"The splitting-up of the world into three great superstates was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three superstates are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries of the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination of another, these three superstates are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annhilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting, and are not divided by any genuine idealogical difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal by the enemy, meritorious. But in the physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or the rount floating fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centers of civilization war means no more than a continuous crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has infact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which was is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great war of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon."
-George Orwell, 1984
I think this passage sums up what could become of war, when land and territory becomes trivial.
