The discussion so far looks to me like an extrapolation of symptoms more than an examination of the fundamental trends that'll shape this century, of which the prospects for WWIII are a subset. I see in the symptoms signs of underlying forces at work, and it's those forces I'm compelled to examine.

It's going to be all about economics, at heart, as it usually is underneath the surface of whatever jingo rationalization is advanced for a specific conflict. Specifically, the competition for a share of a finite resource base by expanding populations whose appetite is being multiplied by a drive to achieve a high Western-grade standard of living. I've presented the numbers before, so I'll just mention that they add up to a virtual population of about 225 billion people by mid-century.

Something's gotta give.

It's shaping up that by mid-century there will be from four to six or seven major power blocs. The Core Four are of course North America, Europe, South Asia and the Indian Ocean nations, and Central to Northern Asia. Key individual First-World nations in those areas will be torn, but will have to choose partners eventually; for example, Australia's cultural heart may be with Europe, but its geographical situation will eventually require it to make an aliiance with one of the Asian powers. Japan doesn't particularly want to join China, but the same facts may compel an alliance eventually, or they may try to triangulate with India (South Asia).

The possible two or three additional blocs depend on whether regions like South America choose to make alliance with the North, or to try and go it alone. Ditto Africa. Russia's ties to Europe don't seem unbreakable, and it may try to reconstruct an empire instead of moving closer to Europe. The Middle East's a special case, representing a coveted resource, and the question turns more on who can establish hegemony. I'd guess South Asia or Europe for obvious geographic reasons; it's unlikely to be America in the long run. An independent Middle East is absolutely not in the cards, no matter what.

The coalescence of power will be driven by the inexorable logic of competition for resources. In their most benign form, large blocs simply have buying power and can get "quantity discounts". When peaceful trade breaks down the player with the biggest army gets the resources. Small nations will, one by one, have to decide to join a power bloc or face certain starvation.

There'll be a few exceptions, as there always are, tiny nations that carve out a unique niche in the economic ecology--the Switzerlands, Monaco, the Carribean banking havens, a few places with a lucky diversity in resources that might aspire to self-sufficiency, or conversely a monopoly on something so much in demand that gives them bargaining power (but no so much in demand as to make theft attractive).

Peaceful trade periodically breaks down in the best of times, but as the competition heats up, the parties will resort to war more and more often as the century progresses and the stakes get ever-higher.

We've learned a lot about managing conflict, and I think we're sure to see a series of relatively small conflicts that all parties consciously try to contain. But managing war can at best achieve metastability: If a nuke slips the leash, the restraint will be dramatically give way and at least two power blocs will engage in all-out war, destroying one or both. So to answer your question as originally posed, we may well see one large-scale conflict that won't quite reach the level of global war, followed by a period of shock and regret that may considerably improve the picture by providing an object lesson on the value of peaceful cooperation...at least for the survivors, when they can emerge from their fallout shelters.

That's a pretty grim picture, isn't it? I may be attempting to look for fundamental trends, but there's still the unavoidable risk of extrapolation, that the accumulation of small differences will negate the prophecy over time. I'm describing a default trend if we do nothing, yet it's possible that enough people will see the danger and work on more cooperative alternatives, completely changing the future timeline.

To get back to symptoms, I think that economic factors are actually a major root cause of terrorism, despite the florid language of religious fanaticism (and BTW, the baseline florid tone of Arabic when translated into English; we need to calibrate for that better, because even an invoice in Arabic sounds like a religious harangue when rendered into English).

Of bin Laden's half-dozen or so grievances, I've said before that I see the more religiously extreme as bargaining chips. "Follow the money" applies equally to everybody--look for self-interest. We're talking about the Middle East here, the people who understand like the rest of us that energy is the root determinant of a society's wealth and success; that for a century energy has come from petroleum; they're sitting on a big part of the world's oil; and yet somehow it's all gone to create wealth and prosperity for other people. We burn their oil in our power plants to power the transmitters that beam images of Western prosperity into their homes (images which amusingly depict Americans profligately burning more oil to power our fancy cars and light our shining cities, and trading plastic gee-gaws made from petroleum); and they look away from the TV screens and see abject poverty. If you were in their shoes, wouldn't you be a little pissed-off too?

We've become fixated on the symptom of terrorism as if it were a root cause because the mainstream intellectual fashion in America for several years has been to pretend that we can't see simple cause-and-effect and Arabs can't either. Instead we cling to the notion that all that upset simply spontaneously emerged one day from the quantum foam, in full flower as a bunch of people suddenly decided that "they haaaate freedom!".

(We were all present at the virgin birth of that "explanation" of terrorism. Before that day, had you ever in a million years imagined that that was the reason? How quickly we grasped at that straw, eh?)

Why do we shy away from looking at the root cause of terrorism? Because if the root really is economic, we have the power to fix the problem with a minimum of bloodshet; but the power to fix the problem tacitly acknowledges that we may have some culpability in the history that brought us to this pass. It's ever more comforting to believe that we're faced with an inexplicable and random force of nature against which we must nobly fight for survival.

That tunnel vision might be the death of America. We risk spending too many decades locked in what we proudly think is a titanic clash of civilizations, when it's actually just one theater of the economic struggle going on around us. We risk one day waking up and finding that everybody else has spent the time consolidating their positions and that we've been shut out.

There ya go, that's what my crystal ball shows for the 21st. It puts my age into perspective for me: This century's likely to be considerably less fun than the last, and so perhaps I'm fortunate to have spent the first part of my life in what we may nostalgically come to think of as the sun-drenched "good old days".