After 2020, an Era of Global Harmony — or a New Dark Age?

By most standards, 2020 has been an awful year, visiting death and disruption on societies around the globe. But if it has been undeniably challenging in real time, how might it appear to historians looking back, a half-century from now?

That’s hard to say, of course, given that how we view any historical event depends significantly on the choices that people made afterward. We would remember World War II much differently, for example, had America simply retreated from the world after that conflict ended, rather than engaging tirelessly to shape the postwar global order. Yet 2020 is sure to loom large in future efforts to trace the arc of the 21st century — perhaps as the year that the American-led global order began to buckle, or perhaps as the year that gave it new life.