How Did We Get Here?

Abstract

Understanding the post-Cold War era—or whatever people may call it someday—has spawned a cottage industry in the past few decades. Yet surprisingly few of these attempts have grappled with the near disappearance of one of the cardinal principles of the twentieth century: collective security. This book traces that disappearance in time by revisiting several essays written from the mid-1990s to the past few years, and asking how so many of the lessons learned during the twentieth century were nearly forgotten by the first two decades of the twenty-first century.