David Ekbladh
The past decade and a half has seen upheaval across the globe. The 2008 financial crisis and its fallout, the Covid-19 pandemic and major regional conflicts in Sudan, the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere have left residual uncertainty. Added to this is a tense, growing rivalry between the US and its perceived opponents, particularly China.
In response to these jarring times, commentators have often reached for the easy analogy of the post-1945 era to explain geopolitics. The world is, we are told repeatedly, entering a “new Cold War.”
But as a historian of the US’s place in the world, these references to a conflict that pitted the West in a decades-long ideological battle with the Soviet Union and its allies – and the ripples the Cold War had around the globe – are a flawed lens to view today’s events. To a critical eye, the world looks less like the structured competition of that Cold War and more like the grinding collapse of world order that took place during the 1930s.
The ‘low dishonest decade’
In 1939, the poet W H Auden referred to the previous 10 years as the “low dishonest decade” – a time that bred uncertainty and conflict.
From the vantage of almost a century of hindsight, the period from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the onset of World War II can be distorted by loaded terms like “isolationism” or “appeasement.” The decade is cast as a morality play about the rise of figures like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and simple tales of aggression appeased.
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