The Fire in Zhabei

In late January 1932, as much of the world fixated on the economic collapse of the Great Depression, a quieter but no less consequential crisis unfolded in Shanghai’s Zhabei district. The Japanese Imperial Navy, citing a manufactured grievance involving anti-Japanese protests, launched a sudden assault on the Chinese-held quarter of the city. What began as a localized confrontation between Japanese marines and Chinese municipal troops escalated within days into a devastating urban battle. Thousands of civilians were killed; tens of thousands fled burning neighborhoods as artillery shells turned factories and row houses into ash. Foreign powers with consular enclaves only blocks away watched from reinforced roofs, fearful that the fighting might spill into the International Settlement. No collective-security mechanism intervened. No great-power consensus emerged to halt the violence. The League of Nations dispatched observers, but its condemnation carried no weight.^[i]

What the world mistook for a regional emergency was in fact an early warning that the international system itself was beginning to fail. The “Shanghai Incident,” overshadowed today by the larger flames that soon engulfed East Asia, reveals the dark geometry of pre-1945 geopolitics. The multipolarity of the time did not produce balance; it produced opportunity for aggressive nations to attack their neighbors. Japan acted because it calculated that no coalition would stop it. China resisted because it had no alternative. Western powers hesitated, trapped between economic exhaustion, diplomatic fragmentation, and fear of triggering a wider war. And as is so often the case in international politics, what began as a limited punitive action metastasized into a conflict far beyond its origin, foreshadowing the full-scale Sino-Japanese War that erupted five years later, and contributed to the Chinese Communist Revolution.

This was the world that preceded the U.S.-led rules-based order: a landscape in which powerful states believed they possessed inherent rights to reshape borders, compel concessions, and dictate the fates of smaller nations. It was a world of entitlement masquerading as strategy, a world where violence was not the last resort but a normal instrument of statecraft. The tragedy of Zhabei was not an anomaly. It was the symptom of a system in which no stabilizing force existed to impose costs on aggression or to defend norms that transcended raw power.

Today, the echoes are unmistakable. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Xi Jinping’s escalating coercion in the Indo-Pacific evoke the same structural pathologies: grievances weaponized into territorial revisionism, domestic authoritarianism fused with expansionist ambition, and a geopolitical environment in which the erosion of collective restraint invites the return of force as the arbiter of order. Analysts of authoritarianism warn that such regimes view international norms not as constraints but as obstacles that can be weakened through disinformation, coercive diplomacy, and often open war.^{[ii][iii][iv]}

The lesson from Zhabei is not merely historical. It is diagnostic. When great powers believe they can act without consequence, they do. When the international system lacks a credible enforcer of rules, revisionists exploit the vacuum. And when democracies retreat, authoritarian states advance.

The Pre-1945 World: A System Built on Entitlement, Spheres of Influence, and Recurring War

To understand the dangers of drifting back toward multipolar disorder, one must recall the texture of the world that existed before 1945. Contrary to romanticized narratives of “natural balance” among great powers, the pre-WWII global system was defined by volatility, opportunism, and frequent interstate conflict. It was an era in which stronger nations believed themselves entitled to reorganize the periphery, and weaker nations existed in a near-permanent state of insecurity.

A World of Routine Territorial Revisionism

Throughout the interwar period and for centuries leading up to it, the use of force remained a normalized instrument of policy. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, brushing aside League of Nations sanctions that were both half-hearted and unenforced.^[v] Japan dismantled Manchuria and installed a puppet regime with minimal international resistance. The Soviet Union seized eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and parts of Finland, confident that a fractured West would not intervene. Each of these aggressions were justified through the same vocabulary we hear echoed by today’s revisionist leaders: historical claims, ethnic unity, spheres of influence, and civilizational entitlement.

As historians such as Hal Brands and William Wohlforth note, multipolarity did not restrain these impulses; it amplified them.^[vi][vii] With no dominant stabilizer, no power capable of credibly enforcing norms, revisionist states gambled on unilateral gains. Their calculations were not irrational. They reflected a geopolitical environment in which the cost of aggression was low, the diplomatic penalties symbolic, and the likelihood of collective action remote.

The Hollow Institutions of the Interwar Order

The League of Nations, conceived as the guardian of collective security, proved incapable of constraining authoritarian expansion. Scholars such as Jeffrey Taliaferro and Norrin Ripsman have documented how the League’s design, dependent on unanimity among great powers who often disagreed, made effective action nearly impossible.^[viii] The result was an institution that issued statements while aggressors seized territory.

Democracy scholars provide additional insight. Larry Diamond and Daron Acemoglu each argue that weak democratic institutions and rising authoritarianism fuel instability not only within states but between them.^[ix][x][xi] The pre-1945 era embodied this dynamic. Fragile democracies in Europe collapsed one by one, replaced by regimes that viewed war as a tool of national revitalization. Economic crises fed extremist narratives. Revisionist leaders—Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and militarists in Tokyo—operated under few internal constraints, allowing ideology and ambition to override prudence.

Spheres of Influence as Instruments of Coercion

Great-power “spheres of influence,” often romanticized today by multipolar theorists, were in practice mechanisms for subjugation. As historian Randall Schweller documents, states that claimed preeminent rights over neighboring territories routinely used military pressure, proxy violence, and political manipulation to secure compliance.^[xii] These arrangements rarely stabilized regions; they fostered resentment, arms races, and counter-alliances. Eventual overlapping spheres of influence led to great-power conflict. This pattern persisted across continents. In Europe, the Nazi and Soviet spheres carved by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact laid the groundwork for mass terror and occupation. In Asia, Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” served as a euphemism for imperial domination. These cases reveal a fundamental truth emphasized by scholars like Timothy Snyder and Fiona Hill: authoritarian powers treat spheres of influence not as zones of stability, but as zones of extraction and control.^{[xiii][xiv][xv]}

Multipolarity as a Generator of Conflict

The interwar world was not uniquely chaotic because its leaders were unusually malevolent. It was chaotic because the system itself lacked an anchor. As Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth show empirically, multipolar systems historically correlate with higher frequencies of war, unstable alliances, and spiraling security dilemmas.^[xvi] Absent a stabilizing hegemon, no power has the incentive, or the capability, to bear the cost of maintaining an open, predictable international order.^[xvii]

The consequence is a return to the oldest logic in geopolitics: the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must. It is this world, not a world of stable equilibrium, that a retreat from U.S. global leadership risks resurrecting. And it is precisely this world that modern revisionists in Moscow and Beijing seek to re-engineer: a system where might again makes right, where coercion replaces law, and where smaller states are compelled to navigate the ambitions of predatory neighbors without protection.

The Post-1945 Transformation: U.S. Leadership and the Construction of Order

The world that emerged after 1945 was not an organic equilibrium, nor a natural evolution of state behavior. It was a deliberate act of geopolitical engineering, an unprecedented effort by the United States and its allies to build an architecture capable of restraining conflict, disciplining great-power competition, and enabling global prosperity on a scale never before seen in human history. As Robert Kagan has argued, the relative peace of the postwar era reflects not an “end of history” myth but the presence of a single power willing to underwrite stability, enforce norms, and bear the costs of leadership.^[xviii]

This transformation began with institutional redesign. At Bretton Woods, the United States championed an economic system anchored in stable exchange rates, open markets, and the removal of beggar-thy-neighbor tariffs that helped precipitate the catastrophes of the 1930s. The IMF and World Bank provided macroeconomic stabilization tools and reconstruction financing; GATT, and later the WTO, created a predictable framework for trade that reduced the friction points that historically triggered conflict.^[xix][xx] Meanwhile, NATO and the broader system of U.S.-led alliances offered a security guarantee unmatched in scope or durability, deterring revisionist aggression and creating a stable environment in which commerce could expand.

The results were extraordinary. Interstate war among major powers declined to its lowest sustained level in recorded history. Global GDP increased more than thirtyfold. Hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty. Trade networks became deeper, faster, and more integrated than even the most ambitious prewar leaders could have imagined. And the United States, which underwrote much of this global stability, enjoyed the greatest economic advancement in its history. But these gains were not automatic; they were produced through governance. Strong institutions, democratic accountability, and rule-of-law norms are essential ingredients for durable international stability.^[xxi][xxii]

American strategists across the ideological spectrum—Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Hal Brands, Michèle Flournoy, and Anne Applebaum among them—underscore that the post-1945 order worked because the United States played a unique role: it provided security without seeking territorial aggrandizement; it opened its markets without demanding subservience; and it invested in institutions that constrained its own power as much as that of its adversaries.^{[xxiii][xxiv][xxv]} These principles made the system legitimate, not merely dominant.

The durability of this order also stemmed from its universality. Smaller states gained protection against coercion; larger states gained access to stable markets; democracies gained partners; and even former adversaries—Japan, Germany, Italy—were integrated into a structure that rewarded peaceful cooperation. As Moisés Naím notes, the postwar order diffused power horizontally in ways that made the unilateral aggression of the 1930s far more difficult to execute.^[xxvi]

The peace that followed was not the natural condition of international life. It was an aberration, a fragile, historically rare achievement. And today, that order is being tested by powers that reject its foundational premise: that sovereignty is universal, not hierarchical; that borders are fixed, not negotiable by force; and that prosperity flows from openness, not domination.

The New Revisionists: How Russia and China Are Recreating Pre-1945 Patterns

If the post-1945 order represented an engineered antidote to the prior violence of the multipolar world, Russia and China are now methodically working to dismantle that antidote. Their behaviors mirror the very patterns that led to catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century: territorial expansion justified by historical grievance, coercive influence over neighbors, and a belief that power, not law, determines legitimacy.

Russia: Aggression as Restorative Politics

Russia under Vladimir Putin has embraced a worldview that fuses imperial nostalgia with authoritarian consolidation. The Kremlin sees the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors as negotiable and their independence as an affront to Moscow’s historical self-image.^{[xxvii][xxviii]} The invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and its expansion into a full-scale war in 2022, reflects the same revisionist logic that drove expansionist powers in the 1930s: the belief that borders drawn by treaties or international law are subordinate to ethnic, civilizational, or historical claims.

This revanchism is reinforced by coercive tools that echo earlier authoritarian strategies. Mark Galeotti and Michael McFaul have shown how Russia weaponizes energy dependence, political interference, disinformation, and hybrid warfare to destabilize neighbors and fracture Western unity.^[xxix][xxx] The Kremlin’s domestic authoritarianism is inseparable from its foreign policy; a regime premised on fear, conspiracy, and centralized power naturally externalizes its insecurities through aggression.^{[xxxi][xxxii]} Russia’s actions today resemble the pre-1945 norm: a great power imposing its will on other states while betting, often correctly, that international institutions will be too slow, too divided, or too risk-averse to impose meaningful costs.

China: Maritime Expansion, Economic Coercion, and Militarized Nationalism

China’s rise has likewise taken on increasingly revisionist features. The state’s sweeping territorial claims in the South China Sea, its militarization of disputed features, and its pressure on Taiwan parallel the expansionist strategies in earlier imperial regimes.^{[xxxiii][xxxiv]} China’s historical narrative, rooted in “century of humiliation” discourse, frames regional dominance not as expansion but as restoration, a rhetorical move reminiscent of Japan’s justification for its “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

The PLA’s rapid modernization, including naval expansion, missile development, and gray-zone operations, reflects a deliberate military strategy aimed at coercing neighbors and complicating U.S. intervention.^{[xxxv][xxxvi][xxxvii]} Meanwhile, economic coercion, employed against Australia, Lithuania, South Korea, and others, serves the same purpose that Italy’s sanctions pressure or Germany’s economic subjugation once did: to discipline smaller states into deference.^[xxxviii] Chinese political scientists like Minxin Pei and analysts such as Jude Blanchette and Elizabeth Economy warn that China’s internal authoritarian trajectory amplifies its external assertiveness, creating a regime that views liberal norms as threats and multilateral institutions as venues to reshape from within.^{[xxxix][xl][xli]}

Revisionism Reborn, and Defended by Multipolar Advocates

Modern revisionist behavior tracks closely with the pre-WWII pattern: strong states asserting dominance through force or coercion against their neighbors, justified through narratives of historical entitlement. Yet some contemporary scholars, such as Graham Allison and Emma Ashford, argue that U.S. retrenchment and accommodation of these revisionist powers would produce stability.^{[xlii][xliii][xliv][xlv]} Their prescriptions echo the failed logic of 1930s diplomacy: granting spheres of influence, recognizing great-power “privileges,” and assuming that authoritarian states will be satiated once their grievances are addressed. Peace at all costs.

The historical record suggests the opposite. Retrenchment signals permissiveness, not prudence; it invites aggression by lowering the perceived costs of coercion.^{[xlvi][xlvii][xlviii]} Revisionist regimes are not seeking equilibrium; they are seeking revision. And absent firm resistance, their ambitions tend to grow, not shrink.

Russia and China are not restoring balance; they are resurrecting the operating principles of a world that produced two global wars.

Why Multipolarity Is Dangerous

Arguments for a return to multipolar “restraint,” whether framed as offshore balancing, great-power accommodation, or the recognition of spheres of influence, reflect a profound misreading of both historical experience and contemporary authoritarian strategy. Advocates such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt contend that U.S. retrenchment would reduce tensions, allow regional powers to stabilize their own neighborhoods, and prevent dangerous overextension.^{[xlix][l][li][lii]} Yet the lessons of the twentieth century, and the behavior of today’s revisionist states, point in the opposite direction.

Spheres of Influence Recreate the Pathologies of Interwar Geopolitics

The idea that Russia or China should be granted de facto control over their peripheries mirrors the territorial logic that underpinned the collapses of the 1920s and 1930s. As Kagan and Brands note, spheres of influence are not stabilizing mechanisms but invitations to coercion; they transform sovereign states into bargaining chips and reduce international politics to hierarchical zones of domination.^[liii][liv] The tragedy of the pre-1945 era was not that great powers contested borders; it was that no credible external force existed to deny their claims. Systems that normalize revisionism, whether in Munich in 1938 or Crimea in 2014, tend to embolden aggressors rather than satisfy them.^[lv][lvi]

Great-Power Accommodation Fails Because Revisionist States Seek Change, Not Balance

Restraint theorists assume that Russia and China primarily seek recognition, security, or status. But extensive research by Fiona Hill and Catherine Belton shows that both regimes seek revision, not equilibrium.^{[lvii][lviii][lix][lx]} Moscow seeks to redesign the European security order; Beijing aims to displace U.S. influence in Asia and alter global governance to privilege authoritarian control. Accommodation does not temper these ambitions; it affirms them.

Nuclear Deterrence Does Not Halt Conventional or Gray-Zone Warfare

Mearsheimer and Barry Posen argue that nuclear weapons substantially reduce the risk of great-power war. But nuclear deterrence has never prevented conventional conflict, proxy fighting, territorial seizure, cyber aggression, economic coercion, or political warfare—all tools heavily used by Russia and China.^[lxi] Nuclear weapons deter total war; they do not deter incremental predation. Revisionists exploit this gap precisely because they know democracies fear escalation.

An “Asian Monroe Doctrine” for China Would Destabilize the Indo-Pacific

Proposals to recognize Chinese primacy in East Asia, framed as a natural balancing arrangement, ignore the fundamental asymmetry between 19th-century America and 21st-century China. In reality, Beijing seeks to reorder the region in ways that undermine sovereignty, restrict maritime access, coerce smaller states, and expel U.S. presence.^{[lxii][lxiii][lxiv]} Such a hegemonic zone would not stabilize Asia; it would paralyze it. Economies dependent on free navigation would become hostages to authoritarian discretion, and states from Japan to Australia would face unprecedented security pressures.

Offshore Balancing Ignores the Lessons of Both World Wars

Offshore balancing presumes that the U.S. can safely withdraw until a threat becomes intolerable, then re-enter decisively. But history has shown the United States’ late entry into both world wars allowed revisionist coalitions to gain enormous momentum before intervention became unavoidable.^[lxv][lxvi] Distance did not protect America in 1917 or 1941; oceans did not prevent systemic collapse. Retrenchment today would allow Russia and China to consolidate regional dominance long before the U.S. could mobilize a response.

The logic of restraint rests on a theoretical symmetry that has never existed in practice. The logic of history suggests that unopposed revisionism expands until checked.

The Strategic Case for Sustained Responsible U.S. Leadership

If multipolarity resurrects the structural dangers of the pre-1945 world, sustained U.S. engagement remains the single most important factor preventing the return of systemic instability. U.S. global leadership is not an act of altruism; it is a strategic investment that reduces the probability of war, expands economic opportunity, and protects democratic resilience.^[lxvii]

U.S. Engagement Is a Security Investment, Not a Burden

American alliances deter aggression at a fraction of the cost of responding to conflict after it erupts. Forward presence and integrated deterrence stabilize regions where latent rivalries might otherwise ignite.^{[lxviii][lxix]} The U.S. does not police the world; it anchors a coalition system that dissuades authoritarian powers from testing the limits of force. And by providing that anchor, the U.S. enjoys the ability to steer global finance and trade in directions that are beneficial to Americans as well as the world.

The Rules-Based Order Is Not Self-Sustaining

The institutions that govern trade, security, and diplomacy do not function autonomously. They depend on a stabilizing power willing to enforce rules and absorb costs. The post-1945 order endured because the United States provided public goods, open markets, security guarantees, and credible commitments that no other power could or would.^[lxx] Absent this leadership, institutions fragment, norms erode, and the most aggressive states shape outcomes.

Authoritarian Powers Fill Vacuums; They Do Not Maintain Order

Where the United States retreats, authoritarian influence expands. Geopolitical vacuums invite predatory behavior, not collaborative governance.^{[lxxi][lxxii][lxxiii]} Russia fills voids with force; China fills them with economic dependency and political coercion. Neither seeks a stable international environment; both seek strategic advantage.

U.S. Alliances Prevent a Return to “War of the Strong Against the Weak”

The alliance network spanning NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and partners across the Indo-Pacific is the most successful conflict-prevention system in modern history. Alliances multiply U.S. power while creating structural barriers to territorial aggression.^{[lxxiv][lxxv]} This model stands in absolute contrast to the pre-1945 world, where weaker states faced existential insecurity and predation was routine.

Sustained U.S. leadership ensures the world does not regress to the structural violence that defined earlier eras. The costs of engagement are real, but the costs of abdication are far higher.

Policy Recommendations: Sustaining Stability in an Age of Revisionism

Preventing a return to pre-1945 disorder requires clear strategy and sustained commitment. The following recommendations outline how the United States and its allies can reinforce the foundations of a stable international order:

Security and Deterrence Architecture

Actions focused on preventing territorial aggression, sustaining alliance cohesion, and ensuring military-technological superiority.

• Reinforce alliance networks and forward deterrence. Expand NATO readiness, deepen U.S.–Japan–Australia–South Korea coordination, and strengthen deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific to ensure revisionist powers face robust and unified opposition.^{[lxxvi][lxxvii]}
• Invest in military-technological deterrence. Accelerate development of AI-enabled systems, long-range strike capabilities, missile defense, cyber resilience, and undersea infrastructure—deterrent tools which are critical for preventing twenty-first century conflict.^{[lxxviii][lxxix]}
• Build coordinated transatlantic and Indo-Pacific strategies. Align European and Asian democracies on sanctions, export controls, maritime security, and counter-disinformation to complicate revisionist statecraft and reduce regional fragmentation.^{[lxxx][lxxxi]}

Economic Governance and Strategic Statecraft

Actions that strengthen the economic foundations of the rules-based order.

• Counter authoritarian economic coercion. Build multilateral frameworks, such as secure supply-chain partnerships, collective retaliation mechanisms, and resilient energy strategies, to blunt coercive tools employed by Russia and China against smaller states.^{[lxxxii][lxxxiii]}
• Increase economic statecraft to support rules-based norms. Use targeted export controls, investment screening, development finance, and trade agreements to strengthen rule-of-law economies and limit authoritarian leverage.^{[lxxxiv][lxxxv]}
• Reinvigorate U.S. leadership in multilateral institutions. Reassert influence in the UN, WTO, IMF, and World Bank to defend open economic norms and prevent authoritarian states from reshaping global governance in illiberal directions.^{[lxxxvi][lxxxvii]}

Democratic Resilience and Normative Infrastructure

Actions that strengthen the political fabric underlying the rules-based order, especially in states vulnerable to authoritarian influence.

• Strengthen democratic resilience abroad. Increase support for civil society, independent media, anti-corruption initiatives, and institutional strengthening in vulnerable democracies, which serve as pillars of long-term stability.^{[lxxxviii][lxxxix]}
• Bolster governance capacity in fragile states. Assist partners with judicial reform, regulatory modernization, cybersecurity protections, and anti-elite capture initiatives. Weak governance is a strategic vulnerability that Russia and China actively exploit.
• Support regional organizations committed to democratic norms. Enhance cooperation with the EU, ASEAN partners, and the African Union on governance standards, transparency, and anti-coercion tools. These networks make it harder for revisionist powers to impose hierarchical spheres of influence.

These recommendations rest on a simple principle: stability requires structure, deterrence, and leadership. Without sustained U.S. engagement, no combination of institutions or alliances can maintain the equilibrium that has defined the postwar world.

Conclusion: A Warning from History

When Japanese artillery ignited the Zhabei district in 1932, the world witnessed an avoidable tragedy and misread it as a distant anomaly. Diplomats issued statements; newspapers briefly covered the flames; foreign observers reassured themselves that this was a localized eruption of old grievances. Yet the deeper truth, visible even then to those who understood the patterns of history, was that such episodes rarely remain contained. They are signals, not accidents. They are warning lights flashing on the dashboard of the international system.

Within a decade, the same permissive conditions that allowed aggression in Shanghai—fragmented power centers, hollow institutions, authoritarian grievance, and the normalization of force—had cascaded into a global catastrophe. What the world dismissed as “regional instability” proved to be the first tremor of a geopolitical earthquake.

The peace that emerged after 1945 was a structural revolution, not an historical inevitability. It was built through design, sacrifice, and an act of strategic imagination: that a world governed by open markets, sovereign equality, and collective security could replace a world governed by fear, hierarchy, and conquest. This achievement rested on deliberately constructed institutions, norms, and alliances, not on a presumed moral evolution of states.[xc][xci] Both history and political science confirm the same lesson: nothing about peace is self-executing.

And nothing about it is permanent.

Today, the international system is again showing signs of stress familiar to historians of the 1930s. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s militarization of the South China Sea, Iran’s proxy warfare, North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship—each is a reminder that authoritarian powers are not simply challenging individual borders; they are challenging the principles that have restrained global conflict for nearly eight decades. These regimes share a worldview in which power confers entitlement, sovereignty is conditional, and rules constrain only the weak.^{[xcii][xciii]}

The risk is not merely that individual states may fall victim to aggression. The risk is systemic: that the cumulative erosion of norms, deterrence, and cohesive democratic leadership will tip the world back toward the unstable equilibrium of the pre-1945 era, a world in which security collapses outward from the periphery, and major powers collide because no stabilizing force remains to prevent it.

Yet fatalism would be a profound misunderstanding of this moment. Unlike the democracies of the 1930s, the United States today is not economically exhausted, strategically isolated, or militarily outmatched. It still retains unparalleled geopolitical leverage: the world’s strongest alliance network, a preeminent military, the central node of global finance, and unmatched capacity for innovation. American decline is often proclaimed but rarely substantiated; what matters is not decline in the abstract, but relative power, and by that metric the United States retains decisive advantages.^[xciv]

The question, then, is not whether the United States can sustain global leadership. It is whether it chooses to.

Strategic retrenchment would not usher in an era of equilibrium. It would create precisely the vacuum in which revisionist powers thrive. Just as the world of the 1930s descended into crisis not because aggressors were strong, but because democracies were divided and hesitant, the world today faces danger not from the rise of authoritarian powers alone, but from the potential abdication of the one power capable of balancing them.

The costs of leadership are real. But the costs of abandonment are immeasurably higher.

The lesson of Zhabei, like the lesson of Abyssinia, Manchuria, and the Rhineland, is brutally clear: aggression unopposed becomes aggression rewarded, and aggression rewarded becomes aggression expanded. Disorder begins at the margins, but it does not stay there. Peace unprotected is peace undone.

The United States still possesses the ability to shape the twenty-first century as profoundly as it shaped the second half of the twentieth. The choice before it is stark: steward a system that has produced unprecedented prosperity and stability, or permit the world to drift back toward the geopolitical landscape of entitlement, coercion, and instability that defined the decades before 1945.

History offers its verdict with unusual unanimity. Great-power leadership is not a luxury; it is the price of preventing catastrophe. If the United States relinquishes that role, others will fill the void, and they will not build a world that favors freedom, stability, or peace.

The fire in Zhabei was a warning. Whether the world heeds its modern echoes will determine the course of the century ahead.

__________________________________________

^{[i] League of Nations, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Sino-Japanese Dispute (1932), https://archives.ungeneva.org/report-of-the-commission-of-enquiry-on-the-sino-japanese-dispute-discussions-at-the-extraordinary-assembly-1932-2;isad?sf_culture=en
[ii] Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2020) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621076/twilight-of-democracy-by-anne-applebaum/
[iii] Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018) https://www.amazon.com/The-Road-to-Unfreedom-audiobook/dp/B077BHPFDL/ref=sr_1_1
[iv] Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/facing-up-to-the-democratic-recession/
[v] “Italian Invasion of Ethiopia,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Italo-Ethiopian-War-1935-1936
[vi] Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt5hh0bc
[vii] Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539346
[viii] Jeffrey Taliaferro, Norrin Ripsman, and Steven Lobell, The Challenge of Grand Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/challenge-of-grand-strategy/7FD5D6B9A1E9D68A8159DCC95B7B736A
[ix] Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/
[x] Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail (New York: Crown, 2012) https://ia801506.us.archive.org/27/items/WhyNationsFailTheOriginsODaronAcemoglu/Why-Nations-Fail_-The-Origins-o-Daron-Acemoglu.pdf
[xi] Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) https://fukuyama.people.stanford.edu/politicalorderandpoliticaldecay
[xii] Randall Schweller, Unanswered Threats (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137589
[xiii] Catherine Belton, Putin’s People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/putins-people-how-the-kgb-took-back-russia/
[xiv] Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, Mr. Putin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt7zsvpb
[xv] Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010) https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471
[xvi] Brooks and Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539346
[xvii] Hal Brands, American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt1vjqnvw
[xviii] Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back (New York: Knopf, 2018) https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-jungle-grows-back-america-and-our-imperiled-world/
[xix] “Bretton Woods Conference,” U.S. Department of State, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/wwii/98681.htm
[xx] World Trade Organization, “The GATT Years,” https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/fact4_e.htm
[xxi] Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) https://fukuyama.people.stanford.edu/politicalorderandpoliticaldecay
[xxii] Larry Diamond, “Why Democracies Survive,” Journal of Democracy, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-impact-of-the-economic-crisis-why-democracies-survive/
[xxiii] Eliot Cohen, The Big Stick (New York: Basic Books, 2016) https://archive.org/details/bigsticklimitsof0000cohe_d8z9
[xxiv] Max Boot, The Road Not Taken (New York: Liveright, 2018) https://www.cfr.org/book/road-not-taken
[xxv] Michele Flournoy, “Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge,” CNAS, https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/sharpening-the-u-s-militarys-edge-critical-steps-for-the-next-administration
[xxvi] Moisés Naím, The End of Power (New York: Basic Books, 2013) https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/moises-naim/the-end-of-power/9780465065691/?lens=basic-books}