Who is winning the world war at this stage?

When future historians study the arc of American foreign policy, they will probably fold all the major events since 2020 — our pell-mell withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — into a unified narrative of global conflict.

- Ross Douthat

If we're fortunate, that will yield academic treatises with titles like “The Empire Tested: America and the World, 2021-2030" If we're unlucky — meaning, basically, if the United States and China eventually fall into a ruinous war — then the struggles in Ukraine and the Middle East will be retroactively assigned to histories of World War III.

We are not, as yet, inside that kind of conflagration. But it’s useful for Americans to think about our situation in global terms, with Russia and Iran and China as a revisionist alliance putting our imperial power to the test.

We've had a lot of these swings in the last few years. In 2021 and early 2022, the rout in Afghanistan and our overpromising to a vulnerable Ukraine made America look ineffectual ... right up until President Vladimir Putin actually invaded his neighbour, at which point his military setbacks and our success in rallying support for the Ukrainians yielded a lot of chest-thumping about the superiority of liberal democracy and the permanence of American hegemony.