China

The most dangerous thing being produced in China is neither lead paint-laden toy cars nor magnet-spewing Polly Pocket dolls and Batman action figures. Rather, it is a booming capitalist culture that, far too often, places value over values.

In 1913, a young Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in a private letter that a war among the major European powers would be so deadly and destructive that it could not be imagined. In 1914, he learned differently.

There are so many historic examples of war being so unlikely, so terrible in its prospect that it just "could not" happen. And yet it did.

That is why, in the large sweep of history, people who want to see peace should never underestimate the potential for war. Even those, like the mistaken Roosevelt, who feel rising prosperity is an antidote to conflict.

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world -- the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

Over the past year the spotlight has come to fall on China's aggressive economic foray into Africa, where it secures energy stakes while doling out cheap credit. More cautiously, however, China also has been building new bridges to the Middle East, carving a place in a strategic region that is home to two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves.

There will be plenty of time to talk about Hillary, or American Idol or the antique ritual known as the State of the Union. Let’s talk instead about the fate of the union.

On Jan. 11, China used a "kinetic kill vehicle" to destroy one of its own weather satellites, 500 miles above the Earth’s surface. The implications of this action are enormous, because it shows that the Chinese are serious about fighting -- and winning -- a space war. The implications for America are ominous: Our own government seems uninterested in anything happening outside the Middle East.

Beijing’s new law criminalizing bad customer service sounds humorous at first. It’s fun to imagine calling the cops on a snooty shoe salesman at the Westside Pavilion.

But as funny as it sounds, the new law -- which makes it illegal for Beijing sales clerks to be rude to their customers -- is no joke. It not only exposes the bizarre contradictions of China’s brand of authoritarian capitalism, it makes the West’s policy of reforming the world’s most populous nation through engagement look positively silly.

History is replete with examples of great power conflict that develops when the world’s dominant powers are not willing or able to accommodate the interests of rising powers into the international order of the day. The last time the world denied two major rising industrial powers, Germany and Japan, what they considered their rightful place in the sun the result was world war.

The United States is bogged down in what appears to be an unwinnable war in Iraq; it is facing very unpleasant options in regard to neighboring Iran’s nuclear program; senior NATO officers say that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast; in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and Russia are moving toward military confrontation, with the U.S. seemingly unable to restrain either; in large swaths of Latin America, new nationalist and populist movements are challenging U.S. interests.

As the world watches the political maneuvering over restarting nuclear talks with Iran -- this time with American participation -- few are paying attention to a broader strategic competition that has started between the United States, Russia and China. Ultimately, this competition will decide not only the direction of Iran's nuclear activities but also its economic, political and military role in the Middle East and beyond. The outcome hinges on which countries will assume dominance in developing Iran's enormous oil and natural gas reserves.

There are sensible and foolish arguments against the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal. The foolish ones are those based on a theological approach to nuclear nonproliferation. The serious ones relate to the nature of the new U.S.-Indian "strategic partnership," and to wider U.S. strategies in the region.