In the last few years of this millennium many political scientists and research institutes have tried to determine what the “hot spots” of the globe will be in the future. In his last book, Samuel Huntington bets on ethnic and religious conflicts as well as on the irremediable break between the western civilisation and the others. The Institute of Strategic Studies of London believes that the biggest war hotbed will be in Southeast Asia. The Hudson Institute holds that Islam's uprising will soon take us back to the times of the Crusades; others fear economical and financial tension between industrialised and Third World countries.   
On the whole the experts' opinions are far from being unanimous as far as the possibility of keeping an acceptable level of peace is concerned. However, it has been observed that - at least for the moment - the only immediate danger of war comes from the Middle East, where the situation decidedly worsened in the past year. Today, it would already be a success to maintain the status quo, which means avoiding to return to the times of the intifahd and to a complete war against Israel.   
The problem is that a mechanism of expectations triggered off in Oslo and it is now almost impossible to put it into perspective. Furthermore, even if the new Israeli government slowed down the application of the agreements, it certainly could not turn back the time of history without triggering a new conflict.   
To understand the problem exhaustively, first of all it will be necessary to play down the positive effects that the terror balance had between 1945 and 1990. It is true that it kept peace among the great powers, in the sense that the prospect of a nuclear holocaust made the prospect of a third world war almost impossible. Outside Europe, nevertheless, war continued to be hot and bloody. The American expert Alvin Toffler estimated that as from 1945 there have been between 150 and 160 regional or civil wars in the world causing the death of 7 million two hundred thousand soldiers in battle, just one million two hundred thousand less than the soldiers who fell in the First World War. Even among the civilians the wars took a heavy toll: between 35 and 40 million people died. Between 60 and 70 out of 184 member countries belonging to the United Nations have been involved in war operations.   
Even after the fall of the Berlin wall, however, things did not go very well. Rather, the conflicts' nature radically changed. The war, “expelled” from Europe thanks to the agreements of the two major world powers, came back in the former Yugoslavia and, despite a two-year armed truce decided by NATO, it cannot be considered over yet. The other continents even witnessed an escalation: in 1994 the conflicts were 31, in 1995 35, in 1996 38, and no one yet knows the figures for this year. Only the experts could list by heart these hotbeds of battle, often neglected by our press.   
The only certain thing is that all together these conflicts cause every year the death of hundreds of thousands of people: civilians, soldiers, people killed in battle or starved to death. Many of them, furthermore, have continued for so long that they seem to be insoluble.   
The American scholar James Rosenau speaks of an “international politics now in a phase of turmoil, shakes and uncertainty”. Edward Luttwak adds: “While the cold war induced people to prudence, the present circumstances leave a larger space to aggressiveness.   
Thus it would be legitimate to suppose that we will have to cope with a new period of war operations that will certainly have consequences in the future”. Since many people believe that waging a war is now less dangerous due to the virtual impossibility of using nuclear weapons, there is the concrete possibility for a growing number of countries to resort to war in order to assert their arguments. These potential warmongers know perfectly that the West's availability to answer their provocation is rapidly decreasing because, as stated by the American strategist Dan Morelli, “the democracies' biggest problem with respect to the soldiers is that they can neither declare nor win the wars without popular support, without the consent of most of the electorate. Besides, in order to maintain this consent, in case of war, it is necessary to reduce to a minimum the cost in terms of human losses and consequently to operate on the battlefield with partly tied hands”.   
The United States answered by resorting to the technological war and did so in an increasingly methodical way. It is true that this strategy worked quite well during the Gulf War but it is not suitable for other situations. Europe's answer instead was even more discouraging. On the one hand, in fact, the availability of our public opinions to engage in an armed conflict that does not jeopardise direct and immediate interests is almost non-existent; on the other, with the exception of France and Great Britain, the EU's armed forces do not even have suitable means.   
Thus the hopes of many governments to transform the United Nations into an efficient guardian of the famous new world order failed miserably. In so fragile a situation, it is clear that the occasions for a conflict to be triggered multiply. Once ideological, maybe even artificial, clashes were over, political and territorial conflicts which had dominated history for many centuries came to the forefront. Even ethnic and confessional conflicts are increasingly taking root and often turn into insurrectional wars, secession of social groups having their own identity against the State they belong to. For this kind of wars, even an intervention from the outside, supposing that someone wants to undertake it, becomes more difficult: according to the international law, in fact, the government involved has the right to refuse it. As we have seen, according to most of the experts, the Middle East is the area where tension is greater. I must say that, during a workshop organised immediately after the signing of the Oslo's agreements, I foresaw - and I was the only one of the seven speakers - that they would not be successful because of the objective impossibility of reconciling irreconcilable interests. Furthermore, if we add the problem of wiping out in time the heritage of fifty years of war with no holds barred, the recrudescence of fundamentalist terrorism, Yasir Arafat's progressive loss of credibility and the coming to power of an Israeli Premier elected with the extremists' fundamental help, the mixture really looks explosive. Even the positive heritage of Oslo's agreements is now in danger, and it could disappear completely if the region's moderate regimes were thrown out of saddle - or were forced to change their politics - by the black knights of new Islam.   
The restored conflict between Arabs and Israeli that the US is desperately striving to keep within a diplomatic range, has the peculiarity of belonging to both “risk categories” at the same time: it has political, territorial, ethnic and confessional features.   
The Asiatic question foretold by the Institute of Strategic Studies of London on the other hand, belongs mainly to first type and has a rather inextricable story of rivalries, historic hostilities and clashes of interests involving China, Japan, Korea and the emerging countries from the south-eastern areas. It would be hard to say what the casus belli is, but there are some choices: Peking's claims on Taiwan, the commercial war which will break out when China becomes more competitive, the possible “explosion” of North Korea, the deaf war already being waged to control the China Sea's oil resources.   
It is meaningful that this is the area of the globe in which military costs are increasing faster and faster. It should not be forgotten that in this area there is the only nuclear power - China - that, thanks to its structure, could use the “final weapon” without delays, and the only large country - Japan - to whom the United States could not deny complete protection due to the existent treaties and deep economic relationships between the two countries. It should also be fair to add, however, that the kind of conflict appearing on the horizon, with its mainly rational components, is also the most “negotiable” from a diplomatic standpoint.   
It is not necessary to support Huntington's extreme theories (he believes that the borders between the western and the other civilisations will become next century's battle lines) to understand that the conflicts between countries, along with the battle between the rich and the poor, will certainly play a prominent role in the future. It has been observed that, for the moment, the line of containment of violent Islam is part of the Islamic world itself and that it will be possible to hold in check and curb this danger as long as this state of affairs lasts. However, will there always be Algerian generals or Egyptians dictators eager to play this role? Will Europe, with its weakness and vulnerability, soon find itself in the front line?   
The explosive potential of ethnic and confessional conflicts was evident especially in Yugoslavia's case. Things were a little better for the Soviet Union's disposal, but the story still continues. Apart from Chechnya's tragedy, the persistent conflict between Armenians and Azeri in the Caucasus and different other clashes latent in central Asia, no one would bet on the solidity of Ukraine torn between a “Europeanising” West and a prevailingly Russian-speaking East, or on the possibility of a completely peaceful living between the Baltic countries and their former Russian rulers. And Europeans are not even in the position to throw the first stone, if they think that London has been wrestling with the problem of Ulster for so many generations, that Spain failed to cope with the Basque extremists, that France does not manage to find a solution for the Corsican autonomism and that even Italy will probably soon have to tackle the mad fringes of Bossi's followers.   
What is the conclusion? We are entering a very complex era that opposing forces, such as the birth of autonomism and the weakening of the Central states, at least as the guardians of the public order and of the national spirit, make it even harder to handle. The need for many governments having a far-reaching foreign policy to cope with problems of different nature at the same time makes it very difficult to find a solution with respect to the Cold War years. And while Europe as a political entity does not manage to take off, the United States seems to have lost the control of the situation it once had and the United Nations are back to the unfeasibility that afflicted them until 1990. The equation of peace, then, is far from being solved; rather, new unknown factors are emerging everywhere.