Security

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. ...

There is a comforting boundary that most Europeans have drawn around this war, and it runs along Ukraine’s borders. On one side, they tell themselves, is the killing field — terrible, but contained, a tragedy happening to someone else, in a country that is not in the alliance and therefore not quite the alliance’s problem. On the other side is Europe proper, safe beneath the umbrella, protected by the most powerful military pact in history and by the four words every schoolchild can recite: an attack on one is an attack on all. It is a soothing geography. It is also a fiction, and the people who govern Russia have been saying so out loud, on television and from official podiums, for some time now. The war was never only about Ukraine. Ukraine is the front line of something larger, and the comfortable assumption that the danger stops at a particular river is the most dangerous assumption Europe currently holds. ...