Preparing for War
The social and political order that prevailed from the 1960s through to the end of the twentieth century was always going to break down. It rested on an historically exceptional configuration of power, one that was never sustainable. What many people mistook for a stable - almost natural - world order was in fact a temporary suspension of normal history.
For most of the twentieth century, China was effectively supine. Its economy was crippled by catastrophic policy choices, and it lacked the institutional and technological capacity to project power beyond its borders. Russia, meanwhile, stagnated, then collapsed outright at the end of the century, losing not just ideological coherence but its imperial structure. Europe emerged from the Second World War exhausted and strategically neutered.
The result was the American century: a brief period of uncontested global hegemony. The United States became the organising centre of the world system, militarily dominant, technologically pre-eminent, and economically indispensable. Europe was folded into this system as a subordinate but useful adjunct: politically compliant after the destruction of the Reich, economically productive, and strategically dependent. The so-called Pax Americana was not a peace between equals but an order held together by overwhelming asymmetry.
What later came to be described as the “rules-based order” was essentially a protocol for managing economic and political interactions under conditions of American dominance. It was never a neutral or universal framework. It worked because there were no peer competitors capable of challenging the United States at scale. That was its hidden precondition.
This situation was never going to last. Once China abandoned ideological economics and adopted policies aligned with growth, capital accumulation, and technological development, its rise to peer-competitor status was close to inevitable. A civilisation with 1.3 billion people, deep historical continuity, technological competence, and a disciplined state apparatus was always going to reassert itself once the self-inflicted constraints were removed. That point has now been reached.
Russia’s trajectory was different but equally predictable. Once the post-Soviet collapse stabilised and a degree of economic recovery occurred, Russia was bound to attempt to reassert control over what it regards as its historical sphere. Empires do not forget themselves easily. Revanchism was not an aberration; it was the default setting once weakness gave way to capacity.
We are therefore no longer living in a post-historical world. We are reverting to normal history: great powers competing over security, territory, resources, and strategic depth. The anomaly was the late twentieth century, not the present.
The United States appears to have internalised this paradigm shift. America no longer assumes it can manage the entire world. It is increasingly concerned with its own survival as a great power in a multipolar system. From this perspective it is “girding for war” in the classical sense: securing the homeland, consolidating its strategic perimeter, and prioritising its responses to existential threats. The renewed focus on the continental United States, on the Arctic, and on hemispheric security reads less like paranoia than a return to strategic realism: walls and moats rebuilt because the landscape has changed.
At the same time, America’s overriding geopolitical objective is to prevent the formation of a unified Sino-Russian bloc. A coordinated challenge from two continental powers would be genuinely dangerous. Decoupling Russia from China is therefore a higher priority for Washington than preventing Russian consolidation in parts of Eastern Europe. In this hierarchy of threats, European territorial disputes become secondary.
There is also a logical pressure built into Russia’s own position. If Russia succeeds - to its own satisfaction - in securing its western borders and reasserting control over its near abroad, it should then look east with a cold jolt of recognition. The real demographic and economic mass on Russia’s frontier is not Poland or the Baltics but China: 1.3 billion people, an industrial colossus, sitting beside a vast, thinly populated Siberia rich in resources. A Russia that has “won” in the west may find itself newly and seriously exposed in the east, and the spectre of that imbalance should haunt any serious Russian strategist. From Washington’s point of view, the potential is obvious: that Moscow, once it has banked its western gains, will begin to fear its dependency on Beijing more than it fears Europe, or American power.
This helps explain the apparent oscillation in American policy over Ukraine. What looks like incoherence is better understood as tactical manoeuvring in service of a larger strategic goal: preventing Russia from becoming a permanent junior partner to China. From an American point of view, it is brutal arithmetic rather than moral theatre.
Europe, by contrast, has failed to adapt. European elites remain ideologically invested in the idea that the rules-based order is a natural and permanent state of affairs, akin to the laws of physics rather than a contingent outcome of power relations. They remain nostalgic for a world in which free trade, moral suasion, and multilateral institutions function - quietly underwritten by implicit American supremacy. America no longer believes in that vanishing world. Europe still does.
This mismatch explains much of the current confusion. European elites tend to interpret Trump as a personal aberration rather than as a symptom of a deeper structural shift. In reality, Trump is better understood as a battering ram: an instrument used by sections of the American establishment to smash through internal resistance, entrenched interests, and outdated commitments that no longer serve a threatened national survival. When existing elite networks are too powerful to be reformed from within, they have to be broken. Disruption is not a bug of this process; it is its mechanism.
European leaders, however, lack both the clarity and the courage to articulate the new reality to their populations. To do so would require admitting that Europe is militarily weak, strategically fragmented, and dangerously exposed. It would mean acknowledging that the long holiday from history is over, and that hard choices lie ahead. They also know that telling the truth would demand radical domestic disruption - and they do not see, at present, the social forces that would support such a transformation. Absent that support, honesty on the part of any serious politician becomes politically suicidal.
Yet Europe’s strategic choice should not be mystified or glossed over. In a global power struggle between America, China, and Russia, it would be folly for Europe to imagine it can float above the fray. If Europe wishes to retain its economic model, its civil liberties, and the broad civilisational inheritance it claims to value, then it must side with America. Not because America is saintly, but because the alternatives are worse: a Chinese-led order in which Europe would become a subject civilisation of the Middle Kingdom, permitted to trade and to remember its past, but expected to kowtow on issues of strategic importance; or a Russian sphere of influence that treats smaller nations as resources for its oligarchy and its Imperial state. If Europe will not defend its own autonomy and values, it will not keep them.
Most likely Europe instead drifts - clinging to an expired paradigm while the strategic environment hardens around it. Unless something forces a reckoning, Europe is likely to remain a strategic basket case for the next decade or two: increasingly irrelevant, increasingly vulnerable, and increasingly the victim of decisions made elsewhere .
History has a habit of delivering such reckonings brutally. One can only hope that Europe is jolted awake by events less catastrophic than the wars that have traditionally marked the return of reality as practised by human beings.
They say that if you want peace, then prepare for war.
