ABSTRACT
As we ponder the forty-odd years since the end of World War II, there are reasons to believe that a new era of peace may well be in train. But there are equally good reasons for skepticism in regard to not only the past four decades, but those that lie ahead as well. Perhaps the recent past has been less peaceful than it might appear to observers in the major powers. Perhaps we, like those who basked in the relative harmony of the forty years following the Franco–Prussian War, have been treading the path to a war that lies unexpectedly around the next turning in the road of international history. This paper will address both of these questions, as well as a third that links the two: what accounts for the absence of central system (i.e., major powers and their industrially developed allies) interstate war since the year that saw not only the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the establishment of the United Nations?
