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policy concerns, like the protection of the critical infrastructure of the developed world or the creation of intervention forces (such as those so discredited in Viet Nam and Somalia), which may now seem marginal, will be seen as centerpieces in the struggle to change, or at least manage, the shape of wars to come. The law-oriented methods of the nation-state will be seen as being replaced by the market-oriented methods of the market-state, setting controversies as different as abortion rights and affirmative action in a new context. For example, nation-states typically endorsed—or banned—prayers in public schools because such states used legal regulations on behalf of particular moral commitments. The market-state is more likely to provide an open forum for prayers from many competing sects, maximizing the opportunity for expression without endorsing any particular moral view. This is but one example of countless such contrasts.
    Above all, the reader should get from this book a sense of the importance of certain choices that otherwise might be made in isolation but that will structure our future as thoroughly as similar choices in the last half millennium structured our past.
    There are times when the present breaks the shackles of the past to create the future—the Long War of the twentieth century, now past, was one of those. But there are also times, such as the Renaissance—when the first modern states emerged—and our own coming twenty-first century, when it is the past that creates the future, by breaking the shackles of the present. 2

Preparation
    Still one more year of preparation
.
    Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book
    In which my century will appear as it really was.
    The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
    Springs and autumns will unerringly return
,
    In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
    And foxes will learn their foxy natures
.
    And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
    Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
    In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
    Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk
    Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.
    No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years
.
    I still think too much about the mothers
    And ask what is man born of woman
.
    He curls himself up and protects his head
    While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running
    He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit
.
    Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.
    I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.
    With not-quite truth
    and not-quite art
    and not-quite law
    and not-quite science
    Under not-quite heaven
    on the not-quite earth
    the not-quite guiltless
    and the not-quite degraded
    —Czeslaw Milosz

BOOK I
     

     

S TATE OF W AR
     

Paradise Lost
    (Book III, lines 111 – 125)
     
    …
They therefore as to right belonged
,
    so were created, nor can justly accuse
    their maker, or their making, or their fate,
    as if predestination overruled
    their will, disposed by absolute decree
    or high foreknowledge: they themselves decreed
    Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
    foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
    which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
    So without least impulse or shadow of fate
,
    or aught by me immutably foreseen,
    they trespass, authors to themselves in all
    both what they judge and what they choose; for so
    I formed them free, and free they must remain,
    till they enthrall themselves
…
    —John Milton
     

 

PART I
     

     

T HE L ONG W AR OF THE N ATION- S TATE
     
    THESIS: THE WAR THAT BEGAN IN 1914 WILL COME TO BE SEEN AS HAVING LASTED UNTIL 1990.
    Epochal wars can embrace several conflicts that were thought to be separate wars by the participants, may comprise periods of apparent peace (even including elaborate peace treaties), and often do not maintain the same lineup of enemies and allies throughout. The Long