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When a storm is coming, there will always be signs. The wind might suddenly drop. The tide goes out farther than usual. Streamers of clouds sail across the sky.
It’s possible to misread or even ignore these signs — to insist that the drops of rain are just a passing shower — until it’s too late. That’s when the real trouble arrives.
What is true of weather is also true of human affairs. Regimes look strong until they don’t. Revolutions at home and upheavals in the international order — the two so often go together — are easy to see in retrospect, but are not always anticipated. Yet if we look closer, we’ll often find the signs were there.
Those of us who live in relatively stable and well-ordered societies would like to believe, like Voltaire’s absurd Dr. Pangloss, who stumbles from one disaster to another, that “all is for the best.” We might grumble about the economy or the prospect of another far-off war, or listen approvingly to radical voices from either end of the political spectrum, but we don’t expect our world to be turned upside down.
We would do better to heed the warning of another French writer. In Albert Camus’s postwar novel “The Plague,” when dead rats appear on the streets of the Algerian city of Oran, and people fall ill with a mysterious disease, the local government and most of the citizens ignore the signs until it is too late. “There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” Camus’s narrator says, “yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”
Today, there are dead rats all around. New temperature records have been set and reset this summer; the earth has baked in droughts, and wildfires have raged. Debt across advanced economies is approaching historic highs. Cuts in medical and food aid, most significantly by the United States, have caused unnecessary deaths and helped the spread of diseases, one of which, sooner or later, could become another pandemic. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid, unregulated rise, threatening jobs, security and, in darker projections, human existence.
Revisionist powers flout rules and norms with impunity. Electorates are angry and volatile. Slow, deliberate, necessarily discreet diplomacy, which builds trust and understanding, has given way to a performative, brash style more suited for TikTok-addled attention spans or the playground.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program recorded 65 state-based conflicts last year — the highest number since 1946. Great powers find themselves bogged down in asymmetric wars with countries that are making the most of new technologies. President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s war in Ukraine, meant to be won in a matter of days, is creaking through its fifth year. Iran, using inexpensive, mass-produced drones to attack American forces and allies, has gained control, perhaps permanently, over a crucial corridor of world trade, drastically reduced U.S. missile stocks and mired President Trump in a war of his own choice.
A world war is not inevitable, but the threat of a catastrophic conflict between big and well-armed powers is closer than it has been for decades.
Like the people of Camus’s Oran, we are understandably reluctant to recognize just how much the world has changed. The problems are thorny, complex, and tedious, and it’s easier to look away. So we holiday on beaches while wildfires rage; we ask A.I. how to train a new puppy, how to write that letter — to do our thinking for us. We hope that the wars will end, that the guardrails, institutions and alliances will be rebuilt, and that the world as we understand it will recover and endure.
But a new reality has arrived with startling speed. The world order that held together for most of our lives started to erode when those within it got too comfortable and complacent, and when there was too much acceptance — even approval — of bad behavior.
We have arrived in a new age of disorder. We must prepare ourselves, which begins with being honest about the seriousness of the moment we’re in, and accepting that our fragile system is faltering. That countries are already adjusting, for better and worse. And that any future of cooperation will have to look different.
What happens to those who refuse to adapt, and insist that a crumbling system can carry on? Consider three revolutions that were, and one that wasn’t.
On the eve of the French Revolution, France, Europe’s greatest land power, was probably bankrupt, in large part because of the enormous amounts it had borrowed to help defeat the British in the American Revolution. Extravagant and corrupt ruling elites had lost their way, and a growing middle class, excluded from political power, was demanding change. At the bottom of society, workers and peasants faced starvation and were increasingly desperate.
Powerful new Enlightenment ideas were circulating — some of which were imported from the American Revolution — about human rights and new forms of government that would give power to at least some of the people.
The French kings and their courtiers misunderstood the depth of the discontent and assumed that nothing could shake them from their privileged position. They were wrong: The monarchy was overthrown, and a chaotic, violent republic was born. Within a decade, Napoleon would be emperor.
There is no single pattern for revolutionary change, but those at the summit of a regime often fail to recognize how brittle it is. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the consequence of defeat abroad, rather than a costly victory. But Czar Nicholas II also insisted, against all evidence, that no reforms were needed because Russians still adored him. In 1930s Germany, Hitler was invited into power by elites who thought, wrongly, that they would be able to use him, and that the existing system was strong enough to box him in.
Each of these revolutions had profound international ramifications. Napoleon led France to dominance over the continent, smashing old institutions and ideas like the divine right of kings to rule. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia, preached and fostered revolutionary internationalism, waging war worldwide on capitalism and democratic nations. Hitler rearmed Germany, conquered most of Europe and murdered millions of Jews and many others in the name of Aryan dominance.
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Photo Illustration by Alma Haser for The New York Times
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