In the last few years we seem to have experienced something like the functional equivalent of World War III. The recent pleasantness (as Winston Churchill might have called it) was preceded, like its unpleasant and far noisier predecessors of 1914 and 1939, by a lengthy process in which rival countries jockeyed for position as they proclaimed competitive visions of the way the world ought to be ordered, armed themselves to the earlobes, made threatening noises, and confronted each other in traumatic crises. Like World Wars I and II, a consequence of the event was that a major empire was dismembered, important political boundaries in Europe were reorganized, and several nations were politically transformed. And, just as the ancient institution of monarchy met its effective demise in Europe in World War I and as the newer, but dangerous and seemingly virile ideologies of nazism and fascism were destroyed by World War II, so a major political philosophy, communism, over which a great deal of ink and blood had been spilled, was discredited and apparently expunged in World War III.

Following World War I and II it took a few years for the basic political order to be settled, after which it remained substantially stable until revised by the next war (or war-equivalent). A similar process of shaking-out seems to be going on now in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union—and perhaps also in China, where aged leaders are trying to counter an apparently inevitable historic process.