I remember reading the Friedman piece several weeks ago and thinking to myself, "This guy drank the China kool-aid too." It's part of the whole American declinism notion that pops up every ten years or so and I've never believed it. We were there with Japan in the 80s, The Soviet Union, the EU, and now China (and India too). It's easy to believe China is going to be the next superpower if you look at its growth relative to the U.S over the last decade. But the thing that's always made me skeptical about any country replacing the U.S as the world's lone superpower any time soon isn't our resources. It's our sense of mission and purpose in the world. It's something that nobody else has. Only we have it because it's in our cultural fabric. It's not something you create on purpose. It grows organically out of a hapenstance of historical events. It informs everything else about us. You see it when you travel to other countries and come back. Americaness is optimism and hope. It's a source of our soft power, which is extremely attractive to the rest of the world. It's why everyone wants to be American but nobody secretly wishes they were Chinese or Nigerian or Brazilian. China or Russia or the EU or India don't have that sense of mission and purpose in their psyche. No amount of military hardware or GDP growth can compensate for that.Superpowerdom is unsustainable without it. So China could be a paper tiger.