Odd Arne Westad

Today's eerie echoes of the First World War


April 30, 2026
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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers talks with Odd Arne Westad – Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University – about his new book The Coming Storm, which argues that rather than entering a new Cold War, we are actually reliving the high-tension multipolarity of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a dangerous era where rapid technological shifts, the collapse of globalization, and the friction between a rising China and a nervous United States mirror the exact structural conditions that caused the world to sleepwalk into the catastrophe of World War 1.


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