The Post-Cold War era is over. What should we call this new one?

The term ‘Polycene’ well describes the state of this new era and the challenges we face.

- Thomas L. Friedman

Protesters at the opening of the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference in Germany. According to Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the world's premier earth system scientists, climate change has become the spark that ignites cascades of interlocking crises. Together, they put the whole earth in a state of polycrisis. PHOTO: EPA

(PHOTO: EPA)

For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we're living in today?

I was born into the “Cold War” era, and most of my career as a columnist was in the “Post-Cold War.”

The latter era - those decades since 1989 characterised by American unipolar dominance — ended in the 2020s with the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which exploded Europe’s Cold War and post-Cold War security architecture, followed by China’s emergence as a true peer economic and military rival to the US.

My initial thought was that we should call this new epoch the “Post-Post-Cold War”, but that made no sense. No, we have arrived at a moment that is much more than the aftermath of a largely bipolar superpower rivalry born in the midto late 1940s. It’s the birth of something novel and highly complex to which we all must adapt, and quickly — but what to call it?

Many climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or, now, the “Artificial Intelligence Age”. Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back”.

But none of these labels capture the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics.