Actually, I see the world moving to a form of détente. Cheap, effective, easily imitated asymmetric tactics like IEDs make it difficult and expensive for us to invade other countries. Our conventional superiority makes it cheap and easy for us to break stuff they need: bridges, parliament buildings, generating stations, airports, the leader's family, etc.

The two main problems are that some of the bad guys have no interest in self preservation and a lot of people on our side want destruction instead of being content with containment.