Top Highlights

• Populism and nationalism are on the rise. What we are witnessing is a widespread rejection of globalization and international involvement and, as a result, a questioning of long-standing postures and policies, from openness to trade and immigrants to a willingness to maintain alliances and overseas commitments.
• All this is a far cry from the optimism and confidence that were just as widespread a quarter of a century before. One source of this mood was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 (11/9 of all days), an event that heralded the peaceful and successful demise of the Cold War, the unprecedented struggle between the United States and the Sov...
• Twice before in the century, great-power competition had led to great-power conflict on a horrendous scale.
• What most reinforced the strength of the order was the shared realization on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union that any direct clash between them could escalate into a nuclear exchange in which the costs would dwarf any conceivable gains and in which there would and could be no victor in any meaningful sense of the word.
• Expressed differently, nuclear weapons had the effect of dampening down competition between the two dominant powers of their day because leaders understood that a nuclear war would be disproportionately costly regardless of the interests at stake. Behind that was the sinister genius of mutually assured destruction (popularly known as MAD) and what ...