Islam too has its schisms but there's no question that the demographic trend is its friend and that the ideological trend is its friend. If the Chinese don't believe in anything other than that the markets are better cats for catching mice than the Plan, and if the Europeans don't believe in anything at all, except maybe that celebrities are important, and the Americans believe in a WalMart-style religion where you go to God for whatever personal problem you want to have solved, the Muslims have the advantage of belief in one of the world's great monotheistic religions — a fervent belief in many cases. This might be really rather critical in how things unfold in the 21st century. If there's one thing that unites the US, India and China, it is hostility to radical Islam. And if there's one thing preventing there being an Anglo-German antagonism, it is recognition of that common factor. The Russians, of course, should be added to that list because they share that antipathy, and in many ways they've taken even more hits. You have a possibility, which we need to take more seriously, that these different, organised civilisations with their great powers end up having to unite because the less well-organised but demographically dynamic and ideologically highly motivated Islam poses a challenge to them all. 

If you go one way from Beijing to the United States there's not much but sea. If you go the other way it's a different story. The lands in between have been the principal strategic preoccupation of the US and that is where the US has spent its manpower and treasure now for years. I think that will change. The US cannot afford to police the greater Middle East, and the neoconservative experiment has to be judged on balance a failure, or a success too expensive to be sustained. That leaves a very big vacuum. 

I remain of the view that if you take economic volatility, ethnic disintegration, and an empire in decline you have a recipe for trouble. As the US retreats from the greater Middle East — which it must for the reasons Dambisa has given — it is not going to give way to some period of peace and love and harmony. On the contrary, I think we'll see a much higher level of violence than we've yet seen. Stakes will be very high, not least because of the commodity scramble, and I think how that plays out will determine whether the 21st century is the century of Sino-American antagonism or the century of something different, something more Huntingtonian, to which in fact radical Islam is the question and Chimerica turns out to be the answer.

DM: In the interest of harmony, prosperity and global peace, I really hope that the West focuses on its own issues as an urgent priority, rather than focusing instead on what China is doing.