冷战以后世界上仅有一个超级大国，势力均衡因此也就不存在了。这种状况是否会持续很久呢?答案取决于你是乐观主义者，还是悲观主义者。还取决于强权政治是否会被纳入受全球单一文化观念影响的某种立宪制世界秩序中。 不过，在可预见的未来，第三次世界大战似乎不太可

下面你将听到的是一段有关国际局势的讲话。
    In the wake of the Cold War, the world has experienced a time when there is only one superpower and therefore, no balance of power. Will this situation persist for a long time? Well, the answer to that depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, and on the possibility of subsuming power politics within a constitutional world order shaped by the mono-cultural global ideology.
    For the foreseeable future, though, a third world war seems unlikely; because there is no major ideological fracture severe enough to sustain it. War itself won’t disappear, and occasional regional armed conflicts flare up.
    Though a world war is less likely for the present, I worry about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and lethal bio-chemical arms. It is terrifying to see the way that power is increasingly disseminated to small, completely ruthless groups like terrorists, drug traffickers and local warlords. The great imponderable is that some nuts could create a nuclear explosion, or that some essentially local conflict could escalate out of control. The huge economic imbalance in the world will also result in serious disasters. The fact that the richest 20 percent have 86 percent of global GDP, and the 20 poorest countries only 1 percent constitutes a destabilizing factor that will harm world peace.
    There are people who anticipate a more progressive path, sometimes called "the new medievalism", in which the relentless advance of information technology results in the demise of the state as we know it. The idea is that global communications will simultaneously empower individuals to create transnational virtual communities and make it more difficult for governments to control their populations. The result will be a new political landscape with overlapping jurisdictions in place of territorial states with distinct jurisdictions.
    Again, I’m skeptical myself. We can’t ultimately exist as virtual communities; we all have to live somewhere and pay our taxes. The resurgence of nationalism argues against this model in any case. In the first half of the 20th century many believed that nationalism would give way to a world organized on liberal principles; some even believed in world government. But today the pressure is in the opposite direction, towards ethnic separatism at an accelerating speed.
    Since the end of the Cold War, much of the attention focused on nuclear and strategic issues has drained away to a dangerous extent in fact. Weapons of mass destruction have increased, and the international political and military balance has now been seriously undermined by the nuclear tests in countries and regions that have lost grip on them.
    A stronger and more efficient United Nations that allows for diversified values, therefore, has been asked for to maintain a check-and-balance pattern of the world political structure.
    As regards the balance of power in the future, well, the one thing that we can be sure about is that our job is not to predict the future but to improve the .understanding of this diversified world we live in. On that front at least, we’re optimistic about improvement and progress .