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If it is to be supplanted, it will have to be by the only competing model of state organization - the Information state. The information state is, both positively and negatively - challenging the Energy state. The Information state's weapons - both social and military - are spreading rapidly. The information state's tools are used by both technologists and terrorists. Each shows, as the Merchant-Nationalist state did - that while it cannot beat the mightier, older states - it can frustrate them, that it does not have their heavy overhead and expenses. AlQaeda is an information state in the purest sense - it is the world's most powerful "micronation" - bound together only by information. But the United States, as pointed out, has been gradually becoming an information state itself: the atomic bomb is the signature weapon of the information state, and the use of the media and the bureaucracy are information systems. However, it has not been realized - even as we live through the "information revolution" what an information state looks like
I urge everyone to read Bobbit's book - it is still the only finished book in English that deals with the transition we are in. One can't ask everything. However, the caveat outlined here still stands: the Market state is dying, because states can no longer control their own market, and the global market place is built on a house of oil. Oil is the basis of our currency system as much as gold was in 1900. What reigns now is the energy state, and it stands at its pinnacle - ruling the entire world with its energy currency and its means to power.
However, like all poor state eras, while it is basically peaceful, the anger of unfufilled dreams is underneath it. The Market State came into being, to no small extent, because coal gave it a means to connect great distances, and it exploited that power ruthlessly. Industrialization's great rise of the 19th century can be called "the coal age" as coal provided light, chemicals, power and transportation. Either the energy state will have to fight increasingly bitter wars over oil - or it will have to find a more limitless source of energy - or it will have to shift its basis to an information state.
There is no fourth alternative.
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