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Although both have never enjoyed greater security from foreign powers than they do today - Russia from its traditional enemies to the west, China from its traditional enemy in the east - they are dissatisfied with the current global configuration of power. For the moment, he seems not to have thought much about the future ramifications of his rhetoric and his actions.Ĭhina and Russia are classic revisionist powers. Whether the president is ready for such a confrontation is entirely unclear. The further accommodation of Russia can only embolden Vladimir Putin, and the tough talk with China will likely lead Beijing to test the new administration’s resolve militarily. Are we three years away from a global crisis, or 15? That we are somewhere on that path, however, is unmistakable.Īnd while it is too soon to know what effect Donald Trump’s presidency will have on these trends, early signs suggest that the new administration is more likely to hasten us toward crisis than slow or reverse these trends. Where exactly we are in this classic scenario today, how close the trend lines are to that intersection point is, as always, impossible to know. The apparent calm of the postwar 1920s became the crisis-ridden 1930s and then another world war.

The most devastating war in history came four years later. In the first decade of the 20th century, the world’s smartest minds predicted an end to great-power conflict as revolutions in communication and transportation knit economies and people closer together. The late 18th century was the high point of the Enlightenment in Europe, before the continent fell suddenly into the abyss of the Napoleonic Wars. History shows that world orders do collapse, however, and when they do it is often unexpected, rapid, and violent. The cost of that descent, in lives and treasure, in lost freedoms and lost hope, will be staggering.Īmericans tend to take the fundamental stability of the international order for granted, even while complaining about the burden the United States carries in preserving that stability. As those two lines move closer, as the declining will and capacity of the United States and its allies to maintain the present world order meet the increasing desire and capacity of the revisionist powers to change it, we will reach the moment at which the existing order collapses and the world descends into a phase of brutal anarchy, as it has three times in the past two centuries. The other is the declining confidence, capacity, and will of the democratic world, and especially of the United States, to maintain the dominant position it has held in the international system since 1945. One is the increasing ambition and activism of the two great revisionist powers, Russia and China. Think of two significant trend lines in the world today.