The twentieth century, the first American century, was also the
century of three world wars. The United States was not only
victorious in the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold
War, but it was more victorious than any of the other victor powers.
As the pre-eminent victor power, the subsequent strategies of the
United States did much to shape the three postwar worlds. They
therefore also did much to prepare the ground for the second and
third world wars in the sequence. Now, ten years after the American
victory in that third, cold, world war, it is time to evaluate the
U.S. victor strategies of the 1990s and to consider if they will make
the twenty-first century a second American century, this time one of
world peace and prosperity, or if they could lead, sometime in the
next few decades, to a fourth world war.
The First and Second British Centuries
Like America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Britain in
the early nineteenth century had passed through a century of three
wars that were worldwide in scope--the War of the Spanish Succession
(1702-13), the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and the successive Wars of
the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Britain had
been victorious in each of these wars, making the eighteenth century
something of a British one. The victor strategy that Britain pursued
after the Napoleonic Wars laid the foundations for what has been
called "the Hundred Years Peace" (1815-1914), making the second
British century as peaceful as the first one had been warlike.
