The Collapse of the Post-War Order and the Birth of a European Civilization
There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place. ...