War (the Red Horse);
Despite Mr Bush's best efforts, there is not a real threat of global war at this time. The major players are either cooperating with each other or chuckling down their sleeves at us. The usual troubles in the MidEast are no worse than the normal state of affairs and a good deal more stable on most fronts than they have been frequently in the past. The only real eyesore there is Iraq, which was an utterly optional war and which shows every sign of being an isolated case. In fact, the seeds of a stable (but probably divided) Iraq are already in place. Their chaos is exceptional, not contagious. Even Israel and Hezbollah can't maintain their boners for longer than a couple of months. The next phase of their war will be fought over who can build the most houses for the people they fought around.
Revelations talks about world-wide war, but the big guys (China, Iran, Russia, Nato) are not in geostrategic conflict -- the prospect is actually for increasing cooperation among the great powers. Once America has an adult in the White House again, we'll be on that same team too. The second string powers of India and Pakistan have a serious beef, obviously, but there too their prevailing track is toward negotiation and cautious suppressing by each side of their own homegrown extremists. Much as I loathe post-Kirk Star Trek shows, their vision of a mostly peaceful earth a century from now is a pretty safe bet.
Famine (the Black Horse);
World food production is up all around the world. The only places where famine is a trouble is the corners of the earth where severe overpopulation is forcing the crisis. That's bad news, but essentially isolated in nature and the result of a lack of death, not the victory of death over human civilization.
Pestilence (the Pale Horse);
The major epidemic diseases of the past are known, licked, and/or isolated. New and improved treatments for today's killers like cancer, aids, and heart disease emerge every year -- and really, isn't heart disease as cause of death reallly just nature's last gasp complaint of "come on, people, you gotta die of something eventually!"
and Death (the White Horse);
The world population is growing (to the point now of growing too much), people are overall healthier than they've ever been in world history, and they live longer than they have in the past. In fact, the scientific victory over the major population controls of human history are main reason we have overpopulation today.
Next time you hear some worried fundy quivering about Jesus & the Antichrist coming back to duke it out, take a moment to reminde them, gently, that they're being silly asses and that someone is getting rich trying to scare them with misleading facts. A sane, sustainable, and cautious peace is not just attainable, but probably a historial inevitability (assuming monkeyface and his PNAC choir don't do something stoopid in their last two years of wallowing in the pork barrel). None of the four Horsemen represents a world-changing
The only downside to all this is that, with the Rapture not happening well beyond the foreseeable future, that awesome Beemer my fundy neighbor drives will never be mine.