The introduction and proliferation of nuclear weapons, meanwhile, made great-power conflict all but unthinkable.
Great power conflict, on the other hand, would be a catastrophe at the global level.
In both Europe and the Pacific, the possibility of great power conflict could no longer be dismissed.
It is not an especially pretty place — slow growth, half-managed crises, and the longer-term threats of great power conflict and climate disaster.
We have to break the old model of super-power conflict, where everything was measured against this chess board of the red side of the map and the blue side of the map, Communism versus democracy.
It was given currency in a 1944 book by a foreign-policy professor at Columbia University, W. T.R. Fox, predicting, "These world powers we shall call 'super-powers,' in order to distinguish them from the other powers... whose interests are great only in a single theater of power conflict".
McNamara and Blight's own struggle with morality and power focuses on three foreign policy issues: preventing great-power conflict between the United States and Russia or China; reducing communal killing in "dangerous, troubled, failed, murderous states"; and moving steadily toward a nuclear-weapons-free world.
But his own chart showing the decline of great power conflict seems to track pretty well with the rise of first Great Britain and then the United States: It depicts a gradual decline in warfare that's broken by irruptions of violence when first France and then Germany challenges the Anglosphere's hegemony.
Beyond that point, the US today faces no serious security threat and, more importantly, confronts a world that has never been less violent, more safe and less likely to be afflicted by great power conflict than at any point in, well, human history.
The information obtained through the interviews was synthesized in a socio-gram which reflects the relationships (power, conflict, etc).
