Perhaps even more worryingly for the long term, in the Asia-Pacific, after three decades of wasteful, pell-mell economic growth a rising China is starting to rub up against the limits of both its politics and demographics. It is beginning to challenge the postwar settlement, jousting almost daily with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines in the East and South China Seas. That is another accident waiting to happen, and one – unlike the downing of MH17 – where there is no real system in place to manage the fallout. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea, America’s main regional allies, which act as a bulwark against Chinese adventurism, are openly bickering. And all that is not to mention Afghanistan’s highly uncertain future, the fragmentation of Iraq, Africa’s Islamist insurgencies, Libya’s slide into failed statehood, North Korea’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and the election of a Hindu-nationalist prime minister in a (nuclear-armed) India.