We are living in a postwar world -- a world in which the all-out clash of sovereign powers is no longer possible. While violence persists, it is hemmed in with complications, a ponderous dance of shackled gladiators. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson looks at the reasons for this change and ponders what to call the opposite of peace in such a world. Anderson, author of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman), is a political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.

While the world waits to see if the Kofi Annan peacemaking initiative succeeds, we ought to look for some new word to describe the opposite of peace. Undoubtedly there are those in both the United States and Iraq who would like to make war -- but real war, all-out conflict between sovereign states, is obsolete.

Clearly, Saddam Hussein has not been building up one of the largest military machines in his region just for the hell of it. He would like to make Iraq a major military power, and wage good old-fashioned war on various neighboring countries including Kuwait, Iran, and Israel. But he is a shackled gladiator, hampered by the United Nations inspectors snooping through his kingdom in search of chemical and biological weapons, and by U.S. vows to use military force to support them.

Clearly, too, there are those on the U. S. side who would happily use as much of America's enormous military power as is necessary to topple Saddam -- to bomb Iraq back to the stone age, in that memorable phrase of the Vietnam era. But America is shackled also -- limited by a tangle of end-of-the-century realities including the power of public opinion at home and abroad.

If the situation moves into armed conflict the media will dutifully call it a war, but it won't be a war. Real war involves a number of things that the American public will no longer tolerate. Among them:

• Sacrifices. Real wars impose hardships on the people at home. World War II brought rationing of many goods, and a virtual shutdown of production of luxury items. Today, we assume the American consumer economy will roll on happily even as bombs fall on Baghdad.

• Casualties. Wars take thousands, even millions of lives, leave their scars upon an entire generation. It is now Pentagon doctrine, and has been since the end of the Vietnam War, that the United States must not engage in any military undertaking that produces large numbers of American casualties, because the public will not stand for it.

• Forced military service. The draft did as much as any other single factor to turn young Americans against the government's policy in Vietnam. Burning draft cards became not only a dramatic act, but a sign of profound change in American life.

• The possibility of defeat. There has been much talk about the likelihood that any American action against Iraq will be unsuccessful -- that Saddam and his military might still be there after the smoke has cleared -- but nobody expects the U. S. to be defeated in the way that Germany and Japan were defeated.

All the above suggest that real war is unacceptable to the American public. But there are other publics, and in an increasingly interconnected world, we can no longer ignore their opinions entirely. The prospect of a global wave of Anti-American protest actions is yet another thread in the tangle of considerations that inhibits our war making ability -- and makes it necessary to pay serious attention to the Kofi Annan agreement.

In short, we are living in a postwar world. I don't mean post-World War II, I mean a world in which the all-out clash of sovereign powers, is no longer possible.

The main reason is simply that there are no longer any sovereign powers. Both Iraq and the U. S. have become -- somewhat accidentally, somewhat unwillingly -- parts of a global system in which no state can operate with complete autonomy.

In this post-war world we can still have many of the things identified with real war -- violence, blood and flames, tragedy and waste and confusion -- but it is violence hemmed in with complications, a ponderous dance of shackled gladiators.

This post-war world is certainly no utopia. It is an unjust and dangerous place. The changes over the past few decades have been anything but neat and steady steps toward peace. The world is not making that kind of progress, but rather stumbling toward civilization.