The Comfort Democracies Confront the Control States

There is such a thing as too much history. Although this may be a strange reflection for a historian who has just finished a world history in a time of European and Middle Eastern war, the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: how people and their families today wish to live. Yet history is a deathless arsenal of stories and facts that teaches us how humans lived and also sometimes how we should live. In our post-religious era—in which, beneath the cloak of secular humanitarianism, righteous religiosity and virtuous crusading remain as potent as ever—history has attained the authority, authenticity and prestige that religion and its prelates once possessed. Politicians deploy its propulsive power to justify their deeds and appetites. And that is why history matters and why it has to be right—or at least, as close to what happened as we historians can manage.The Ukrainian war and the wars that followed October 7 in the Middle East marked the end of an exceptional period: the 70-Year peace, which was divided into two phases, 45 years of Cold War, then 25 of American unipotency. If the first era was like a chess tournament and the second like a game of solitaire, today is like a multiplayer computer game, a tournament of power in which many new smaller and middling contenders compete for power alongside the mega powers, some of them like India on the verge of superpowerdom, others that are suddenly planetary or at least continental players, and a few tiny but rich enough to deport themselves like mini-empires. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was not a new way of exerting and expanding power. Its flint-hearted ferocity was a return to what the dynasts of the past—warlords, kings, and dictators—would find routine. Normal disorder has resumed, but in a new realm of kinetic speed and inexorable interconnectivity that I call the Ultraworld. And there is no laboratory of technical inge