Future: Tense: The Coming World Order

American defeat in Iraq is only a matter of time, but how long it takes matters a lot. The fate of Iraq is a sideshow, the terrorist threat is a red herring, and the radical Islamists' dream of a worldwide jihad against the West is a fantasy, but the attempt to revive Pax Americana is real. No matter what the outcome of the election in November, 2004, the enterprise is likely to continue. It is bound to fail eventually, but we need it to fail soon.

American military power is not limitless, and the other big powers will not stand for US military domination of the world. They don't buy the cover story about the 'terrorist threat,' but they don't want a fight either. They are all on hold for the moment, hoping that America will remember its commitment to the United Nations, the rule of law and multilateralism. If it does not, then the drift back into alliances, balance-of-power politics and military confrontations will begin. Ten years from now, an American-led alliance that includes India and occupies much of the Middle East could be facing a European alliance led by France, Germany and Russia AND a hostile, heavily armed China.

In Future Tense, Gwynne Dyer's brilliant follow up to last year's bestselling Ignorant Armies, he analyzes how the world made its way to the brink of disaster, and describes how we may all slide over the edge. It was fringe groups of extremists - Islamist fanatics and American neo-conservatives - who set the process in motion, but it has gone well beyond that now. It is not too late, but the clock is running.

Neither Osama Bin Laden's goal of establishing a single Islamist Caliphate nor the neoconservative efforts to impose uncontested US hegemony on the world—both of which he reviews in some detail—have the slightest chance of success, argues international affairs columnist Dyer. Unfortunately for the rest of us however, these forces can be seen as "objective allies" in undermining the world system of multilateral institutions that ever so slowly have been nudging us towards a world without war. In Dyer's eyes, this problem emerged less with the events of September 11th, 2001 and more with the US's ill-considered decision to invade and occupy Iraq, an occupation that is destined to fail sooner or later. Unless that looming failure is recognized and the US turns back toward the multilateralism it had been instrumental in constructing since the end of World War II, he believes, the occupation threatens to move the world back to a situation wherein maneuvering blocks of great powers attempt to counterbalance each other, a situation that brought us two world wars and untold misery and is rife with the possibility of greater disaster. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Gwynne Dyer has served in the Canadian, British and American navies. He holds a Ph.D. in war studies from the University of London, has taught at Sandhurst and served on the Board of Governors of Canada’s Royal Military College. Dyer writes a syndicated column that appears in more than 175 newspapers around the world.