Weighing the likelihood of a US-China war

AGAINST the backdrop of growing tensions between Washington and Tokyo, renowned American futurologist George Friedman and Meredith Lebard argued in a book they co-authored in 1991, The Coming War with Japan, that the post-Cold War international system would be dominated by a global geo-economic and geo-strategic rivalry between the United States and Japan.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the fall of the Communist bloc and at a time of growing economic friction between the Americans and the Japanese, the notion that Japan would replace the obsolete Soviet Union as the leading global threat to US interests did not seem as totally farfetched as it does today.

Japan was bashed at that time for trying to "invade" the United States by buying real estate in Manhattan and film studios in Hollywood, for violating Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and for pirating American technology and, on the top of the list, for "stealing" American jobs through its unfair trade policies and the manipulation of its currency.