The shining light of an intelligent design of the State, with its mythical powers immediately apparent and equal through the centuries, did not happen. Fourth Generation War theorists are prone to say Clausewitzian war is over because the state is losing primacy. In reality, the state had primacy for maybe one hundred years. The United States wasn’t a coherent state until after the Civil War (always referred to as “These United States” and frequently at war along and inside its border). The rise of the international system usurped power and autonomy from the states, which 4GW’er fail to acknowledge as part of evolution. Philip Bobbitt’s description of the evolution of the state-nation, nation-state, market-state is useful here, but not much use to 4GW’ers.

Clausewitz did not write the “State” had sole power to conduct war. This thought, a basis for 4GW, lay in revisionist interpretations of the evolution and concept of war, the writings of Clausewitz, and, most importantly, the ever-present employment of political, economic, ideological, and military means to ends.

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There is no crisis of legitimacy in the state system. Roles of states are changing, as they always have. The power of Diasporas is increasing. The value of inter-related commerce and societal pressures increases. But none of these are properly addressed by 4GW, but in fact, improperly attributed. States are losing their autonomy (although Putin’s Russia is fight that trend) willingly. As states evolve, voluntarily ceding autonomy, as in the European Union today, as in the states of the US federal project a century and a half ago (read about Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jackson to see how tenuous our “State” was and how it doesn’t fit in the 4GW theory). States did not magically appear in the present image and will continue to evolve.