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Originally Posted by jammies
Well, 5 to 1 odds is 80% against, so I rather agree with you that their chances of becoming a superpower aren't that good. I doubt they will go to war, though, at least not against each other - the only credible opponents are the Russians and perhaps some kind of Islamic coalition led by the Turks. However, the Russians don't have the muscle and the Turks are more interested in joining the European Community than fighting it.
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I'd like to think so, but there has been quite a bit of blow-back in recent years from the liberal immigration policies and mobile work forces caused from gloablization. I can see fascism, communism and storng nationalism making a comeback, and if that was to happen, there are bound to be some countries butting heads again.
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What makes you think Western civilization is going to destroy itself? I think that possibility ended in 1989 myself.
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Every civilization comes to end eventually... and it either collapses in on itself or gets destroyed by outside forces (or a little bit of both like the Roman civilization). Personally, I see Western Civilization (at least as we know it now) collapsing in on itself. We have built a fake economic system where we don't pay for what things actually cost resource and energy wise. We rely on developing countries to provide us with cheap assets in a way that was very similar to how the Roman Empire survived off of tribute to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. We can't expect that to last forever and when it ends, our way of life is going to change drastically. The capitalist system will need to be changed and if it can't be re-born into something as beneficial to us, our whole political systems will fail too as they are incredibly expensive to maintain. In short, freedom and democracy requires a lot of spare money. There's a reason many dictatorships are born out of poverty.
So, if you define Western Civilization as capitalism, freedom, and democracy, I don't think it is on solid ground unless things change drastically.