Spheres of Chaos

Global Disarray in 2026

In June 1976, Communist parties from East and West convened in East Berlin to consider the growing tide of Eurocommunism in countries like Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Washington was very concerned.

I covered the event for the Washington Post.

On a spring trip from Moscow to Venice, my wife and I had stayed at the luxurious Gritti Palace, with a letter of introduction to the manager. He was in despair, certain that in a year or so Italy would have a Communist government and the hotel would go under.

That did not happen. Nearly fifty years later, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez spent millions at the Gritti Palace, apparently in lavish luster, for their over-the-top wedding last summer.

Since the end of World War II, epochs, situations, and national groups have been defined in shorthand: the Cold War, the non-aligned, the Axis of Evil, the Global South, the end of colonialism, ISIS, and so forth. This year we were supposedly on the cusp of the era of Spheres of Influence, the world divided among three domineering powers: the United States, China, and Russia.

As it happened, within a few years after that East Berlin meeting, Eurocommunism’s influence peaked and ebbed. It is now the far right that poses the greatest threat to democracy and security. Looking around, what we see everywhere are forces massing to the left, right, north, south, east, and west. All these threats and violence amount (updating a previous term) to the New World Dis-Order.

So, how will this chaotic era evolve? My sense is that it will end in a climax that will defy most of the predictions being made.

Donald Trump is increasingly frenetic. Vladimir Putin is intransigent and cruel. Xi Jinping is seemingly cool, presiding without public rambunctiousness but with dictatorial authority over China’s vast strengths.

And Benjamin Netanyahu, the belligerent leader of a country of ten million people, has shown extraordinary skills at political survival and fomenting mayhem in his region — and, to a great extent, in the United States, certainly among American Jews.

My great fear is that this period will explode rather than subside. Trump and Putin both have nuclear arsenals, with arms treaties having expired. When their control is directly challenged, I worry that one or both will do something no longer unthinkable: prove that they can mount a nuclear strike as a demonstration of what can happen.

I imagine that there are still restraints on Trump, though when I hear Pete Hegseth’s bluster, I’m not so sure. But who will stop Putin from doing whatever he wants? Of all the great dangers in the world — Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Taiwan, et al. — the gravest is Vladimir Putin’s nuclear cache and his absolute power over it.

I am, by instinct and experience, not an alarmist. Declaring crises of all kinds — foreign (Vietnam and Iraq, for instance) and domestic (illegal immigration) — has a self-fulfilling tendency, and usually does not solve the problems before making them worse, one way or another.

I believe the current Trump-Putin do-si-do is an exceptional relationship. This is not Hitler and Mussolini, a cliché of repetitive history, but it certainly does rhyme.

Their assembled weaponries — strategic, tactical, and cyber — can destroy civilizations with far less use of conventional military power than in the past. I do not know what Xi Jinping would do if he thought matters were really getting out of control, but I can’t imagine he would not take whatever action he felt he needed to protect his interests.

Here’s where I try to calm down, at least to myself.

Threats to civilization have been around since the beginning of recorded time, and great civilizations have collapsed. Think of Greece and Rome, the Aztecs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs, the Soviets. To some extent the “clash of civilizations,” as Sam Huntington so vividly foresaw, is inevitable, but at least before the nuclear age civilizations could regroup and progress would continue to a better world.

Will that happen now, when multiple civilizations are clashing and empires are asserting their influences?

Sometimes, in the midst of our vast political challenges. small signs — spring’s green shoots — become apparent, showing that societies can make surprising, peaceful pivots.

From 1945 until 1989, the fate of Berlin was considered a potential trigger for nuclear superpower confrontation. But on that 1976 trip to East Berlin, I encountered something completely unexpected, which I wrote about in a “Letter from Berlin,” as follows:

“Most evenings after work, Heinz, a young shop foreman, and his wife, Ellie, an English teacher, settle down with beer and pretzels in front of their big television for several hours of cops-and-robbers (Kojak is popular), commercials and the latest news.

“What makes the routine surprising is that they live in East Germany, not far from the Berlin Wall, and the television they watch is three channels beamed every day from the West. Heinz, moreover, is a Communist Party member.”

I wrote that as much as 80 percent of East Germany was receiving West German television channels on ordinary sets, and even senior party officials conceded that the programs were widely watched.

My coverage of the Eurocommunist summit was on the front page. My Berlin letter was somewhere inside the newspaper. On reflection, I have concluded that the television story was the one that had the really significant lasting impact on how East Germany would evolve.

I wish I could cite similar indicators that forecast a less chaotic future because of the way most people want to go about their lives. At the moment, though, I don’t have any in mind.