We stand at the dawn of a new era in world history. The truisms and certainties of the past 60 years have disappeared in the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. How to think about the world in the new century is a crying need in a time of uncertainty, ambiguity, and flux. We can hold on to the theories and assumptions about the world, national security, and war, which have marked the efforts of those involved in political science and international relations over past decades. But such theoretical approaches have had their difficulties – not the least being that not a single one predicted even two years before it happened an event as monumental as the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But to reject such theories requires that one have something to put in their place, and, here, historians have abdicated even the debate. The result has been to turn the study of current and future problems over to those who, if they do not reject history outright, are happy to rampage through the past with scant attention to its context or complexity. And in their search for absolutes and answers, they have only served to muddy the water for those who wish to gain some feel for war, power, and international relations in the coming century.