China's rise as an economic power has plenty of people in the United States seriously worried.
While the mainland has been an excellent source of cheap labour and markets for American companies, there is a niggling worry in the back of many minds that this may be the beginning of the end in terms of US domination of the global economy.
In the next 20 or 30 years, it is conceivable the mainland will be bumping up against the US in terms of its economy's size and political influence. That scenario seriously concentrates the minds of those committed to Pax Americana.
But would the mainland's ascendancy ever provoke a war with the United States and for what reasons? This compelling question is asked in A War Like No Other: The Truth About China's Challenge to America by Richard C. Bush and Michael E. O'Hanlon.
It is a well-researched and well-written book by two scholars from the respected Brookings Institution, not an alarmist, right-wing diatribe.
The authors point out there are many tensions in US-Beijing relations over trade, intellectual property rights, the yuan and other issues. But none of these are likely to spark a military conflict.
Unlike the rise of Japan and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, the mainland is a 'status quo' power that does not seek to destroy and remake the world in its own image. It has built its wealth on the free-trade framework established by the US after the second world war and has a stake in maintaining global growth and stability. But the mainland has a serious blind spot - one thing that could spark the first all-out war between two nuclear powers - and it is called Taiwan.
