For the past 50 years, the lives, careers and outlook on world affairs of the world's leaders were forged by the cataclysm of World War II.
But that time is over. Those leaders are dead, dying, retiring or writing their memoirs.And what comes next may surprise and alarm many Americans.
"The war," to those world leaders, meant World War II. For them, it was a "good war."
For one of them, Ronald Reagan, the war was so pivotal he convinced himself he fought in it, when all he really did was make war movies while in uniform.
The war turned George Bush from a cocky 18-year-old into a hero who saw his duty and did it. For Bush, 40 years later, the Persian Gulf War was an extension - a victory of good over evil.
Not any more. Today's world leaders don't want to fight wars unless they start them.
Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, was born after World War II. He is the first president with no personal memories of the war. Everything he knows about the war came from books or others' ruminations.
Even as he has presided over the 50-year commemorations of the end of the war, he has put his international focus almost entirely on trade and economic growth.
The impatience of Clinton and others of his generation with some of the traditions - and old international strictures - has been striking. Even one of the war's most promising legacies, the hope that the United Nations would be a way to end war, has turned to dust.
Americans would have one more president who fought in World War II if Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., wins in 1996.
But Dole's age - 72 - is already being used against him by some who worry that the experience and insights chiseled into him during the war might be offset by physical or mental impairments down the road.
In truth, if Dole wins, he would have no other leaders with whom to share a collective bond of personal memory of the horrors of the war. That opportunity is gone forever.
The new French president, socialist Jacques Chirac, wasn't even a teenager when the war in Europe ended. He is not bound by the complex loyalties and gratitude to the United States that even his predecessor, the dour Francois Mitterrand, bore deep in his psyche.
The likely next prime minister of Japan, Ryutaro Hashimoto, who is currently trade minister, has no deep ties. Born after World War II, he already has shown that Japan's post-war friendship for America is not important to him out of sentiment. He and his friends in government are interested far more in the economic value it brings.
Britain's prime minister, John Major, was born in 1943. He and Clinton are of the same generation but they share little else, especially not the memories of the war's hardships that bonded previous U.S.-British leaders.
Major and Clinton, who don't even seem to like each other, have had a rocky relationship. Both say privately that the long-vaunted "special relationship" between Great Britain and the United States has become an affair of pragmatism.
German president Helmut Kohl remembers the war only from a teenager's vantage point. His mettle was forged in the Cold War.
While Kohl brilliantly maneuvered the reunification of Germany, he has had an increasingly hard time reminding many of his countrymen why the Nazis were so hated and feared, and why Germany has depended on the United States and its military might to keep the peace in Europe.
Kohl's memory failed him and he forgot how divided Europe was before World Wars I and II. He urged recognition of Bosnia as a new country dominated by Muslims and Croats, not Serbs, and unwarily helped create the current chaos in the Balkans.
World War I was ignited by a spark in Sarajevo. The same city now symbolizes the worst security dilemma facing Europe in the 1990s.
For 50 years, global politics has been dominated by men shaped by their past and looking to that past for guidance.
Now, with electronic banking that can alter economies around the globe in a twinkling, and fax transmissions from cell phones that can link remote regions of China to Manhattan, the new world leaders must be more forward-looking.
Economic prosperity not hobbled by huge debt will be the goal for all industrialized consumerist nations; not all will make it.
As America turns inward, other nations will rely less on its military power. Trade will replace powerful armies as the muscle of preference.
America's stature as a superpower may decline as personality and friendships count for less as leaders with MBAs, not helmets, in their closets, jockey for position.
The trend is clear. Political leaders think less and less in terms of the lessons of past civilizations and more and more in terms of trade agreements, technology and mergers.
New leaders will make mistakes if they assume, as did Kohl and his people, that the ethnic, religious and cultural animosities of the past can be ignored. Power politics and nationalism have not been wiped out.
But the next generation of leaders will be free to forge new alliances without the prejudices and traditions of the past.
The disparity between rich and poor nations will be the new challenge and the new source of immense anger and frustration. For that the lessons of the past may not be good enough for the new millennium.
The big question for Americans is whether the next century will also belong to them or whether the torch will pass to hands in Europe and Asia.