Timothy Garton Ash
In these times of planetary polycrisis, we try to get our bearings by looking to the past. Are we perhaps in “The New Cold War”, as Robin Niblett, the former director of the foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House, proposes in a new book? Is this bringing us towards the brink of a third world war, as the historian Niall Ferguson has argued? Or, as I have found myself suggesting on occasion, is the world beginning to resemble the late 19th-century Europe of competing empires and great powers writ large?
Another way of trying to put our travails into historically comprehensible shape is to label them as an “age of …”, with the words that follow suggesting either a parallel with or a sharp contrast to an earlier age. So the CNN foreign affairs guru Fareed Zakaria suggests in his latest book that we are in a new “Age of Revolutions”, meaning that we can learn something from the French, industrial, and American revolutions. Or is it rather “The Age of the Strongman”, as proposed by the Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman? No, it’s “The Age of Unpeace”, says Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, since “connectivity causes conflict”.
But come now, surely it’s “The Age of AI”, the title of a book co-authored by the late doyen of foreign affairs gurus, Henry Kissinger. Or “the age of danger”, as international essayist Bruno Maçães argues in a recent issue of the New Statesman? If you type the words “the age of …” into the search box on the website of the journal Foreign Affairs, you get another bunch of contenders, including the age(s) of amorality, energy insecurity, impunity, America first, great-power distraction, and climate disaster.
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