what IS happening...?

The world is changing. I sound like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings movie. Let's try again. The world HAS changed and what we are witnessing is the near total and complete erasure of the order that we have comfortably known up until this point. Not much can be done to alter the path that we are on, and even worse, any serious incursions will only prove to make the transition more difficult. This is of course, making several assumptions:

1. The People's Republic of China will survive as one state.
2. India will choose to become a full partner with the United States, along with Japan, Britain and Australia (and a smattering of other smaller states)
3. The primary focus of the US foreign policy remains the Terror World.
4. The Democrats continue their descent towards becoming the 21st century Whigs.
5. The European Union will be unable to extricate itself from the mores of "democratic socialism" (plain old fashioned collectivism from my standpoint) and will indeed become Eurabia, with horrifying consequences for the region of the world that spawned the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, and pretty much everything of consequence to Western civilization upon until the Founding.
6. The United States remains a single state (Mexifornia anyone?)
7. Africa remains mostly impoverished and incapable of functioning as nation-states can as well as most of South America (compared to what will be the new "West")
8. No WMD's are used on US soil for the indeterminate future.

The indeterminate future. What would you have said to me if I came to you in 1992, during the Golden Era of the brief post Cold War period, and said that in 2005 we would have destroyed the Taliban and Saddam's regime, occupied both nations and begun the process of rebuilding the infrastructure and building civil societies, begun the process of reordering our military bases away from old allies who are now perfectly capable of defending themselves, and that Fox News would have more viewers that CNN and MSNBC combined, that the blogosphere (the what you say? by this point you're exasperated) would have managed to swing the pendulum of power out of the hands of the MSM (the what? the MSM?). My point is that what in the hell is going to be going on in 2017? That's only 13 years from now--13 years ago I would have argued that we would be engaged in a brutally intense cold war with China and facing a massive militarization of the Straits with the eminent possibility of war between the US and China concerning Taiwan and China's desire to become the global hegemon, thus supplanting the US.
Instead China has become the country that puts all those worthless pieces of plastic together after everyone else has built the really complex parts and now they think that every other problem that they have will vanish, just as sson as they control the entire world market of worthless pieces of plastic. Sounds like Stalin in the 50's who saw that Western nations produced a lot of steel, so, the Soviet Union should also produce steel. The ends for authoritarians are always on a piece of paper; the ends for liberals (I should remind people that I refuse to concede ground to modern liberals on the meaning of this word; modern liberals are not liberals, they are authoritarian reactionaries who have interest only in their own power) are always in a person's mind. A person, an individual makes decisions and then has to live with them. An authoritarian makes decision and everyone else has to live with it.

The thought that permeates the left: Somewhere, someplace, someone is doing something that I think they shouldn't be doing and the only way to stop this is by forcing them to stop.

Instead of my scenario above, we are faced with the same China which has witnessed the marvel of the US military and knows that they are nowhere near ready to try anything, yet. But oh how they are planning. Planning, planning, planning. But it will get them nowhere. The history of China is replete with examples of extensive cycles of centralization and decentralization. The more power Beijing tries to accumulate, the more quickly it will determine it will cement it's own end. The more wealth that the enterprise free zones on the eastern coast accumulate, the more they will be resented by the nations more than 900 million peasants, who live in relative poverty and complete and total lack of choice about their lives. They are given the illusion of local government and little else.
Ever notice how there is never any news about China? About, anything about China. Ever. Can you think of a story about China that talks about a particular Chinese person doing anything? What technologies have the Chinese invented in the past hundred years that were crucial to the development of the information economy?

Back to the list. I believe it is highly unlikely that the PRC will not survive to 2017. Scratch number one.