OK, right, pontificating. I like doing that:
Gremlin said:
What do you think is going to be the biggest issue approaching us in the next 15years or so eg;
Russian resurgence
I don't think it'll be a big issue. The world is used to treating Russia as a great power, so if anything, the last decade has been the anomaly. Look how deferential everyone always was even to Yeltsin. Russia throwing its weight around in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is normal. We'll get used to it in no time. Hell, there may be jobs in it again for all those unemployed Kremlinologists
Radical Islam vs The West
This will be big, not necessarily because it will be so important, but becausae it is so convenient. Whenever sopmething goes wrong in an Islamic country, the guilty parties can blame the West and the Jews, and rally the faithful (angry, unemployed, poor and humiliated) round the flag. And whenever a government in the west needs its citizens to stop paying attention, it can start an amber alert or something. And of course the terrorists won't just stop killing people, and chances are neither will the West stop panicking and overreacting, so we'll have a steady supply of atrocity stories to fuel it. Unless we get something really big and nasty coming up out of China, this'll be headline news for quite some time
There are too many futures invested into denying it. No, I doubt it will see more attention than it already gets, though that is, of course, plenty. But given that the scenario isn't anything like 'The day After Tomorrow', anything less than that will cause a sigh of relief. It will, of course, be a very big thing, but reinsurance rates, avgas surcharges, ozone concentrations and dyke building costs just aren't media-sexy. Unless we get a man-made disaster that kills hundreds of thousands, it's going to stay background noise.
Proliferation of Nuclear weapons
Sure. Every time it happens everyone gets upset, and five years later we all get upset together about the next one. Hey, does everyone remember how the world was going to end if Pakistan went nuclear? Or was that Red China?
Of course, if someone is dumb enough to actually use a nuclear weapon we're in trouble. But I don't think anyone is that stupid. Nukes are invasion insurance. Get one, don't get invaded. That seems to have become a concern for many countries again recently.
Depends on what China is going to do. If they go the Japan route, not really, The big economic shakeup has happened. We'll have to live with that. China will experience a bumpier road ahead, and have to deal with slower growth and develop sustainable policies to replace some of the human and environmental capital it's been using up. If they start throwing their weight around, this will be headline news, but not unexpected.
Now, the *Fall* of China, that would be some issue... Let's hope not.
Where? It'll be big in Europe, where societies aren't set up to assimilate outsiders, and it'll probably get very ugly if people like the BNP, DVU or Vlaam's Blok are anything to go by. In the US, it'll be less of an issue. The Third World and emerging econmomies will have to deal with it in their own way, and that'll be big, but not here (ever hear of the East African Trade Union in the local press? Thought not.)
Failure of the welfare state
This will be noisy, but unless someone chooses to deliberately sabotage the process, it might not be as disastrous as it looks. For all the sound and fury, where entitlements are cut, the whole thing actually doesn't seem to generate the resentment it was expected. Of course, expect this to be the domestic issue of the coming decades, but domestic almost invariably translates into not interesting internationally. So we won't hear much about the woes of the NHS or Social Security, and you won't read much about the German civil service pension retrenchment and unemployment benefit reform, although elections will be won or lost on it.
And how do you see it being solved if possible.
Unlike problems, issues rarely have solutions. I can see many ways of resolving the problems associated with those processes, but I can't see any way that they will just go away. People are damn good at solviong problems but experience dictates they're even better at spotting them.
