In that world, the policymakers in Washington are nevertheless still likely to be the decisive group in establishing the context in which the rest of the society of states makes its decisions. So all other governments must ask what will be its strategic priorities, and how will its allies and potential ‘peer-competitors’ make their own choices, in the light of their respective interpretations of Washington’s capabilities and intentions? The most spectacular example of how fast US strategic priorities can change remains, of course, the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on US soil. In an hour or two on that traumatic day, China lost its previously pre-eminent place on the Pentagon’s list of preoccupations, to be instantly replaced by the Arab world, or the Middle East, or even the Islamic world in general. At the time of writing, that set of US strategic priorities is still in effect. It will not necessarily persist, to my mind, in a multipolar world, but the process of its being modified is likely to be quite protracted.

Donald Rumsfeld’s Quadrennial Defense Review for 2006 places the jihadists atop the threat list, ahead of the rising power of China.

It is, however, the jihadists themselves who control, at least for the present, those particular priorities. As long as they appear able to mount a major attack on the United States, especially if they continue to seem capable of acquiring a nuclear weapon (from Pakistan or Iran or maybe even Russia or North Korea), they and the Middle East area in general are likely to remain at the forefront of Washington’s security preoccupations. Rumsfeld said in February 2006 that he expected the campaign against them to endure for 20 years. Washington is now labelling it ‘the long war’. Nevertheless, I am going to assume, for the sake of advancing some arguments about the more distant future, that by about 2015, other possibilities will have displaced the jihadist threat at the top of the US security agenda. The most obvious is, of course, the growth of Chinese power, and its potential as a prospective ‘peer–competitor’, at last able to step into the long-empty shoes of the old Soviet Union.

Anyone who has been watching China’s inroads into what had been regarded as secure enclaves of US influence must be struck by how adroit it has been diplomatically—far more so than the Soviet Union ever was. Moreover, China has a national asset that the Soviet Union never had: its highly efficient export economy, which creates an almost insatiable appetite for commodities of every sort (oil, coal, iron ore, wheat, rice, cotton and so on). Countries that have commodities to sell (like Australia) must thus eagerly welcome China as a diplomatic friend. And that emphasises my earlier point about the diplomatic potential of regionalism in a multipolar world, which is well illustrated by two cases: Central Asia and Latin America. Africa, in time, may become a third example.

When it was created in 1996, the grouping of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan was regarded simply as a rather unpromising Chinese effort at some regional fence-mending. This message was reinforced following 11 September 2001, as the United States rapidly established a strong new regional influence in Central Asia due to the strategic necessities of the campaign in Afghanistan. But once it became apparent, by 2002–2003, that the United States might have longer-term ambitions in Central Asia, especially in regard to its oil reserves, China and Russia developed genuine (though perhaps temporary) common interests in checking any future prospects that the United States may have of controlling resources there as they had 50 years earlier in the Middle East.