in Iraq again. The US bought off the bad guys with guns and money, but the underlying issues were not resolved. Things could get ugly and the region can easily descend into decades of slow, prolonged bloodshed. It won't be WWIII, however. The big players -- the US, China, India, and Europe -- can help accelerate the process, let it run its natural course if you will, by playing the various factions against each other, bleed them dry, and extract resources while they can.
In Asia, there are plenty of potential sources of conflict: India/Pakistan, the South China sea, the India/China rivalry, and resource-rich Siberia. India and China are already competing with each other for influence in S.E. Asia, and the US is getting involved as well as a counterbalance to the Chinese. Where will this go over the course of 20, 30, 40 years? Anyone's guess is as good as mine.
"War" will certainly take on a different meaning in the modern, globalized world. It's not clear if the United States realizes this, yet. China certainly does.
Here's a great article discussing the pivotal role that "grand strategy" will play, something our political system may not be fully prepared to grapple with:
Peaceful Rise Through Unrestricted Warfare: Grand Strategy with Chinese CharacteristicsQuote:
As countless observers have pointed out, the American-Chinese rivalry in the early 21st century bears more than a passing resemblance to the Anglo-German antagonism that led to World War I. In these conditions, it is not surprising if a consensus has emerged, among International Relations (IR) academics, around the proposition that the U.S.-China relation is bound to be the most important bilateral relation in the coming decades.
Yet, the degree of certainty regarding the salience of this bilateral relation is only matched by the degree of uncertainty surrounding its dynamics and its eventual outcome. When it comes to answering the question “Is a conflict inevitable?,” all three IR schools (realism, liberalism, constructivism) hedge their bets by offering both a pessimistic and an optimistic variant – a tacit admission that, on the most burning issue of the day, the predictive value of IR theory is close to nil. (1)
For the outside observer, the most disconcerting aspect of this academic debate is that optimists and pessimists alike share the same unexamined notions of conflict and war, as if “conflict” was a self-explanatory concept, “war” was a trans-historical category. In particular, both proponents and critics of Power Transition Theory (PTT) – the most popular theory about China in academe today - keep arguing about the factors conducive to the initiation, timing, severity, and consequences of “major wars” without giving much thought to either the singularity of Chinese strategic culture or, a fortiori, to three global developments of the past fifty years: the waning of “major wars,” the declining “fungibility” of military force as such and, last but not least, the transformation of “war” itself. (2)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/449-corn.pdfEvery few decades, men find ways to unleash ever greater horrors upon their fellow men. The next century will be no exception. Industrialized warfare, death camps, and strategic bombing were all but unimaginable at the beginning of the last century. What unknown terrors might await us now, 100 years later?
