In a study of cyclical history, this book presents a grand sweep of modern history and how decades of savage wars, and turbulence, led to a brief era of exhilaration and hope, followed by despair in the new century. The collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the Soviet Union (1991), marking the end of the Cold War, were celebrated with great euphoria. 

The book points out that the defeat of Soviet communism by the Western allies was one of the most consequential outcomes of great power conflict in the twentieth century, comparable to the defeat of fascism in the Second World...