The Introduction sketches out the key themes of the book, offers a justification for focusing on the identity of the American soldier as a key issue in the Army’s post–Cold War transformation and introduces the reader to literature on ‘warrior culture’. Just as Army leaders and ordinary soldiers often meant very different things when they spoke about warriors, so contemporary historians, anthropologists and classicists have used the term in various ways. Thus, the latter part of the Introduction spends some time examining how the term has evolved and been deployed in different contexts.

The chapter develops the stylized facts used in the following three chapters and surveys the literature on the effect of development on democracy and on the effect of democracy on development. The main dataset is the Polity P-index with 7,142 annual observations covering 1960–2016 in the Main sample and 818 in the OPEC sample. The chapter also considers the two political indices from Freedom House. The transition curves for the three political indices are beautiful. The transition curves are robust, with the OPEC-exception. The variability of the political system vanishes with development in accordance with the End of History hypothesis. The causality tests show that increased income causes democracy with little simultaneity only. This finding is robust over 200 years.

Historians have recognized parallels between the temporalized chain of being and early ideas about human progress, both being seen as the ascent of a linear scale of development towards a predetermined goal. But the sequence of developmental stages postulated by social thinkers could be defined in different ways depending on whether the goal was a spiritual one (paradise) or a more utilitarian vision of a perfectly ordered society guaranteeing happiness for all (utopia). This chapter outlines the emergence of the more spiritual approach, noting its origins in Christian millenarianism and the hope that Christ's message would eventually lead humanity to regain the state of perfection it enjoyed before the Fall. Eighteenth-century advocates of social progress such as Joseph Priestley saw it as a process of spiritual evolution, a view developed further by liberal Christian thinkers in the following century. Idealist philosophers such as Hegel also defined history in terms of humanity's ascent of a spiritual scale, although their later followers over-simplified the message. There were speculations about the nature of the future society which would give full rein to our spiritual nature.

Although the twentieth century saw a transition to a less goal-directed model of progress, efforts were still made to defend the older vision in which humanity was the predetermined end of evolution and a particular social order the goal of social progress. Christian thinkers still tended to think of evolution as a process driven by cooperation rather than struggle, with humanity and a spiritually mature society as the goals. Even within a Darwinian framework, it has been argued that evolution is subject to constraints that leave something like humanity as the only possible end-point. From the opposite ideological position, Soviet Marxism preserved the image of a sequence of developmental stages leading to the future utopia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union there were suggestions that free-enterprise capitalism is the final end-point of social evolution.

The discussions and debate we had around the “Toward a Greater Eurasia: How to Build a Common Future” in the fourth Astana Club Meeting (12–13 November 2018), held while I was working on Systemic Earthquake, contained significant clues with respect to understanding the psychology of the international environment and bringing out the main focus of this book’s methodological approach. The prevailing intellectual currents among participants emerged right from the opening session of this wide-ranging roundtable gathering hosted by the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and attended by a number of former presidents, prime ministers, and ministers together with a host of academics distinguished for their work on the issue of international order.

Argues that despite hopes of sweeping change, Clinton ended up running a traditional, Cold War–style foreign policy. He used Cold War institutions like NATO, and acted to contain Russian power in the Balkans. Examines attempts to apply a Clinton Doctrine and its successes and failures. Argues that Clinton's interventions advanced a trend of wars of Muslim liberation.