War and peace in our time will depend on the decisions of various world leaders, but these three presidents above all: Donald Trump in the United States, Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia. So peer into their minds and take stock of the ideas floating around there. What you’ll find is not so much clashing ideologies as a common mindset. And that spells trouble.
During the Cold War, American and Soviet leaders did subscribe to rival ideologies. The former stood for liberty and capitalism (or “liberalism”), the latter for different shades of Marxist-Leninism. Remarkably, that scary situation turned out to be rather stable. The Cold War stayed cold (unless you happened to find yourself on the frontline of a proxy war) and was ultimately resolved peacefully.
