Opinion: Stop me if you've heard this before, but by 2050 China will be a colossus bestriding the world like a, er, colossus, and America will be on the skids, reduced to a race of wheezing 400lb lardbutts in faded Disney merchandising confined to their E-Z-Boy recliners.
Playing Greece to Beijing's Rome will be the European Union, run by the 120-year old Jacques Chirac - and, if you make any jokes about Chirac or his Oriental mistress, you'll be punished by one of your household's many Shanghai-manufactured Elmo and Pooh dolls exported to the US by the People's Republic in the early years of the century as a vast army of sleepers waiting to be activated and serve as the enforcers of the new Middle Kingdom.
Well, it might happen - And it might not. We're not very good at projecting half-a-century out. In fact, we're not very good at projecting half-a-decade out. There weren't a lot of people in 1913 predicting that by 1918 the Russian, German, Austrian and Turkish empires would all be gone, nor were there many experts in 1987 predicting that by 1992 the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union would all have collapsed.
So it would seem to me more likely that something sudden and convulsive will have rearranged the geopolitical order long before China completes its stately rise to global hegemon. Will the something sudden convulse China? Beats me.
We might be in for a nuclear catastrophe in the Indian sub-continent or complete societal breakdown in Aids-riddled southern Africa. But, on the other hand, if one were looking for a likely candidate for unexpected disaster, a totalitarian state of 1.3 billion people trying to manage a historically unprecedented transformation into the world's only economically viable form of communism and with ever-widening disparities between the glittering coastal megalopolises and an impoverished rural backwater, well, that certainly sounds a likely candidate for something goofy.
Remember Sars, disease-of-the- week a couple of years back? The politburo's showcase cities were infected by that vast hinterland, where the farm animals often sleep in the house and some rustic caught it from the pig in the rec room and then toddled up to town for the day.
Given that the government health officials will behave just as ineptly and mendaciously as before, what if the next rurally incubated disease is that much more infectious and that much more virulent? Or how about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history? Since China introduced its one-child policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where there are 119 boys for every 100 girls.
The pioneer generation of that 20 per cent male surplus is reaching manhood now. Unless China's planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what's going to happen to those young men?
As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can't get any action are useful for manning the nuttier outposts of the jihad but not for much else. Would you want to be running a country facing those structural challenges? Long before 2050, China's surplus bantam cocks will have come home to roost and spread some lethal strain of avian flu. That being so, if you're into futurology, why not concentrate on the more imminent dates? One thing China's very good at is booting decisions a few years down the line and then using as a bargaining chip the looming deadline and expectations of its own increasing strength.
For example, in 2020, the Sino-Russian border question comes up for final resolution. It's not a corner of the world many of us are reliably expert on. Indeed, despite all the talk about the inevitability of Chinese dominance, a lot of westerners don't have any real idea where the new hyperpower actually is. As the first issue of the new Parisian tabloid L'Anti-Americain put it, in a parodic entry diary by George Bush, "Ask the CIA: Where's China?"
Hey, how about that Bush? He's so dumb he can't even find on a map the 21st-century behemoth destined to consign him and the other Texas morons to the trash-can of history!
In fact, it was the prime minister of Canada who last year stood up in public and declared that China was the most important nation in the southern hemisphere. If Dubya had said that, that guy who does those lame paperback collections of "Bushisms" could have retired to the Bahamas.
For the benefit of any Canuck cabinet ministers reading this, China is actually so far north it borders Russia - for 2,264 miles with a blip for Mongolia in the middle.
Think of America's porous frontier with Mexico multiplied a hundredfold and you'll get a sense of Moscow's dilemma as 2020 approaches. It signed a temporary agreement with Beijing because it simply can't afford either the money or the manpower to enforce that border. In the ever emptier Russian east there are 16 million people and falling.
In China, there are 1½ billion and they need lebensraum. China is resource-poor; the Russian east contains 80 per cent of that country's resources. Russia is a dying country - literally: more abortions than live births, lower male life expectancy than Bangladesh. Facing extinction, Moscow doesn't have much to barter with - except dangling the Chinese an offer that could solve several of their structural problems.
The CIA managed to miss the death of the Soviet Union. I wonder if it is doing the same with the far more consequential death of Russia.