Our unraveling world is history repeating itself 

As I watch aghast at horrific acts of terror in Moscow, cruel violence in Gaza and Ukraine and the surge in wars and crises across the globe, I am reminded of the remark by historian Will Durant: 

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”   

It is not just the seemingly hapless, vicarious U.S. entanglements in Gaza and Ukraine that continue to elude 24/7 efforts to wind down and resolve. Nor is it just the wave of conflicts across a belt from West to East Africa, in Nagorno-Karabakh or Serbian rumblings in the Baltics. And it’s not just the unsettling economic nationalism and growing protectionism that led the International Monetary Fund to warn of “geoeconomic fragmentation.”   

Rather, it’s the combined effect of all of them, dubbed a polycrisis: the simultaneous occurrence of calamities cascading against each other to compound the effects (Ukraine, food shortages, climate change) of disasters. Together this amalgam illuminates the most uncertain and conflict-riven period since World War II, the specter of a world spinning out of control. 

But don’t take my word for it. In their annual global threat assessment last month, the intelligence community (IC) spelled it out in 41 pages of mind-numbing detail. Their bottom line:  

“The United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications.” 

The IC report elaborated on what U.S. policymakers face: “Regional and localized conflicts and instability … will demand U.S. attention as states and non-state actors struggle in this evolving global order, including over major power competition and shared transnational challenges.” 

A line attributed to Mark Twain advises, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Unfortunately, when you look at the trends of great power competition, tariff wars and weaponized interdependence for national advantage, it’s hard to avoid seeing the resemblance to the 1930s, as a recent essay in Foreign Affairs persuasively argued. 

An echo of the past is evident in the two gradually solidifying blocs — the U.S. and its European and Asian allies on the one hand, and Sino-Russan-Eurasian entente on the other, the ratcheting friction playing out in Ukraine and the Taiwan strait.  

Similarly, in the economic realm, the U.S.-China tariff wars, sanctions and other tools of economic coercion by competing powers are still far from having an impact like the Smoot-Hawley Act, which, like the 1929 bank collapse, helped usher in the 1930s Great Depression. The institutions and rules are fraying, and trade growth has slowed and is becoming more geopolitically driven, but not collapsing. 

However, the IMF is concerned that if these trends intensify, they could reduce global economic growth by up to 7 percent over the long term. And as occurred in the 1930s, economic precarity tends to make the world more prone to conflict. 

Perhaps most troubling is that there seems to be a historical amnesia in both the geopolitical and economic realms. Looking at U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan, for example, the lessons of the Cold War seem forgotten. 

How? One huge difference between today and the 1930s is the existential risk of nuclear weapons. The Taiwan predicament brings to mind the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; when the U.S. and USSR narrowly averted catastrophe. Recent studies of the watershed event, enriched by the opening of U.S. and Soviet archives, suggest both Kennedy and Kruschev were terrified of starting a nuclear conflagration.  

Yet in the U.S. and China’s current mutual demonization, constraints of potential nuclear destruction seem absent in the heated rhetoric over Taiwan. Both nations sometimes seem to have a sense of inevitability and eagerness to prepare for war. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of several seminal events that led the U.S. and USSR to gradually realize that their vulnerabilities required some restraint, a means to manage strategic competition. That led to an architecture of arms control to limit the arms race.  

But as the resurgence of great power rivalry with Russia and China has accelerated, the entire edifice of arms control has unraveled. The last remaining vestige, the New START agreement limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, expires in 2026, but Putin has announced Moscow is suspending its participation in the treaty. The U.S. has no nuclear agreements with China. Yet all three major powers are modernizing and expanding their arsenals. 

Perhaps Mark Twain was on to something. Some historians, like Peter Turchin, see recurring cycles of history in the discord of our times, rise and falls, integration and disintegration. While they allow that nothing is inevitable — humans have agency — the trends described herein are troubling.  

Looking back at the 1930s and the conflicts that followed, the lessons of history seem obvious. Can proactive diplomacy find a balance of power, a framework to manage a competitive coexistence with China? Can the institutions of the post-WWII order — the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization — be reformed and updated to meet current challenges? 

Both are possible. But history suggests that learning from it tends to be the exception, not the norm. 

Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. He previously served as senior counselor to the undersecretary of State for global affairs, as a member of the U.S. secretary of state’s policy planning staff and on the National Intelligence Council Strategic Futures Group. Follow him on X/Twitter @Rmanning4.