WORLD WAR III: Not Quite Yet, Just Wait for China

As far as potential adversaries go, China takes the cake. It is a massive country with more than four times as many people as the US. Since economic reforms began a quarter-century ago, China has developed to be the fastest growing economy in the world. President Bush has called China a “strategic competitor.”

And as the Chinese military develops, especially as the country’s navy pushes into the Pacific, in the words of Robert Kaplan, “It is not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe by, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II."

Diplomatically, the superpower has preyed on the US’s weaknesses. Surely there are no Chinese troops in Iraq. And take Latin America, for instance. It’s a continent that has lately been democratically electing more and more socialist-leaning governments while the rich gringos to the north concern themselves in the Middle East. China, however, has happily moved in and built trade relationships, especially for oil, with the newly-elected Latin American leaders.

Funny that you mention it, oil. Oil, oil, oil. It always seems to come back to that greasy, crude substance, doesn’t it?

And China is hungry for oil. Today, oil closed at about $77 a barrel. Considering that China’s emerging middle class is gigantic and that the country accounted for about a third of the increase in world oil consumption in 2005, more than anyone else, and that the world’s oil supply will only decrease from here on out, if there’s a World War III and it’s about oil, it might not have anything to do with the Middle East, it might be a war with China.

(Image from flickr.)