Italian investigative reporter Giulietto Chiesa's latest book is anything but comforting. Yet, in an age of facile response to difficult questions, "La guerra infinita" is a welcome relief from the run of the mill publishing events designed to attract the greatest amount of attention to the least amount of thought. Chiesa's central question is rather simple: What do the events of September 11th and the war that has followed tell us about the nature of the new world-order ? His answer is a great deal more complex: ambitious in scope and chilling in its logic. Chiesa sees America's self-elected role in the post-September 11th world as one of empire (or as he sees it - Empire), intent on influencing the course of international events through its control of the liquid nature of international capital, and its essentially corporate control of mass media. What differentiates the present strategy from that of the Cold War is the lack of a competing empire. With some measure of a Chinese détente largely achieved, and Russia rapidly disintegrating, competing ideologies are now mobile and local to an unprecedented extent. Chiesa, however, sees American fear of China, and Washington's prediction that the year 2017 will see "the Sleeping Dragon" reawaken to become America's only competitor for world influence, as the central thesis behind its present declaration of "infinite war". Highly researched, well documented and unconventionally straightforward, "La guerra infinita" offers an important, though disturbing, vision of current international events.