Wir kämpfen immer noch gegen den Zweiten Weltkrieg: das ungeklärte Erbe des Konflikts, der die heutige Politik geprägt hat

[SS from the essay by Antony Beevor, author of *Berlin: The Downfall 1945* and *Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917–1921.]*

World War II certainly brought the strands of world history together, with its global reach and its acceleration of the end of colonialism across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet despite sharing this international experience, and entering the same order built in its wake, every country involved created and clung to its own narrative of the great conflict.

Even the matter of when the war began is still debated. In the American telling, it started in earnest when the United States entered the conflict after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States a few days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, insists that the war began in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union—ignoring the joint Soviet and Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, which marks the start of the war for most Europeans. Yet some trace its origin back further still. For China, it began in 1937, with the Sino-Japanese War, or even earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Many on the left in Spain are convinced that it began in 1936 with General Francisco Franco’s overthrow of the republic, launching the Spanish Civil War…

Today, the first major continental war in Europe since World War II is in its fourth year, driven in part by Putin’s selective reading of Russian history, while deadly conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere threaten to spread further. The Trump administration, meanwhile, appears to be casting aside the United States’ global leadership in a confused tantrum. Eighty years ago, the end of World War II paved the way for a new international order based on respect for national sovereignty and borders. But now, a steep bill for American ambivalence, European complacency, and Russian revanchism may finally be coming due.