Wenn wir zu einer Ordnung vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zurückkehren, stehen die Mittelmächte vor einer Herausforderung

The world the WW2 veterans bequeathed to us was immeasurably better than the world they’d inherited from their parents. For they were born into a world of Great Power rivalries, in which, in Mark Carney’s words, „the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must“.

This was the generation that went home to build the rules-based international order, because they had learned the hard way what a system without rules, without laws, can lead to. They wanted no going back to that.

Those born in the decades after the war may have made the mistake of believing that the world could never go back to that.

And 24 years ago, as I gave my talk in a New York City still traumatised by 9/11, did I, too, make the mistake of thinking the post-World War Two order, underpinned, as it was, by American might, was the new permanent normal? I think I did.

For we did not foresee then a world in which trust in traditional sources of news and information would be corroded by a rising cynicism, turbo-charged by social media and, increasingly now, artificial intelligence.

In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes. It has been corroding not just in the US but across the Western world for decades now. As such Trump may be a symptom, not a cause, of Carney’s „rupture“ with the post-World War Two order.

nerve gas as an intermediary to nuclear weapons. mass mobilization with drones. learn from Ukraine.