The last but definitely not the least of my horsemen is the post-Cold War geopolitical situation. The fall of the old Soviet Union and the “czarist/orthodox/nationalist” revival in Putin’s Russia, the meltdown of much of the Middle East and some of Central Asia, immense population increases in Africa, political instability in the U.S. and Europe, and of course, most consequentially, the dramatic rise of China, have created a far more dangerous landscape because there are so many more “hot spots” that could trigger major conflicts, and the stasis of the Soviet-US stalemate has been replaced by a slew of far more dynamically fluid crises.

The most potentially globally consequential of all is of course the U.S./China rivalry. History is not comforting about what usually transpires when a rising power and a declining one face off. Known among historians as “Thucydides’ Trap,” the classic pattern, from Athens vs. Sparta in antiquity, to Spain vs. Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries, to Germany vs. the allies in the 20th, is that there is a war or a series of wars. In 12 of 16 comparable cases over the past 500 years, that has proved true, and in those cases in which war was narrowly averted, massive and painful adjustments were required.

So, the odds are high that some sort of Chinese vs. U.S. armed confrontation is likely at some point in the next decade. One has to hope that should this occur, it would be limited to tactical engagements in the South China Sea and not escalate to a nuclear exchange. An enormous 21st Century “Great Game” is now underway as all the countries in southern and central Asia are carefully hedging their bets. Myanmar’s military opened a bit to the West because they realized they would become complete vassals of China if they didn’t, but they can’t push it too far lest they incur their massive northern neighbor’s overt wrath. Vietnam has used a rapprochement with the U.S. for similar reasons. The Korean Peninsula is of course another very hot and fluid flashpoint. And while Russia and China’s relationship is currently good, finding common ground in their hostility to the U.S., the Russians have long been fearful that their southeastern neighbor will gaze at the resource-rich and sparsely populated vast Siberian expanse with hungry eyes, and those two nations did engage in some border skirmishes a few decades ago. The evolution of that geopolitical relationship will prove critical, because a Russo-Chinese entente would control the lion’s share of the Asian landmass, and the Chinese fear encirclement more than anything. Their aggressiveness in the South China Sea arises from that historical fear.

In any case China has become far too powerful and dynamic to put back in a box. It is the main trading partner for just about all of Asia, and in fact many other nations’ main trading partner globally, as well as probably the leading source of investment in much of the developing world, so the planet is going to have to find a way to accommodate its rise, one way or another

Whether China is culturally suited to eventually replacing the U.S. as the new “hegemonic power” is open to question. We are more likely to see the rise of a more multi-polar world, which has positive elements but also far more instability built in. In some ways it may resemble the geopolitical scenario in Orwell’s 1984, with its major blocs (Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia). Many of us had hoped the E.U. could become a counterweight to both the U.S.’s robber baron corporation model and China’s state kleptocracy, offering a more humane, eco-friendly template of a well regulated market-based economy blended with a benefic social safety net, a sort of larger-scale version of the Scandinavia model.

The post-WWII European elites, many of whom were highly intelligent and well-intentioned, desirous above all to never again witness the carnage of the two world wars, made a few major miscalculations. They were ahead of their still often very culturally traditional, nationally oriented populations in their readiness to erase borders. They should have done more to appease public opinion with an inspiring pan-European message and to attach more obvious incentives for the masses to the project. Instead, they allowed corporate interests to have too much sway over economic policies in the nascent union, thereby alienating many in the working classes. They also let too big a bureaucratic apparatus congeal. Their heirs then expanded too quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, understandably wanting to rapidly re-Europeanize the former Eastern Bloc countries, but many of those nations weren’t ready to become modern democracies. They should have been integrated more gradually.

Managing the union is now akin to herding cats, a few of them (in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) very authoritarian or corrupt (or both) cats. It remains to be seen whether the European experiment implodes or merely muddles through or surmounts its current travails and emerges as a viable alternative model. My sense is that the best hope would be for a “multi-speed” European project, with the core Western European countries (France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, perhaps Holland and Austria and a few others) with the most robust democratic institutions, accelerating their integration on the economic and perhaps military fronts, and permitting them to act without all 27 (once the UK leaves) member states having to agree about everything. Other countries could participate in some common policies and not others. This is already the case with the Euro, which only 19 EU members adopted. This will be very politically difficult to work out, but without it, it’s hard to imagine an E.U. nimble enough to be an effective major power on the global scene.

In my view it would be a major catastrophe if the European experiment failed, as if it could be sufficiently reformed it could offer a potential anchor for a saner global zeitgeist, but the odds are not looking great at the moment. The coming elections there should begin to give us some clues as to whether it can weather at least this portion of the storm, or if the floodgates of destabilization will be thrown wide open.