The developing geo-political and military situation is not good at all. If we are sucked into any kind of major warfare in the Mid-East ... meaning that they actually fight and give us any kind of difficulty, then it is not too far a stretch to think that N. Korea tries to go south. If they do, we would be hard pressed to respond quickly, and in serious jeopardy of direct military conflict with China IMHO, who might pick that time to try and gobble up Taiwan and make a major move in all of Asia.
That is the precise circumstance in my series, Dragon's Fury
The Army's TACWAR system could do what Saddam Hussein couldn't do: actually get his troops to fight--and that is why our casualty estimates were an order of magnitude too high. The Iraqi Army has even less reason to fight for the greater glory of the Husseini al-Tikriti clan today.
BTW, if the DPRK charges south, my money's on the ROKs, with or without significant US assistance. Another prediction: If Kim Jong-Il tries anything nuclear against Japan, the JSDF will suddenly reveal what they did with the missing plutonium, and our postwar problem will be "OK, how the f*** do we keep the Japanese from trying to establish the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere?"
My read on the global situation is that the "conventional" (read: "usual") threat scenarios are going to be overturned by 2015, and we're going to settle into an uneasy standoff between us, the Franco-German Axis of Europe, and possibly Brazil. Japan may jump in either direction, depending less on economics and more on cultural shifts.
Our significant allies will be Russia (or as much of Russia as will be actually governed from Moscow), the UK, Eastern and some of Southern Europe, Israel, Iraq (post-Hussein), and Iran (post-theocracy). Minor allies will include the South American neighbors of Brazil.
Not-so-fun places will be mainland China (warlords, famine, and nukes, oh my!), the Arabian peninsula (where we will have to smash the odd Wahabbist uprising), and Africa (as always).