Forgive my absence; spring is here, and I'm going to be out in it. I just stopped in to comment on the idea of a balancing super-power, a counter-weight to the United States' puissance. That idea was very popular before--it was believed that the powers of Europe were too evenly matched, and that war was at an end. World War One came next. Then, after the horrors of that war, it was felt the an equilibrium had been reached. The powers were balanced once more, and their memories of the previous war would prevent any further hostilities. World War II. After World War II, the USSR and the United States were more-or-less evenly matched with conventional weapons, and the threat of nuclear weapons was thought to make their use impossible. Sixty years of war by proxy later, we have, conservatively, eighty million dead. The only lasting periods of relative peace (and I've got to qualify those nouns that way, since we are a belligerent species) have been when one power was without question ascendant. I am no fan of empire, but to argue that a "counter-weight" would prevent war is ignorance beyond imagining.