It's Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There

Our world resembles the 1930s more than we might think. Now, as then, the balance of power is shifting ominously. Violent autocracies are seeking expansive empires. Ties between authoritarian states are growing stronger; regional conflicts are becoming interwoven. Democracies are threatened from without and within. The US is, once again, tempted by a doctrine that pursues unilateralism and retrenchment, in the guise of “America First.”

To be sure, the parallels are inexact. The present international system is stronger than the one that crumbled in the 1930s, thanks to the stability American power and US alliances still provide. None of the travails of recent decades — not the global financial crisis, not Covid — has wrought privation and radicalism equivalent to that caused by the Great Depression. For these and other reasons, a catastrophic collapse of global order may seem inconceivable. But to many who lived through the 1930s, it seemed inconceivable that the accumulating pressures of that decade would explode into the peerless horrors that followed.