I’m not sure I entirely agree with this — states are still pretty important, for example and Jihadism is a bit more modern than some claim — but I am a sucker for anything which blames our current plight on pre-1914 stuff:

Nobody in the mainstream wants to think about the fact that al Queda, Hezboullah, Fatah, etc. are non-state actors, and thus none of the 20th century analogies fit. You have to go back to the time before the Peace of Westphalia to find paradigms that involve nonstate actors. Since that leads to thinking about the 30 Years War, the Hundred Years War, the medieval era (favorite kick-toy of liberals for generations) and, yes, the Crusades…it’s not a happy thing. But that’s what we face. The Peace of Westphalia is likely breaking down, because it was a treaty signed between Christian powers all of whom had certain cultural artifacts in common….and those cultural artifacts are not universals, no matter how hard we try to pretend. Islamic countries are not going to accept the notion that if the King is a Shia, then all the people are Shia, if the King is an Alawhite, then all the people are Alawhite, and so forth, because the Koran tells them so. So someone has sent up the bomb! All your analogies are useless against the tide of reality, and the sooner we start reading the real history of Moslem expansion (“Islam expanded across North Africa” sure does leave out a lot of blood, y’know) the sooner we’ll come to grips with the world as it is, rather than as we wish it to be. Looking at the Euroweenies whose elites refuse to admit that anything is really wrong with majority-Moslem cities, it’s clear what price will be paid by those that refuse to learn from history. Or is it?