China cannot be considered a superpower by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps in 20 years, butr not now. China is where the US was in the 1880s.

I've actually kicked this around a lot with an erudite commentator at my own web site. I'm trying to make the case that there is a cohesive class for whom the EU & the USA both furnish useful intruments of control. The EU, for example, has ten members with a cohesive social contract, industrial policy, and financial apparatus. Another member, the UK, has an enormous pool of connections in the 3rd world, of finance capital, and administrative expertise.The US--when characterized as a global actor--is really a front-office state, a sort of lobotomized confederation of enterprises who are chiefly concerned with attracting investment capital.The neocons, in my opinion, understand this. That is the one big thing they do understand. They have as much loyalty to the USA as you might have towards a pair of socks. This is a bit of a caricature, and I'll readily admit it exaggerates the difference between the USA and EU member states. So, for example, the Anglo-American radical tradition (J.A. Hobson, Henry David Thoreau, the IWW) would be the neocon's real adversary--the latter group would reject the neocons' efforts to turn the nation of the USA into a weapon to wield against against other nations or peoples.As for the EU being a rival superpower--I think it would have to do something about the enabling behavior of its financial centers first.

I think the main worry is not that the EU would become a rival superpower in a military sense but that politically the EU will continue the Franco-German elite's trend toward reviving Europe's darker political-economic traditions - anti-democratic, statist, paternalistic, protectionistic, corporatism. This is the evident preference of the French who have attempted to control both the final draft version and the interpretations of constitutional clauses in this direction by issuing last-minute" clarifications" solely in French in order to change the meanings.Europe's history in the last three hundred years does not provide comfort when the proposed EU constution is designed to insulate EU policy makers from democratic accountability of *any* kind - even to elected heads of government to say nothing of European voters.