ABSTRACT
This volume concludes with a discussion of the events and tendencies that might continue to produce chaos and war in our international relations. On the one hand, it might be the case that international politics becomes a ‘grey zone’ of conflict and competition in what I describe as a time of ‘cyberpunk international politics.’ In this view, states and militaries will be dealing with the management of new actors, tactics and technologies in a security landscape of sub-threshold messiness and complexity. But great power conflict will work to remain sub-threshold at the same time as there will be destructive conflicts emerging around the planet. There will be events and ‘traditional’ tendencies in international politics that will threaten to push conflict between great powers or nuclear powers into open war. The book concludes that all the trends and possibilities in future warfare will depend on the types of ‘world order’ that will begin to emerge out to 2049; some of these world orders are sketched out in the conclusion of the book. The book concludes that the problem of policymakers existing in what Hans Morgenthau described as ‘worlds of fantasy’ will likely become more challenging in a multipolar world dealing with emerging actors, technologies, new terrains and global challenges.
