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An American failure in Iraq may well be the prelude to a type of conflict that has very rarely been seen, not merely during the last century or few centuries, but during the last fifteen hundred years. Even the World Wars, with their horrifying death tolls and political as well as economic costs, may pale in comparison to the unraveling of the post-World War II international order—possibly the first result of the consistent inability of current American leaders to grasp in a timely fashion what has actually been taking place, not only in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Muslim world generally, but in every arena of global affairs. Like any other war, the American struggle against Islamist extremism is not occurring in a vacuum. Other forces are bearing down on the United States that may fatally erode not only American, but global security and cohesion, aggravating the destructive potential of an expanded Western-Muslim confrontation, and in turn being aggravated by such a widened conflict.

The first of these larger forces is population migration. At the moment, we are witnessing very rare movements of entire communities and even populations throughout the world, nearly all of them driven by the repeated failures of various national economies, as well as by political corruption and religious intolerance. In the Western Hemisphere, for example, the pervasive inefficiency and corruption of governments in nations ranging from Mexico to Argentina—aggravated, as always by the exploitative, even predatory practices of U.S. multinational corporations—is fueling what the news media has termed an “immigration crisis” in America.

The planetary environment, meanwhile, long under assault by agricultural and industrial practices that have been woefully short-sighted and mercenary, is causing physical disasters—ruined harvests, hurricanes and other catastrophic storm systems, mudslides, and wildfires. America has been responsible for much of the atmospheric poisoning that, it is now generally agreed among scientific experts, is seriously and perhaps fatally accelerating those already bizarre shifts in climatic cycles that have contributed so heavily to such natural disasters abroad and at home.

At this moment, when we are challenged by a potentially destabilizing war in the Middle East, population shifts on every continent, and severe environmental deviations throughout the world, it may be time to look for similarly cataclysmic historical moments in global history in order to see if mankind met them any more successfully in the past; or, if it did not, to determine what circumstances might have been changed to effect a happier outcome.

Should the worst-case scenario concerning our Iraq invasion actually materialize; that is, should the entire Middle East become destabilized as increasing parts of the Muslim world are seized by extremist religious regimes, all of whom band together to pursue the forceful establishment of an expansionist Islamic caliphate throughout the world (which was, as most experts who minimize the current Islamist-jihadist threat tend to forget, the goal of the original Muslim armies in the seventh and eighth centuries—a goal they came within one or two decisive battles of achieving), then it would represent a shift in global power and populations such as we have not seen since the fourth and fifth centuries, the era of “The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians,” as the famous early-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish scholar of the period, J. B. Bury, pronounced it.

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