But if the United States, and possibly NATO, should anticipate conflict, including the
possibility of warfare, with a superpower China and its allies (which might include
Russia), that is quite another.
Finally, did 9/11 herald World War III, as Lawrence Freedman (2001) has speculated?
The United States, though not its European allies, appears to have decided that it did.
Is the master narrative of the strategic history of this century going to be the global
struggle against Islamic terrorism and insurgency, a struggle which is mainly about the
future of the Islamic world? Or is that conflict likely to be sidelined either by its own lack
of staying power or by its replacement for prime international attention by a return of
great power political rivalry, probably in the form of a new bipolarity on a Sino-American
axis of dangerous antagonism? One cannot know, but the question, and its possible
answers, could hardly be more important for future international security.
If the topics just outlined were insufficiently troubling, readers might consider the
possible and probable consequences of rapid climate change for civility among states and
societies. As the material resources most vital for the sustenance of life itself come under
growing pressure from environmental change, a whole new master narrative of violent
strategic history may well be born, alas.
Warfare: from the Industrial Age to the Information Age
For a book on strategic history, this chapter and the previous one have said very little
directly about the evolution of, or revolution in, warfare since the end of the Cold War.
This apparent dereliction of duty reflects a suspicion that the often intense, and certainly
protracted, debate about a revolution in military affairs was nowhere near as significant
as many people assumed. This topic, which so obsessed American defence analysts and
theorists in the 1990s, generally was treated somewhat autistically. It is difficult to have
a strategy in the absence of an enemy, and it is no less difficult to carry through an RMA
in the absence of strategic policy guidance. That difficulty disappears, of course, if it is
simply assumed that one sort of military prowess will fit all strategic needs. In Iraq the
United States has learnt, yet again, that regular and irregular warfare are fundamentally
different, and that one kind of military competence most definitely does not suit all
cases.
When one reviews the military dimension to the strategic history of the post-Cold
War years, the first thing one ought to notice is the acute shortage of useful, let
alone conclusive, evidence. How has the art and science of warfare advanced since the
Berlin Wall came down in 1989? Certainly, US-led forces won swift and, for Americans
and their allies, all but bloodless victories over Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Yugoslavia in
1999 and Taliban Afghanistan in 2001. But in each of those cases the enemy as a regular
military opponent was so feeble that the United States would have had to try very hard
in order to be frustrated, let alone to lose. (In fact, in 1999 over Kosovo, the Serbians did
somewhat embarrass NATO by managing to conceal most of their military equipment
so as to evade the air campaign.) Advances in the grammar of war achieved by the
United States since the end of the Cold War have appeared impressive, but it was so easy
to appear impressive when fighting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that nothing of much
consequence can be learnt from it. One’s military prowess is flattered when the enemy is
grossly incompetent, or grossly overmatched in material and method, or both. It is well
240 War, peace and international relations