New Cold War?

I know I just recently posted a big blob of a blog after a long dearth of posts, I have a few quick things inspired by recent news.

The first is that I am of the opinion that we will not enter a new Cold War with China in the foreseeable future. China will simply not become as mighty vis-a-vis the US as the Soviets were. To put this in perspective, look at one giant indicator: GDP. Using 2010 numbers and a compound interest calculator, you can see that if China sustains a growth rate of 10 percent for 15 years (which is absurdly high for such a time) and the US only sustains a growth rate of a mere 2 percent, then at that time China and the US will have parity with GDP (actually it will take about 14.5 years). Both countries will have about 18.6 trillion in GDP (in 2010 dollars). The point is that the US is far mightier economically than people think. China won't have that kind of growth consistently (if ever), the US might easily not have such low growth (considering our population - largely due to immigration - rapidly increases even as our GDP per capita does not drastically go down (in other words, our economy generally grows with the growth in people). The current fiscal troubles we seem to have will disappear soon and level headed observation will hopefully resume.

Of course, while it is true that the Soviets never had a GDP of more than around 60 percent of the US economy, the Soviets also had the Warsaw Pact. China basically has North Korea. The big countries around it, Russia, S. Korea, Japan, India are not about to be as cozy in their relationship with China (let alone under the thumb of China) as the Warsaw Pact states.

Whether China becomes more hostile to the US, less hostile or remains in this pseudo-friendship of opportunity we find ourselves in, an actual Cold War won't easily emerge. The bottom line is that the US is far too powerful, and thus, far too important for the rest of the world, for China to somehow present itself as a complete alternate for a minor power to rally with.

In the war on terror:
The news that suddenly Al Qaeda is on the brink of defeat is not really news. Bin Laden had been marginalized for at least 2 years, as I recently posted. Both the ideological and tactical battlefield between the US and Islamism is far vaster in dozens of other places beyond Afghanistan and even Pakistan. Bin Laden's death, while satisfying to see justice served, does not represent an actual major shift in the war against radical terrorists and Islamists. The shift already happened following the devolution of Al Qaeda which began around 2007.