In his 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation, former U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson confessed the difficulty of navigating the shift from one historical paradigm to another—in his case, from cooperation with the Soviet Union during W.W. II to the onset of the Cold War. “The significance of events was shrouded in ambiguity,” he wrote. “We groped after interpretations of them, sometimes reversed lines of action based on earlier views, and hesitated long before grasping what now seems obvious.”
It’s clear that we’re living through a similar transition today. Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has ignited a land war in Europe of a scale not seen since 1945, while economic and military tensions with Xi Jinping’s China have accelerated dramatically and risk spiraling into conflict. Zooming out, state-to-state conflicts are at their highest level since the end of the Cold War, and total conflicts are at their highest since the end of W.W. II. Recognizing that history is again underway, President Biden declared in 2022 that “the post-Cold War Era is definitively over.”
