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  "path": "/2026/04/as-wwi-fades-from-memory-its-lessons-are-relevant-as-ever/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-15T05:57:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
  "tags": [
    "Book Review",
    "Diplomacy",
    "History",
    "The Latest",
    "War",
    "WWI"
  ],
  "textContent": "More than a century after its end, the memory of World War I remains haunting. But as Odd Arne Westad argues in his book,  _The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History_ , the real problem is that it isn’t haunting us enough.\n\nWorld War I, the famed diplomat George Kennan observed, was the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. Once billed as the “war to end all wars,” the conflict instead birthed World War II and the Cold War. It was, in many respects, the prequel to a century of horrors. The war shattered empires, redrew maps, and forever changed human history as no other conflict had before or since.\n\nPerhaps one veteran put it best in an interview with the BBC half a century later. “You’re hunted back to the jungle,” a then-elderly British soldier named Richard Tobin observed. “The veneer of civilization has dropped away.”\n\nApocalyptic footage from the ruins, from the wasteland of the Somme to the bombed-out field of death at Ypres, where men in gas masks rode horses over a devastated landscape captures some of the horror. But only some. No fewer than 40 million, civilians and soldiers alike, would die by war’s end.\n\nThose who survived carried scars—physical and psychological—forever. For decades, Western policymakers looked at the cataclysm of the Great War as a warning. But as Westad shows in his new book, that generation—a generation that remembered the costs of industrialized warfare—is no longer with us, physically or spiritually, and we are the worse for it.\n\nThe Great War’s damage extended beyond the battlefield. As Westad notes, World War I “destroyed a world where many people believed in progress and gradual advance and replaced it with a cynical and desperate world, in which nations and ideologies were natural and necessary enemies.”\n\nBefore the war, it was possible to traverse through much of the known world without so much as a passport. Border controls were few and far between. By war’s end, new walls were up. Polyglot empires, from Austria-Hungary to the Ottomans, lay in ruins. New borders, and with them, new barriers, emerged. The two horsemen of the 20th century, fascism and communism, could not have emerged without the horrors of the Great War. There is a direct line from the events that began on a Sarajevo street in 1914 to the Iron Curtain that kept millions enslaved for about half of the 20th century.\n\nIf World War I was born from hubris and miscalculation, and Westad convincingly argues that in many ways it was, we may be on the precipice of another great power disaster.\n\nWestad, a Yale historian perhaps best noted for his works on the Cold War, recognizes the echoes of the past in current events, something that should concern all policymakers.\n\n“War in all its forms is a terrible thing,” he writes. “But Great Power wars are more destructive than others because of their intensity and scale, because of the weapons used, and because of their tendency to spread.” Such wars, Westad warns, “make all other current wars pale in comparison.”\n\nFor nearly eight decades, much of the world, and certainly the West, has experienced smaller-scale wars and insurgencies. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan had their own horrors and difficulties, stretching on for years and with unsatisfactory conclusions. But these were not the industrialized slaughter of the World Wars.\n\nThe Taliban presented challenges of their own, but they are most certainly not China, an industrial superpower with 232 times America’s current shipbuilding capacity. Beijing has been engaged in one of the largest military buildup in modern history. And like Imperial Germany, the Chinese Communist Party also seeks its place in the sun.\n\nWestad is correct to note the many parallels between the era before the Great War and our own. Russia and China are rearming with revisionist aims. The old order is clearly collapsing, just as it was in the early 20th century. And once again, new weapons make the costs even more terrifying.\n\nThe historian is also right to point out that “there are enough structural and political conflicts between the Great Powers today to make a major war a likely scenario.” Indeed, a global conflagration is perhaps more likely today than at any moment since the Cold War’s height—and, as noted above, we no longer have a generation of John F. Kennedys or Dwight Eisenhowers who have been “tempered by war” and “disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,” as Kennedy put it in his inaugural.\n\nAll the terrible pieces seem to be falling into place. And Westad’s book cogently highlights them.\n\nStill, there are things to quibble with in the historian’s latest work. He claims that the new order presently underway will be multipolar. However, it seems more likely that the future will be defined by two superpowers, the United States and China. Other regional powers, including Russia and India, will certainly play important roles, but with comparatively limited capabilities and influence.\n\nElsewhere, Westad seems a trifle too certain about the European Union’s ability to play a similar role on the world stage. The economic potential is certainly there, but it’s less certain whether willpower and cohesion are.\n\n_The Coming Storm_ is an important book. The writing is clear and concise and the history is critical. American audiences, often less versed in the Great War than their European counterparts, would do well to pick up a copy. As Mark Twain famously remarked, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Let’s hope that both Twain and Westad are wrong. Preventing another Great Power war must be the priority for policymakers. The costs are unimaginably high.",
  "title": "As WWI Fades from Memory, its Lessons Are Relevant as Ever"
}