Although no longer the site of surrogate competition between rival political-economic systems, the "Third World" is the main focus of instability in the post-Cold War world. Wars of secession, bloody ethnic conflicts, chaotic violence in failing states, domestic and international terrorism, essentially criminal insurgencies with no political objective - all are flourishing wherever "world peace" has left a vacuum. In Distant Thunder, Donald M. Snow traces the dynamics of disorder in the new international environment and the ways in which U.S. policy will need to adapt to new realities.