Major war/conflict cycle commencing? (update 1)

from: Telegraph 7th September 2010

I try to remain optimistic that the US and China will work out a more or less amicable way to run the world for the next half century, a “Chimerica” of interwoven superpowers.

But it was slightly disturbing to hear the warnings of a distinguished China-watcher at a closed-door session of the annual Ambrosetti conference on Lake Como.

(This gathering of the global policy elites at Villa D’Este is a hardship assignment for Telegraph hacks. It fell to me again this year, but somebody has to do it.)

“China’s military spending is growing so fast that it has overtaken strategy,” said Professor Huang Jing from the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. (He kindly let me quote his remarks.)

“The young officers are taking control of strategy and it is like young officers in Japan in the 1930s. They are thinking what they can do, not what they should do. This is very dangerous.

“They are on a collision course with a US-dominated system”.

Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson rattled me even further with a talk warning that the Chimerica marriage of the last generation is “on the rocks”.

“China gets 10pc growth: the US gets 10pc unemployment. That doesn’t seem the basis for a happy marriage,” said Prof Fergusson, – who used to sit next to me at the Telegraph as a young leader writer almost 20 years ago, before he went on to become one of the 100 most influential people on the planet (Time magazine).