The Definite Article

I think that a large violent conflagration is on the horizon and it is most likely to involve India and China.

The reasons are thus:

1. India and China are attempting to industrialise. Both economies are growing rapidly (I've already talked a bit about China's runaway economic growth). As they make further attempts to undergo an industrial revolution, both will go through environmental upheavals that may well be unacceptable to already industrialised nations who are attempting to reduce the effects of industrial output on the environment. The kerfuffle over the Kyoto Protocol largely stemmed from the fact that the U.S. didn't want to be held to a standard that wasn't going to apply to China, India and Brazil. It's not clear how to transform a third world economy into a first world economy without a massive amount of pollution.

2. India, China and Indonesia have a coming sex gap crisis. The ratio of women to men usually holds at a natural 51% women. India is more like 47%, mostly due to the abortion of sex determined foetuses and infanticide. China is the same; Indonesia is worse. While this troubles me personally (I rather enjoy there being more women than men), the effects on the state of mind of India and China in twenty years, when there will be tens of millions of men of marrying age for whom there will be no one to marry nor with whom to make a family, are potentially catastrophic. I expect that there will be violence.

3. The expanse of irreconcilable forms of Islam continues. In these societies, again, women are treated as second class citizens. At the risk of sounding Victorian, I believe that women have a civilising influence on the men around them. When denied of a voice, they can no longer temper the vituperations of the bitter and what emerges is often unalloyed bile. Witness the words of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; it would matter less if he was just some anti-Semite spouting off, but he's a head of state, so calls to wipe Israel off the map are none to clever.

4. The U.S. will not want to quietly surrender hegemony to China. It's in a state of denial at the moment, not wanting to acknowledge the rapidly approaching economic eclipse, but once it is fully realized, America may well start pushing issues like greater Taiwanese independence. Given the States' history with international diplomacy of late, this is likely to be either cackhanded or hamfisted or both, more likely to provoke than accomplish any kind of policy goal.

A war between China and India is not unthinkable and has the potential to draw in an enormous number of nearby nations. Pakistan may very well take advantage of the distraction to seize Kashmir, for instance.