Its like history is repeating itself if we compare now to the 1930s.
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Russia’s conduct in Ukraine since 2014 has demonstrated how what starts as a limited incursion into a disputed territory can become an effort to erase an entire nation. Recent events in the Middle East remind us of how even an economically feeble revisionist, Iran, can cultivate proxies capable of throwing the region into chaos. In East Asia, China is conducting what one US admiral
calls “the largest military buildup in history since World War II.” These states make
no secret of their desire to rearrange the regions around them and upend a world long structured by American power. They still have some distance to go: The fact that the front lines of the US-China competition are in the Taiwan Strait, not the Central Pacific, and that the contest between Russia and the West is occurring in Ukraine, not Central Europe, testifies to the achievements of the present order. But to assume this system is immune to the strains being exerted upon it is to risk being surprised, once again, by how quickly things fall apart.
The authoritarian powers make awkward partners. Iran, Russia and China aren’t formal allies. Historically, they have been rivals more often than friends. Even today, a China that ultimately dominates Eurasia might menace Russia and Iran more severely than it menaces America. But this isn’t much reason for reassurance, because a second lesson is that even an ambivalent alliance of totalitarian states can set the world aflame.
The Axis powers — Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy —never trusted one another. As historian Williamson Murray wrote, they were united mainly by their
desire “to steal as much of the world as possible.” Had they succeeded, the towering ambitions and toxic racism that motivated these countries surely would have condemned them, eventually, to a fratricidal falling-out. Even so, one of history’s most dysfunctional partnerships created deeply destabilizing effects."
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