If you're just reconciled to war and brutality as an irredicable element of the human conditions, then the natural thing for the world's leading power to do is to try and horde its power.

OK, I'll cut you slack on "horde," because it's a homophone for "hoard," which you probably meant.  I can't for the life of me figure out what word you were thinking when you typed "irredicable."

It may well be possible that we are on the verge of a major peace outbreak. It may well be possible that this is the lull before the storm of wars. One thing is certain - we have no way of making an informed guess. So, since it is a much more pleasant feeling to believe the former, why not do so?

If we continue the Bush administration tactic of unilaterally declaring that we are at war, that the war will be a very long one, that we can never know if it has ended, then this terrible, terrible Global War can only become more terrible, terrible. But, let us just think happy thoughts - President Gore will usher in a long lasting era of peace starting in about 5 years.

Mack seems to stick the point of deaths per conflict, down to 600 at the start of this century, down from 37,000 around 1950, but that has more to do with the nature of warefar than the increase in peace.

First, the cold war itself, outside of Korea and Vietnam, has been the number 1 deterent to large scale conflicts and high body counts...the threat of the atom bomb and MAD has kept the world from destroying itself.   The likelyhood of seeing the number of soldiers killed that we saw in WWII is expodentially smaller now.  To put this in reference, in Russia, during WWII, 1 in 8 citizens died due to battle, starvation or the elements.  Of course numbers are down, the majority of nations putting enough troops in the line of fire are wielding machettes and machine guns during tribal or cival wars, which will be near impossible to eliminate.

Second, warfare itself has changed.  Both now and in the future, which is what this report seems to be commenting on, the type of enemy will be no longer be a state, but a group that transcends national boundries based on an idea.  Last year, the National Counterterrorism Center released statistics on the increase in terrorists attacks for 2004.  The numbers were up three time greater than 2003.  CNN had a quick recap of the numbers.  Coincidentally, the Bush administration censored the numbers for 2005 and asked that they not be published.  I haven't yet found the report, but Al Franken mentioned on his show about a week ago that they have been released by the group assisting State.

While warfare, as we have known it for as long as history can remember, may be coming to an end, there is a new breed of war laying its foundation across the globe.  This should be the real concern and doesn't seem to be fully accounted in the Human Security Center report.

I assume djmoonbat was complaining about the prose rather than asking what it meant, but just in case, I'm sure he means "ineradicable."

Of course, the timetable for peace and prosperity has to take into account that Bush has plenty of time left in office. And, as with the courts, the mess he made will last a lot longer.

 Assymetrical warfare is going to become a bitch in the next fifty years

By this, do you mean terrorist attacks by non-state agents?

Do you mean civil wars in failed states, as in the Sudan?

Do you mean ethnic insurgencies against existing states, as in Russia? 

Do you mean that imperialist wars by the US are going to opposed by ill-armed insurgencies?

I'm being a little snarky here, but I've heard this before, and when I read it in your message, I realized I didn't know what it meant.  The only way the US is going to get involved in asymmetrical warfare that I can see is when it involves itself, as in Iraq, in imperialist adventures.

more thoughts in this vein are here including in the comments: War Making Headlines, but Peace Breaks Out. We do have evidence of a movement away from the great nation state world wars of past centuries. But ah, is it "progress" for us to return back to more civil strife tribal violence? Is that indicative of us returning to solve the real problems of the human race that we have been ignoring, or is it evidence of us taking several steps backwards once again?

Thanks for your comments.

I confess I have no idea what the prospects of collapse for sophisticated, technological societies are (I'm not sure it has ever happened before), but I do believe the prospect of regional and global systems disruption is significant.

Dixon writes about this subject and has written a book - really the book - about the relationship between resource scarcity and conflict.

"Less dependence on centralized power generation and large-scale agribusiness would reduce the risks."

I agree. I tend to think the effects of global warming, and implications for the gulf stream, are very difficult to game, but it seems clear that in an era of eroding national borders, and the diminished primacy of nation states, localism and a new tribalism will be better buffers against the threat of systems failure than central governments. We can hate postmodernism, but we ignore its insights and its implied solutions at our peril.

Some good analysis here. I like your Uplift War (do you read D. Brin?)

I don't expect to see it, though. Money is too powerful. I expect no conflict between matched powers but there will be plenty of local war as resources tighten up and population pressure increases. I expect future terrorism as revenge for climate refugees. A good reason to look like we're trying.

I'm pretty pessimistic over the next hundred years. Narrow self-interest is so genetically deep in most people that suicidal policies will persist. Worst-case guess is a further downward spiral of resource depletion, war, disease, and climate catastrophe, with some folks getting off-planet. If those survive, at a distant furtue time we will restore Earth.

I'm stuck here, though, as are my children, so I'll keep trying to ameliorate the worst tendencies in local ways.