To the Editor:
Re “The Global Order Is Changing. We Can No Longer Ignore the Warning Signs,” by Margaret MacMillan (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 27):
Professor MacMillan’s essay offers a convincing historical narrative. The author gathers ominous signs, summons the collapses of the past and invites the reader to recognize the present as the moment before the storm. After 30 years working in publishing, however, I’m suspicious of narratives that arrive this neatly.
The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Hitler’s rise to power, World War I — these events look inevitable in retrospect because we know how each story ends. The world is changing, yes, and some changes are serious, but disorder is not the same as collapse, and a crisis is not necessarily a prelude to revolution.
What we need now is less apocalyptic storytelling and more discrimination — to identify which institutions are failing, which are adapting and which are proving more resilient than the headlines suggest.
The temptation to declare a new world order is understandable, but sometimes the most useful act of historical imagination is to resist the seduction of a dramatic ending.
Carol Ann Fitzgerald Chapel Hill, N.C.
To the Editor:
I have admired Margaret MacMillan’s scholarship and public writings since my graduate school days, and I agree with everything she wrote about the crumbling of the current world order. Still, I am frustrated.
Once again, an influential academic and public intellectual has taken great pains to critique everything while investing very little effort in suggesting solutions. There is little intellectual risk involved in detailing the current dysfunctions of international politics and merely urging us to not “ignore the warning signs.” Why does Professor MacMillan not turn her formidable mind to the constructive work of identifying, or at least sketching, an alternative?
The loss of prestige that political liberalism and cooperative internationalism have suffered over the past two decades is due in no small part to the perpetually critical posture of its leading lights.
Trygve Throntveit Minneapolis The writer is a research professor in higher education at Ball State University and the author of “Power Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment.”
To the Editor:
Margaret MacMillan’s essay delivers a diagnosis of global disorder with a wistful nostalgia for the order that produced it. And whom does she blame? Electorates that are “angry and volatile” with “TikTok-addled attention spans” — all delivered with a sneer.
Elites, or those living comfortably in the current order, by contrast, merely grew “complacent” — more like a lapse than a failure. President Trump’s “my own morality” is paired with Louis XIV’s “la gloire,” as if crude 21st-century impunity and aristocratic vanity are equivalent sins in different costume.
The “discreet diplomacy” Professor MacMillan mourns also produced the Iraq War consensus and the bailout architecture that fed the entrenched inequality now fueling the anger she describes.
If the public has lost faith in institutions, those institutions’ own records are more likely the cause than degraded attention spans. An essay warning against nostalgia for a crumbling order shouldn’t itself be an exercise in it.
Vincent Liota Millerton, N.Y.
To the Editor:
Margaret MacMillan’s essay is a sobering diagnosis. But it stays within the worldview we are called to question. Her parallels — the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Weimar Germany during the rise of Hitler — are drawn from within the Westphalian nation-state system, read through a Western, modern-age lens. That history assumes order is something engineered — the Newtonian, mechanistic logic of modernity.
Reality is not a clockwork universe after all. The nation-state is not the largest element in play. It sits nested within human civilization, which is itself nested within the living Earth. This is not a machine breaking down. It is closer to a caterpillar dissolving before it becomes a butterfly. Civilization is being called into a deeper maturity, as a bed of weeds grows more complex and evolves into a prairie, revealing unimaginable regenerative potential.
We are not facing a new world order engineered by the same thinking that brought us here. We are facing a new era. It can exceed our wildest imagination if we stop mistaking the storm for a problem mechanistic thinking can even see, let alone solve. We face, in short, something that the poet William Blake understood but society ignored — a crisis of perception.
John Fullerton. Stonington, Conn. The writer is the author of “Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis.”
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