The pattern of epochal wars and state formation, of peace congresses and international constitutions, has played out for five centuries to the end of the millennium just past. A new constitutional order—the market-state—is about to emerge. But if the pattern of earlier eras is to be repeated, then we await a new, epochal war with state-shattering consequences. Many persons see war as an illness of states, a pathology that no healthy state need suffer. This way of looking at things more or less disables us from shaping future wars, as we search, fruitlessly, for the wonder serum that will banish war once and for all (or as we plan to fight wars we know—or believe—we can win). Yet we can shape future wars, even if we cannot avoid them. We can take decisions that will determine whether the next epochal war risks a general cataclysm.
Whatever course is decided upon will be both constitutional and strategic in nature because these are the two faces of the modern state—the face the state turns toward its own citizens, and the face it turns toward the outside world of its competitors and collaborators. Each state develops its own constitutional order (its inward-facing profile) as well as its strategic paradigm (its outward-turned silhouette), and these two forms are logically and topologically inseparable. A state that privatizes most of its functions by law will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries—with profound strategic consequences. A state threatened with cyberattacks on its interdependent infrastructures can protect itself by virtually abolishing civil privacy or by increasing official surveillance and intelligence gathering or by expensively decentralizing. Each course has profound constitutional consequences.