The great Friedman-Huntington debate: the coming clash between two fundamentally opposed post-9/11 global views.

• Author: Merry, Robert W.

In 1910, a starry-eyed British economist named Norman Angell published a book called The Great Illusion, positing the notion that war among industrial nations had become essentially obsolete. It was an instant smash, translated into eleven languages and stirring something of a cult following throughout Europe. "By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument," wrote Barbara Tuchman in her narrative history, The Guns of August, "Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one."

At major universities throughout Britain, study groups of Angell acolytes sprang up. Viscount Esher, friend and confidant of the king, traveled far and wide to spread the gospel that "new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars." Such wars, he suggested, would generate "commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering" on such a scale that the very thought of them would unleash powerful "restraining influences." As he told one audience of military men, the interlacing of nations had rendered war "every day more difficult and improbable."

In recounting all this, Tuchman barely conceals her contempt for Angell and Esher, which seems understandable given the carnage unleashed upon the European continent just four years after Angell's aptly named volume began its massive flow through bookstores. Of course Tuchman was writing with history at her back, while Angell was peering into the future. But, for anyone whose consciousness contained even a hint of realism, it wouldn't have required subsequent events to demonstrate the flaws of the Angell thesis. His dreamy vision of the future could prove out only if the laws of history were repealed. And the laws of history are immutable.

In our own time, the end of the Cold War has spawned numerous efforts to predict the future shape of the world. In the wake of September 11 and the so-called war on terrorism that followed, a question seems apt: Which of these efforts encompass a realistic view of history?

First out of the box was an academic named Francis Fukuyama, who wrote an influential 1989 essay provocatively entitled "The End of History." He argued that the Cold War's outcome would usher in an unprecedented era in which major global conflict would disappear. That's because, he wrote, we will have reached...