The Question of Naming

History has a way of naming things only after they have concluded. We look back at 1914 and 1939 as definitive starting points, but as we discuss in the latest Explaining History podcast, those living through the current conflagrations in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela are left wondering: are we already in the midst of a global conflict? And if so, at what point do we give it a name?

The historian Richard Overy, in his seminal work Blood and Ruins, suggests that the two World Wars might be viewed as a single, continuous struggle of imperial powers with a nineteen-year “quasi-peace” in between. If we adopt this broader lens, our current era of “unrelenting conflict” looks less like a series of isolated incidents and more like a violent transition from one world order to another. For those in the Global SouthGlobal South Full Description:The Global South is a term that has largely replaced “Third World” to describe the nations of Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. It is less a geographical designator (as it includes countries in the northern hemisphere) and more a political grouping of nations that share a history of colonialism, economic marginalization, and a peripheral position in the world financial system. Bandung is often cited as the birth of the Global South as a self-aware political consciousness. Critical Perspective:While the term implies solidarity, critics argue it acts as a “flattening” concept. It lumps together economic superpowers like China and India with some of the world’s poorest nations, obscuring the vast power imbalances and divergent interests within this bloc. It risks creating a binary worldview that ignores the internal class exploitations within developing nations by focusing solely on their external exploitation by the North.
Read more, where conflict has been a near-constant reality since 1945, the Western debate over whether a “World War” has begun might seem like an academic indulgence. To much of the world, the war never truly stopped.

The American Imperium: From Production to Financialization

To understand where we are going, we must understand the “Economic Imperium” America built after 1945. Emerging from the Bretton Woods conference, the United States envisioned a world of nation-states that would serve as the building blocks for American capital. This was a world where European tariff walls were dismantled, and new nations provided cheap resources and labor for American corporate power.

However, the America of today is not the America of the 1950s. It is no longer the nation of Eisenhower’s highways, the futurist expositions of Levittown, or the industrial “arsenal of democracy.” Decades of outsourcing, financialization, and the prioritization of Wall Street over Main Street have hollowed out the American manufacturing base.

As Nick Shepley notes, this has created a paradox: while America remains a superpower, it suffers from relative decline. Like post-war Britain, which remained a top-five economy while its living standards for the working class stagnated, the U.S. is grappling with a “hollowing out” of its social and industrial fabric. This decline limits its ability to wage long, conventional wars. The philosophy that the state can manage and regulate capital—a lesson learned from the Great DepressionGreat Depression The global economic collapse that began with the US stock market crash of October 1929 and deepened through bank failures, trade collapse, and mass unemployment to produce the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century. By 1932, a quarter of American workers were unemployed; industrial production had fallen by half. The Great Depression began not with a single event but with a series of interconnected collapses. The October 1929 stock market crash wiped out speculative fortunes but would not, alone, have produced a decade-long depression; the depression was deepened by bank failures that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans, by the Federal Reserve’s contractionary monetary policy that reduced the money supply, by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 that triggered retaliatory trade barriers worldwide, and by the gold standard constraints that prevented governments from expanding their monetary supplies in response to the crisis. By 1932–33, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, industrial production had fallen by fifty percent, and the banking system had effectively ceased to function. The international dimension was crucial: Germany’s reparations obligations and war debt structure, financed by American loans, made the German economy uniquely vulnerable to the credit contraction. The Depression contributed directly to Hitler’s electoral rise — the Nazi Party gained over 37% of the vote in July 1932 in conditions of mass unemployment and national humiliation. The policy responses — Roosevelt’s New Deal, Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard, the various autarkic nationalisms of the 1930s — produced partial recovery in some countries while deepening the crisis in others. Full recovery required the Second World War’s military spending to restore full employment. The Great Depression was not a natural disaster but a political-economic failure: decisions made by governments, central banks, and financial institutions that could have been made differently. Keynes’s analysis — that the depression reflected a collapse of effective demand that markets could not self-correct without government intervention — was substantially correct, but politically unacceptable to the orthodoxies of the 1930s. The lasting significance of the Depression is not economic but political: it demonstrated that sustained mass unemployment was politically uncontainable, that democracies unable to provide economic security were vulnerable to authoritarian alternatives, and that the international economic system required political management that pure market mechanisms could not supply. The post-war Bretton Woods system — managed exchange rates, capital controls, the IMF and World Bank — was designed precisely to prevent a recurrence by building the international economic management mechanisms that had been absent in the 1930s.—has been systematically dismantled by neoliberal think tanks, leaving the state ill-equipped to handle the current crisis.

The Rise of a New Challenger

While America moved away from state-managed capital, China moved toward it. In an ironic twist of history, the Chinese Communist Party has perhaps learned more from Franklin D. Roosevelt than from Chairman Mao. China has transitioned from being a “handy sweatshop” for global capital to a serious, strategic, state-led economic power.

By the Obama era, the “Pivot to Asia” signaled that the U.S. had finally recognized China not as a tool for extraction, but as a rival for hegemony. China’s version of five-year planning has not eliminated private capital but has subsumed it into national missions. This strategic containmentContainment The US foreign policy doctrine articulated by diplomat George Kennan in 1946–47, holding that Soviet expansion should be blocked at every point rather than directly confronted. It defined American grand strategy throughout the Cold War. The doctrine of containment emerged from Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ of February 1946 and his anonymous ‘X Article’ in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, which argued that Soviet expansion was not driven by genuine security needs but by ideological imperatives — that the Soviet state required external enemies to justify its domestic repression, and that it would expand wherever it found a vacuum of power. The policy response was not war but patient, firm resistance at every point of Soviet pressure: economic aid to rebuilding Western Europe (the Marshall Plan), military guarantees to countries facing communist insurgencies (the Truman Doctrine), alliance systems (NATO), and the forward deployment of American military power. Containment as Kennan conceived it was primarily political and economic; as implemented, it became heavily militarised — a drift that Kennan himself criticised throughout his long life. The doctrine was applied, with varying degrees of consistency, in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, and dozens of other theatres, sometimes protecting genuine democracies against genuine Soviet-backed subversion, sometimes overthrowing democratic governments that Washington decided were insufficiently anti-communist. Containment’s central ambiguity was whether it was a defensive strategy or an offensive one in disguise. Kennan argued it was defensive — preventing Soviet expansion, not threatening Soviet territory. Critics on the left argued that ‘containment’ was often a codeword for maintaining American dominance over the developing world regardless of whether Soviet influence was actually present. The interventions it was used to justify — Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam — were not all responses to Soviet expansion; several were responses to nationalist movements that threatened American economic interests. Kennan spent decades arguing that the militarised version of containment he had supposedly invented was a betrayal of his original concept. The doctrine achieved its stated purpose — the Soviet Union collapsed without a direct superpower war — but at a cost measured in the democratic governments destroyed and the civil wars fuelled in the name of fighting communism.—vying for control over the “flows” of resources—is the subtext of modern conflicts. The pressure points in Venezuela and Iran are not just about local regime change; they are about “pinching off” oil supplies to the Chinese engine.

The Proxy Wars and the Limits of Power

We are currently in a period of “aggressive great power competition.” While the presence of nuclear weapons prevents Russia, China, and the U.S. from confronting one another directly, the friction manifests at the edges of their spheres of influence.

The instability we see today echoes the Balkans in 1914. Just as the dying Ottoman EmpireOttoman Empire ottoman-empire The Islamic empire centred on Istanbul that ruled Anatolia, the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe from the fourteenth century to its dissolution after the First World War. Its collapse created the modern states of the Middle East, Turkey, and the Balkans in ways that continue to shape regional politics. At its peak in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire encompassed an enormous territory from Hungary to Yemen, from Algeria to the borders of Persia. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state governed through the millet system, which granted non-Muslim communities (Christians, Jews) significant autonomy in their internal affairs in exchange for taxes and political loyalty. The nineteenth century brought simultaneous challenges: nationalist movements among the Balkan populations — Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians — used the language of national self-determination to carve independent states from Ottoman territory, with Russian and Western support; the empire lost more than a third of its European territory in the 1877–78 war with Russia. Attempts at modernisation and reform — the Tanzimat reforms, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 — failed to arrest the decline and produced new tensions between Turkish nationalist modernisers and the empire’s Arab, Armenian, and Kurdish populations. The First World War was catastrophic: the empire entered on the German side, suffered the Armenian Genocide (1915–23), lost the Arab provinces to British-led forces, and was dissolved by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) — replaced by the Turkish Republic under Ataturk, whose territorial integrity was established by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). The Ottoman Empire’s collapse created the modern Middle East in ways that are still unfolding. The borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent mandates reflected French and British strategic priorities rather than the population distributions, administrative traditions, or political aspirations of the peoples concerned. The result was a set of states whose internal social compositions were incompatible with the nation-state model imposed on them: Iraq with its Sunni-Shia-Kurdish divisions, Lebanon with its confessional arithmetic, Syria with its minority-dominated military, Israel-Palestine with its overlapping claims. These incompatibilities were not caused by the Ottoman Empire — which governed diverse populations through systems of autonomous administration — but by the particular form of its destruction and replacement. The ongoing instability of the region reflects, in significant part, the unresolved consequences of those decisions made in London and Paris between 1916 and 1920. and the rivalries between the Habsburgs and Romanovs created a tinderbox in Eastern Europe, the relative decline of the American “unipower” hegemony has created a vacuum.

The current political landscape in the U.S. adds a layer of unpredictability. The squandering of American “soft power” and the realization that there are clear limits to American “hard power” have forced client states—such as South Korea—to reconsider the “bargains” they made for protection. If the U.S. is stripping missile defenses from faithful allies to plug holes elsewhere, the message is clear: the hegemon is overstretched.

Looking Toward a “Great Power Settlement”

What follows this era of chaos? History suggests that such periods of violence continue until a “generational great power settlement” is reached—a moment where the primary players (the U.S., China, and Russia) come to a mutual understanding of their respective spheres of influence.

However, such a settlement requires a leadership that recognizes the reality of a multipolar world. It requires an American president who appreciates the limits of economic, hard, and soft power. Britain is still on the journey of embracing its “diminished status” decades after the fall of its empire; it may take a generation or more for American culture to do the same.

We may not have a name for the current era yet. We may call it a “New Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other.,” a “Global Transition,” or eventually, “World War III.” But regardless of the label, the reality is a world of rival power blocks competing for a shrinking pool of resources. For now, we are in the “musings” phase of history—watching the wind and waiting to see which way the next storm blows.