Americans once associated spheres of influence with a cynical, volatile European past. Now Washington is resurrecting them.
In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942.
The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease.
