The era of the post-Cold War fantasy that encouraged the more impulsive to take the ‘peace dividend’ is well and truly over. The fall of the Berlin Wall of course expanded the boundaries of democracy and freedom. But by hastening globalisation, it did not make the world a safer or more predictable place. We live on an unstable and uncertain planet, characterised by a multiplicity of threats and recurrent crises always threatening to erupt into armed conflict, mostly asymmetric and of low or medium intensity. There has been a dramatic shift from the era of East-West confrontation, founded on an unchanging foe and preparations for a high-intensity conflict.

Ballistic, nuclear proliferation is poised to cross a worrying threshold with the policies currently being followed by North Korea, and even more so Iran. The spread of bacteriological and, especially, chemical weapons, while less spectacular, remains of considerable concern. The hyperterrorism that struck New York, Madrid and London may once again afflict many countries. The ingredients for a burgeoning of violent crises are accumulating: increasing scarcity of energy and water supplies, ecological, demographic and economic imbalances that exacerbate migratory pressures, dominant nations driven by a craving for power hardly compatible with the rules of the international community, weakened or totally collapsed nations that leave the field open to criminal and terrorist tendencies and religious or cultural antagonisms that some fanatics would like to translate into a clash of civilisations.

These fault lines could lead to crises or even hot wars, all the more worrying since the West’s technological supremacy can be effectively sidestepped, especially in urban terrain. The military successes of Hezbollah, a non-state actor, against the Israeli army, and the reverses suffered by US troops in Iraq, are two particularly revealing illustrations of this. But this supremacy can also be challenged by the growing sophistication of the defence industries of new powers like China, which recently gave a striking illustration of this with its apparently successful test of an anti-satellite weapon.