From Real Clear Politics [the site's title is without irony, I'm afraid -- L]

[Author] Tony Corn is currently writing a book on the Long War. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the position of the U.S. Department or the U.S. government.

I urge you to try to get through the full article by Corn, beyond the few excerpts, below. The author may sound like a nut-case but policy papers by graduates of the US Naval War College are taken very seriously by the US Defense Department.

The Revolution in Transatlantic Affairs

The return of both China and Islam in world history after a three-century-long eclipse has been the defining feature of the international stage since 1979.

In the first decade afterwards, the West was simply too focused on the "second Cold War" against the Soviet Bloc to ponder the meaning of the revolutions engineered by Den Xiao Ping in China and Khomenei in Iran. In the second decade, a victorious West, indulging in rhetorical self-intoxication, mistook the most recent stage of a century-old globalization process for the end of history and even geography.

Throughout the 1990s, this infatuation with globalization and a "time-space compression" in the virtual world led most Westerners to ignore the twofold epochal change taking place in the real world: the transfer of the center of gravity of the world economy from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with "three billion new capitalists" poised to put an end to three centuries of Euro-Atlantic economic primacy; and the rise of a "second nuclear age" in Asia and with it, the concomitant end of three centuries of Western military superiority.1

[my emphasis]

This article is a must-read for anyone who would like to know what is being fed to the current US administration by the military and what's shaping its policies with regard to Europe and NATO.

Corn goes on to rant about the SCO, "the NATO of the East" and its dangers.

The Long War promises to be a thinking man's war. As a full-fledged Alliance, NATO possesses the kind of staying power that mere ad hoc coalitions cannot deliver; but NATO still has to come to terms with the fact that thinking power will matter more than fighting power. If NATO is to avoid the twofold danger of the SCO becoming a NATO of the East while NATO becomes a mere SEATO of the West, the Alliance will have first of all to downgrade its "toolbox" dimension and beef up its "think-tank" dimension.

It's a lengthy article and may merit deconstruction.