THE TOP TEN POTENTIAL MILITARY SUPER POWER COUNTRIES

The present day governments that have been claimed to become (or to remain) a superpower within the 21st century

CHINA

The People’s Republic of China receives continual coverage in the popular press of its potential superpower status, and has been identified as an emerging economic and military superpower by many academics and experts.
Shujie Yao of Nottingham University has said that, "China will overtake the United States to become the world's largest economy by 2038 if current growth rates continue," and that China's nominal GDP will likely overtake that of Japan by 2009 or 2010.
The Republic of China is on the march with its military preparedness, with its economy, and its need for oil to fuel its 10% rate of economic growth. China has the fastest growing economy in the world. And that growth means that China will be a direct competitor with the USA.
China has over 1.2 billion people to feed and to direct in various enterprises and they have people far and near throughout the globe. International relations analyst Parag Khanna states that by making massive trade and investment deals with Latin America and Africa, China has established its presence as a superpower along with the European Union and the United States. China's rise is demonstrated by its ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product. He believes that China's consultative style has allowed it to develop political and economic ties with many countries including those viewed as rogue states by the United States. He states that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization founded with Russia and the Central Asian countries may eventually be the "NATO of the East". Another factor favoring China's rise is its government as Fareed Zakaria and other academics observed, China's government can do tasks such as development or dealing with a crisis faster than democracies in Europe or India.
But there is another side to the emergence of China as a super power that will compete directly with the USA for spheres of influence, resources, and wealth in the world. That adverse side was partly shown in the 1980's, when the Japanese auto industry went head to head with the American auto industry.
Since China is a communist nation and Americans loved to hate communists, this combination of non-white people who are communists may be very incendiary as China rises to the level of being in direct competition with the US for world resources and spheres of influence. 
The huge needs of China's industry and a quickly growing economy will demand greater consumption of oil and gas than does the USA. Furthermore, China needs to import these resources from other nations more than does the US. Right now, China is attempting to purchase Unocal, a large American oil company, and that is causing many Americans to become protectionist and worried about the rising influence of China. But China's influence is being felt all over the globe.
On the Continent, China is courting African nations to tap into the vast natural resources of those nations, long overlooked by western powers after exploiting them for their manpower in developing nations such as the US, UK, France, etc. China's courtship is also causing the US and UK to spend more time and money on and in Africa as a way of blunting the China sphere of influence. China is building factories, dams, dikes, railroad lines, etc.
China would be America's only global competitor for military and strategic influence within a decade, perhaps much sooner. China is viewed by the US government as a near-future threat. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told the Senate on February 27 that the Chinese are "building their military, in my view, to reach some state of parity with the United States," adding that "they're a threat today, they would become an increasing threat over time." Nor is this a revelation to Washington policy-makers. McConnell's predecessor John Negroponte testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2006 that "China is a rapidly rising power with steadily expanding global reach that may become a peer competitor to the United States at some point." In June 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed that the U.S. must help integrate China into the international, rules-based economy before it becomes a "military superpower." Rice, with a doctorate in Soviet studies and years of experience in the White House during the last days of the Cold War, would not use the term "superpower" lightly.
On the other hand, China is observing US military actions, styles, strategies, and weaknesses that it may be able to encounter them in any future conflicts; the USA is keep a weary eye on China and its military.
As China asserts its full power, Taiwan may be the first confrontation the US will have with China, as it moves to recapture Taiwan, another financial center like Hong Kong.  Financial stability will give China the ability to build a robust military--they now have atomic weapons, WMD's, and a million-man military. 

George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, however doesn't believe that China will be a superpower, stating that China's geographic position is actually isolated due to Siberia in the north, the Himalayas as well as jungles to the south, and the majority of China's population is in the east, saying that with this, China can't easily expand. He also states that China has not been a major naval power for centuries, and building a navy will take a very long time.
Geoffrey Murphay's China: The Next Superpower argues that while the potential for China is high, this is fairly perceived only by looking at the risks and obstacles China faces in managing its population and resources. The political situation in China may become too fragile to survive into superpower status according to Susan Shirk in China: Fragile Superpower. Other factors that could constrain China's ability to become a superpower in the future include: limited supplies of energy and raw materials, questions over its innovation capability, inequality and corruption, and risks to social stability and the environment. Amy Chua states that whether a country has enough pull to bring immigrants is an important quality for a superpower. She also writes that China lacks the pull to bring scientists, thinkers, and innovators from other countries as immigrants. However, she believes that China has made up for this with its own diaspora, saying that size and resources for them are unparalleled.
ALBERT KEIDEL, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was deputy for the Office of East Asian Nations in the U.S. Treasury. Before that he was senior economist in the World Bank’s Beijing office. He has taught at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, and Georgetown Universities, summarises in “China’s Economic Rise – Fact and Fiction“, July 2008, 16 pages: 

1. China’s domestically driven economic expansion is not limited by export markets and can sustain high single-digit growth rates for decades.
2. Beijing now seems likely to overcome potential stumbling blocks such as economic instability, pollution, inequality, corruption, and a slow pace of political reform.
3. China’s economic size will match America’s by 2035 and double it by midcentury, with unclear but potentially wrenching strategic implications that demand U.S. economic and military reassessment.
4. American policy makers should take this opportunity to enact wide-ranging domestic reforms and rethink their inherited concepts of global order.

Excerpts
Exports: Not China’s Engine of Growth
Skeptics about China’s growth prospects most frequently question the sustainability of its export performance. In recent years, its exports and trade surplus have ballooned, leading to the common assumption that its growth is export-led and that limited global markets will curtail its expansion sooner rather than later. But this assumption is not supported by the data on the sources of Chinese growth, which are overwhelmingly domestic.
In fact, a detailed study of each of China’s five macroeconomic booms and slowdowns since 1978 reveals that domestic shifts in investment and consumption have been responsible for China’s growth. Even in recent years, the contributions to growth from the country’s trade surplus have had secondary importance. …
How Big Is China Now, and How Big Could It Become?
… Despite this low starting point, if China’s expansion is anywhere near as fast as the earlier expansion of other East Asian modernizers at a comparable stage of development, the power of compound growth rates means that China’s economy will be larger than America’s by midcentury—no matter how it is converted to dollars. …
China’s Future Military Potential
The military repercussions of China’s rapid economic expansion are more difficult to gauge, but should it want to, China by later in the century could become a major—and possibly the leading—global military power. Whether it chooses to pursue this goal depends in part on the international environment thirty or more years from now. Today, while China’s military resources are still a small fraction of America’s, the United States has time to lead the development of a system of international institutions and coalitions in which America can prosper when it is no longer the world’s largest economy.
China’s relative military capabilities today are even weaker than indicated by estimates of its annual military budgets like those in the Pentagon’s recent report to Congress on Chinese military power. Conservative estimates show the U.S. 2005 military budget was at least eight times China’s. But another indicator of China’s global military strength is not annual budgets but rather the dollar value of accumulated stocks of sophisticated weapons. …
Recent Military Budget
On March 4, China's National People's Congress announced that it would increase the country's military budget 17.8 percent in 2007 to a total of $45 billion. Despite the fact that this was the biggest single annual increase in China's military spending, the Chinese government reassured the world that this spending hike was normal and need not worry anyone. "China is committed to taking a path of peaceful development and it pursues a defensive military posture," a spokesman said.
In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), China's effective military spending is greater than $45 billion, or even the U.S. Department of Defense's $105 billion estimate. In fact, it is in the $450 billion range, putting it in the same league as the United States and far ahead of any other country, including Russia.
It remains to be seen whether China's now massive stake in the global economy will result in Beijing becoming a responsible stakeholder in global affairs, but Beijing seems poised for true global status as a "military superpower." The latest figures from the econometricians at the Central Intelligence Agency—whose data come from the World Bank—peg China's 2006 GDP, adjusted for purchasing power parity, at $10 trillion, with a nominal exchange-rate value of $2.5 trillion.
Despite the Chinese Communist Party leadership's espousal of China's "peaceful rise," the unprecedented peacetime expansion of China's military capabilities betrays a clear intent to challenge the United States in the Western Pacific and establish itself as the region's predominant military power. With China's massive GDP and military spending at an estimated 4.5 percent of GDP, the resources that Beijing now devotes to its armed forces surely make it a top global power. The exact methodology that U.S. intelligence agencies use to arrive at this estimate is classified, but it reportedly takes into account the fact that China's budget figures do not include foreign arms purchases, subsidies to military industries, any of China's space program (which is under the command of the Central Military Commission), or the costs of the 660,000 strong "People's Armed Police." It appears that some defense spending sectors that are not counted in the defense budget have increased much faster than the budget itself.
U.S. intelligence agencies can plainly see where the money is going. China is assembling a blue-water navy, with a submarine fleet of 29 modern boats, including 13 super-quiet Russian-made Kilo class subs and 14 Chinese-made Song and Yuan class diesel electric submarines that are reportedly improved versions of the Kilos. At least 10 more of these submarines are in China's shipyards, together with five new nuclear ballistic missile and attack boats. China's surface fleet is also undergoing a similar modernization.
China's power in the air and in space is also on the rise. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force has about 300 Russian-designed fourth-generation Sukhoi-27 Flankers and a number of Chinese-built Jian-11 planes and 76 Sukhoi-30 multi-role jets. With Russian and Israeli assistance, the PLA Air Force has acquired an additional 50 or so Jian-10 fighters based on U.S. F-16 technology and reportedly plans to build 250 more. China's rocket forces are also expanding at an unprecedented pace, with production and deployment of short-range ballistic missiles targeted at Taiwan increasing from 50 per year during the 1990s to between 100 and 150 per year today. Presumably, output from Chinese ICBM factories is expanding at a similar pace.
Most recently, China's January 12 test of highly sophisticated direct-ascent "kinetic kill vehicle" (KKV) technology, coupled with attempts to blind or laser-illuminate a U.S. reconnaissance satellite in 2006, are convincing evidence of the PLA's intention to neutralize the United States' military assets in space in any conflict.
Indeed, China's 2006 "White Paper" on national defense describes a China that is moving onto the offensive:
The Army aims at moving from regional defense to trans-regional mobility, and improving its capabilities in air-ground integrated operations, long-distance maneuvers, rapid assaults and special operations. The Navy aims at gradual extension of the strategic depth for offshore defensive operations and enhancing its capabilities in integrated maritime operations and nuclear counterattacks. The Air Force aims at speeding up its transition from territorial air defense to both offensive and defensive operations, and increasing its capabilities in the areas of air strike, air and missile defense, early warning and reconnaissance, and strategic projection. The Second Artillery Force aims at progressively improving its force structure of having both nuclear and conventional missiles, and raising its capabilities in strategic deterrence and conventional strike under conditions of informationization.
The ultimate question must be whether Beijing's leaders have any purpose in assembling a military machine worthy of a superpower other than to have the strength to challenge the United States' strategic position in Asia.

Other military super powers:

• USA
• EU
• Russia
• UK
• Israel
• India
• France
• Germany
• Japan