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Set Introduction xix states lacking a unified nation-state at their core, from the artifice of Yugoslavia, to the multiple artifices of the post-Ottoman Middle East, to the newly liberated artifices along the periphery of the now “former” Soviet Union. With the end of communism, and before Western values could take root, these places took on a dark and somber tone, becoming voids in the international order, eddies of chaos where fear, not hope, was the currency of the realm, and those who could master its dark- ness, or offer respite from it, became the new masters of the land, driven by various visions: of medieval theocracy, tribal warlordism, ethnic purity, and defensive jihad. During the brief years that spanned the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers, we heard a lot about failed states, rogue states, and balkanization, as the triumphant West sought to contain these cancers in the international body poli- tic. Though few and far between, and greatly outnumbered as democracies rapidly proliferated throughout the world, taking root among both the old communist and anti-communist authoritarian regimes that had arrayed against one another during the Cold War, these dark spots amongst a world of light were nonetheless feared as all malignancies are, because chaos, no matter how small, is always the enemy of order. After the War on Terror began, the armed forces of the West found themselves at war in many of these dark spots, waging modern wars against what seemed to be medieval foes, grappling with the complexity inherent in asymmetry, improvis- ing solutions to extend the reach of order and to stamp out the threat of chaos. In some theaters of operations, such as Afghanistan, this struggle resembled a cru- sade between the Christian armies against resurgent Islam, a replay of the struggle that defined much of the Dark Ages before Europe was united under the banner of Christendom. And yet, ironically, the seeds of the Western vision of modernity, a secular and democratic vision, were preserved by Islamic scholars as early Christen- dom erased much of the West ’ s classical heritage during the fires of the Inquisition, with these ideas slowly working their way back to the West after a thousand years of intellectual banishment. In other theaters, such as Iraq, the struggle was against secular totalitarianism, ironically precipitating a medieval struggle against secularity itself in the chaotic aftermath of the lightning collapse of Saddam Hussein ’ s tyranny. If the goal was to restore hope to a land gripped by fear, then things obviously departed from the script but the night is young, and the final chapter of this struggle has yet to be written, with recent indications suggesting that hope may yet triumph over fear. But if the goal was to demonstrate that the armies of the West could crush both a theocratic and a secular tyranny at the same time, and thus not just to export hope to the dark spots of the world but to restore hope to the West itself that it could not be defeated on the field of battle, then one might fairly conclude that things are proceeding very much according to plan, and with minimal Western losses, as two adversaries have been swept from power, each in a matter of weeks, not months or years, with Western losses by any historic measure nominal. For many of the Western participants in the War on Terror, this struggle is not against theocracy or secular tyranny per se but against the locus of anti-Western sentiment, the ideologies of hatred no matter what their form that share the dream of defeating the West. This has been a long struggle, dating back to the classical