World War II at 81: The peace built after 1945 no longer feels permanent
Eighty years on, the world has once more reached a point where nothing makes sense to anyone with a conscience, and a historian may find unsettling similarities in the collapse of the old order
Manik Bandopadhyay started his famous novel Chinho with a harrowing tale. It depicted political unrest amid the macabre carnival of a peace built on the ruins of famine-stricken Bengal after the Second World War.
Even though the joy of the war end did not touch Bengal, the church bells were ringing in London and Paris; the GIs were returning to the United States with chests full of pride after saving the world from the nazi horror; and the Soviet Union was lamenting their death and sacrifice.
On 8 May 1945, the guns fell across Europe. The day is now celebrated in the west as Victory over Europe Day. Russia celebrates it the next day due to the time difference of the time of the surrender of Nazi Germany.
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Eighty years on, silence has once again fallen upon the world. The world has once more reached a point where nothing makes sense to anyone with a conscience, and a historian may find unsettling similarities in the collapse of the old order.
Wars continue across Iran, Gaza and Ukraine, while authoritarian politics is once again gaining ground globally.
The world that built the monster
When the Versailles Treaty of 1919 humiliated Germany through land loss, crushing war repayments and strict restrictions, it paved the path for the monster that engulfed the world in 20 years. The Kriegsschuldlüge, the war-guilt lie, as Germans called it, festered. Hyperinflation destroyed the savings of the middle class. The Great Depression of 1929 then broke what remained of the Weimar Republic's fragile legitimacy.
Into that vacuum stepped a politician who understood something the liberal establishment did not: suffering populations at first, do not seek solutions. They want someone to blame.
Dorothy Thompson, the American journalist who interviewed Hitler in 1932, was among the first foreign correspondents to recognise what was happening in Germany. She left that encounter with a description that has lost none of its power even today. She didn't find a titan of malevolence; she found a vessel for the collective hatred.
In her book 'I Saw Hitler!' in 1932, she wrote: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequential and voluble, ill-poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A future historian will find it difficult to explain why a great nation, at a particular moment in its history, found in him its leader. But I sat in a room with him and realised that he is the voice of the world's most powerful inferiority complex."
Donald Trump's disdain for post-war architecture is central to them. He has questioned the value of NATO, courted authoritarian leaders with an admiration that is difficult to read as merely strategic, and conducted foreign policy in a manner that has left allies uncertain and adversaries encouraged.
As she correctly pointed out, such monsters are created through the particular desperation of the society that elevates him. The monster is always a symptom. The disease lies elsewhere.
In his 1941 work 'Escape from Freedom', the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the primary drive of the German populace was not a desire for liberty, but a desperate flight from the 'burden' of modern isolation and economic insecurity. When the middle class lost their savings to hyperinflation and their status to the Depression, the 'freedom' of the Weimar Republic felt like a void of structure and meaning. Hitler offered a psychological refuge, a way to submerge the fragile individual self into the roaring ocean of the Volksgemeinschaft, the people's community.
And that may explain the rise of the far-right across the West. The rise is made willingly, gratefully, and with something close to relief. Hitler did not seize power. Every institution that might have restrained him — the courts, the press, the churches, the universities, the civil service — either capitulated or was captured. Those that resisted were crushed.
The patterns are similar in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who has suggested the 'termination' of constitutional rules to overturn election results and floated the idea of delaying or even cancelling elections when the 'process' does not serve the 'people'.
Even though hatred was the fuel, it simply did not make it possible. It was the prior collapse of trust in institutions, in the system, in the idea that the order could deliver fairness.
This erosion of faith is what Hannah Arendt, in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', identified as the essential preparation for absolute rule. The ideal subject of a totalitarian regime is not the convinced ideologue, she argued, but something far beyond that. Today, we enter a state where the only remaining authority is the charisma of the leader and the only remaining truth is whatever he tweets every morning.
The world order built on the ashes of the old
After the war, the world realised that a world without rules defaults to the matsyanyaya of the strong devouring the weak. And the United Nations was formed in 1945. The Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF and the World Bank were created in 1949. The Marshall Plan and NATO followed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights came, the Geneva Conventions were updated and expanded.
They were the attempt to make cooperation more rational than conflict, to bind nations into webs of interdependence so dense that war would become too costly to wage. They were frequently exploited by the powerful. But they held.
For eight decades, no war engulfed Europe. For eight decades, the major powers, however tensely, did not fire directly upon one another. And for once, Pax Americana was achieved.
The American-led liberal international order was never purely benevolent. Washington toppled governments, fought proxy wars, and exempted itself from rules it enforced upon others. But it also maintained an international system where smaller nations could exist, trade could flow, and disputes could be adjudicated by something other than brute military force. Whatever its sins, it was a structure. And structures, as 1919 to 1939 demonstrated, matter enormously.
The rhyme beginning to sound
Now let's look at the world on the 8th of May, 2026.
Russia's war in Ukraine has entered its fourth year. It's a war of territorial conquest in the heart of Europe, of the kind the post-war order was specifically designed to render unthinkable. Gaza lies in catastrophic ruin. The world witnessed a genocide of 75,000 Palestinians carried out by Israel with impunity.
The Iran War drags on, destabilising the world economy. Nobody knows where this war is going. In the Indo-Pacific, the question of Taiwan sits like an unexploded shell. This feels like the time precisely for which W B Yeats wrote: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
And America, the architect, the guarantor, the sometimes-overbearing landlord of the liberal international order, has elected a president whose instinct is to treat alliances as transactions, institutions as obstacles, and the rule of law as a constraint upon the powerful rather than a protection for the weak.
Donald Trump's disdain for post-war architecture is central to them. He has questioned the value of NATO, courted authoritarian leaders with an admiration that is difficult to read as merely strategic, and conducted foreign policy in a manner that has left allies uncertain and adversaries encouraged.
Sebastian Haffner, a German journalist who fled the Nazi regime and later wrote a memoir of those years called 'Defying Hitler', composed in 1939 but published only posthumously, described the peculiar psychological state of the civilised person caught inside a collapsing order, "The first thing that the Nazis have done is to abolish the private life. They have turned every individual into a part of the state machine (...) We were like people in a slowly sinking ship who go on playing bridge in the saloon while the water is already rising in the hold."
The saloon and the card game are different today. They are feeds and comment sections and rolling news cycles, but the rising water is the same. The UN's authority erodes while The World Trade Organisation's dispute mechanisms stall. International criminal courts find their indictments treated as optional courtesies rather than binding law when it comes to Israel. They are slowly being hollowed out, slowly, until the shell remains but the substance is gone.
Meanwhile, the domestic politics of democracies across the world are converging on a familiar pattern. The press are being delegitimised as purveyors of lies. Minorities are being made into symbols of national decline. Courts are packed or bypassed. Electoral systems are questioned not when they produce fraud but when they produce the wrong result. From the US to India, this is the state of democracies with highly developed institutions and safeguards.
A historian does not need to invoke the 1930s gratuitously to observe that these are the mechanisms by which democracies have previously been undone. The mechanisms are the same. The velocity is, if anything, greater, accelerated by digital technology and AI-based surveillance that Goebbels could only have dreamt of.
This is perhaps the most dangerous of all historical errors—the confusion of a managed peace with a permanent one.
To ignore the unexploded shells of our current era like the war in Ukraine, the catastrophe in Gaza, the gathering tension in the Indo-Pacific, and the institutional decay at the heart of the West is to commit the same error of comfortable inattention that was so bitterly regretted after World War 2. It is to sit in the saloon, playing cards, while the water rises.
The order built in 1945 was a necessary construction, raised at enormous cost from the rubble of catastrophe. Whether the world leaders are wise enough or dedicated enough to maintain what they built is the defining question of this moment.
