The past decade and a half has seen major upheavals around the world. The 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, the Covid-19 pandemic, and major regional conflicts in Sudan, the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere have left a residual uncertainty. Added to this is a tense, growing rivalry between the United States and its perceived adversaries, especially China.

In the face of these harrowing times, commentators often resort to the simple post-1945 analogy to explain geopolitics. The world, we are repeatedly told, is facing a “new Cold War.”

But as a historian who studies the U.S. role in the world, these references to a conflict that locked the West in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union and its allies for decades—and to the impact the Cold War had around the world—are a false lens through which to view events today. To a critical eye, the world resembles less the structured competition of the Cold War and more the agonizing breakdown of the world order that occurred in the 1930s.

The “decade of low dishonesty”

In 1939, the poet WH Auden described the previous ten years as the “decade of little dishonesty” – a time that produced uncertainty and conflict.

From the perspective of a century looking back, the period between the stock market crash of 1929 and the outbreak of World War II can be distorted by loaded terms such as “isolationism” or “appeasement.” The decade is portrayed as a morality play about the rise of figures such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and as a simple narrative about appeasing aggression.

But that era was much more complicated. In the 1930s, powerful forces reshaped economics, society, and political beliefs. Understanding these dynamics can bring clarity to the confusing events of recent years.

Major and minor depressions

The Great Depression shaped the 1930s worldwide. It was not, as is often recalled, simply the stock market crash of 1929. This was merely the prelude to a large-scale collapse of the global economy that lasted for a painfully long time.

Persistent economic problems affected economies and individuals from Minneapolis to Mumbai, India, and led to profound cultural, social, and ultimately political changes. At the same time, the length of the Great Depression and its resistance to standard solutions—such as simply letting market forces “eradicate” the “rot” of a massive crisis—discredited the laissez-faire approach to economics and the liberal capitalist states that supported it.

The “minor depression” that followed the financial crisis of 2008 had similar consequences: it plunged the international and national economies into chaos, brought uncertainty to billions of people, and discredited the liberal globalization that had prevailed since the 1990s.

During both the Greater and Lesser Depressions, people around the world found their lives turned upside down. Finding established ideas, elites and institutions inadequate, they turned to more radical and extreme voices.

Not only did Wall Street crash; for many, the crisis also undermined the ideology that drives the United States and much of the world: liberalism. In the 1930s, this skepticism raised questions about whether democracy and capitalism, already marked by contradictions in the form of discrimination, racism and empire, were up to the demands of the modern world. In the last decade, we have seen voters in countries around the world turn to authoritarian-oriented populists.

The American essayist Edmund Wilson lamented in 1931: “We have … not only lost our way in the economic labyrinth, but also our conviction of the value of what we do.” Writers of major magazines explained “why liberalism is bankrupt.”

Today, both left and right figures can share the view expressed by conservative political scientist Patrick Deneen in his book “Why Liberalism Failed”.

Evil winds

Liberalism – an ideology based essentially on individual freedoms and the rule of law, as well as a belief in private property and the free market – was touted by its adherents as a way to bring democratization and economic prosperity to the world. But in recent times, liberal “globalization” has hit a skid.

The Great Depression had a similar effect. The optimism of the 1920s—a period some called the “first wave” of democratization—collapsed as countries from Japan to Poland established populist, authoritarian governments.

Today’s rise of figures such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia or Xi Jinping in China reminds historians that authoritarianism continues to have an appeal in times of uncertainty.

What both eras have in common is an increasing fragmentation of the global economy, during which countries, including the United States, tried to stop economic decline by raising tariffs to protect domestic industry.

Economic nationalism, although hotly debated and contested, became a dominant force worldwide in the 1930s, and this is reflected in recent appeals for protectionist measures in many countries, including the United States.

A world full of complaints

While the Great Depression in the United States sparked a “New Deal” in which the state assumed a new role in the economy and society, people elsewhere, suffering the implosion of a liberal world economy, witnessed the rise of regimes that gave enormous power to the central government.

The current appeal of the Chinese model of authoritarian economic growth and the strongman image embodied by Orban, Putin and others – not only in parts of the “global South” but also in parts of the West – is reminiscent of the 1930s.

The depression exacerbated a number of so-called “totalitarian” ideologies: fascism in Italy, communism in Russia, militarism in Japan and, above all, National Socialism in Germany.

Importantly, these systems gained a certain legitimacy in the eyes of many people around the world, especially in comparison to weakening liberal governments that seemed unable to provide answers to the crises.

Some of these totalitarian regimes already harbored significant disagreements with the world that had emerged after World War I. And when a world order based on liberal principles failed to provide stability, they set about reshaping it according to their own ideas.

Observers today may be shocked by the return of large-scale wars and the associated threat to global stability. But there are clear parallels to the Depression years.

In the early 1930s, countries like Japan attempted to reform the world system by force – hence the term “revisionists.” The secession of parts of China, especially Manchuria, in 1931 was met with little more than non-recognition of China by Western democracies, much like Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014.

Over the course of the decade, open military aggression expanded. China became the lodestar as its anti-imperial war of self-preservation against Japan was reluctantly supported by other powers. Today’s Ukrainians could well understand this parallel.

Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia and finally Poland became the target of “revisionist” states that attempted to reshape the international order in their own image through military aggression or the threat of military aggression.

Ironically, many who lived through these years of crisis were experiencing their own “cold war” against the regimes and methods of states like Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. They used those very words to describe the breakdown of normal international relations into a scrum of constant, sometimes violent, competition. French observers spoke of a period “without peace, without war” or a “demi guerre.”

The figures of the time understood that this was less a matter of ongoing competition than a melting pot in which norms and relationships were being reforged. Their words reflect the sentiments of those today who are observing the emergence of a new multipolar world and the rise of regional powers seeking to expand their own local influence.

Taking the reins

It is sobering to compare our present with a situation in the past that ended in a world war.

Historical parallels are never perfect, but they invite us to rethink our present. Our future need not be a repeat of the “hot war” that ended the 1930s, nor of the Cold War that followed.

The growing power and capability of countries like Brazil, India, and other regional powers reminds us that historical actors evolve and change. But if we recognize that our own era, like the 1930s, is a complicated multipolar period beset by severe crises, we can see that tectonic forces are once again reshaping many fundamental relationships. Understanding this offers us an opportunity to contain forces that led to disaster in another era.