The new geopolitical epoch

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN calls this the “decisive decade”. Yet the label scarcely captures the moment—the start of a post-post-cold-war epoch in which the American-shaped world order may be violently undone by Russia and China. “Great-power competition” is too tame amid Russia’s destruction of Ukraine; the “new cold war” too reductive given the West’s complex economic interdependence with China.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered the norm, established after the second world war, that borders should not be changed by force. It has revived the spectre of nuclear war for the first time since the end of the cold war, with a twist: Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has wielded the threat of nukes not as a last resort but as an opening gambit to shield his war of aggression.