The Lost Peace

We won the Cold War. Yet over the past three decades, economic, strategic and political naïvety has cleared the ground for a new and menacing world order—one defined by instability, energy crises, unending conflict in the Middle East, and authoritarian great powers such as Russia and China.
In his new book, Henrik Dahl–an acclaimed Danish author and Member of the European Parliament–takes aim at the West’s elites. He identifies four decisive failures: in our dealings with Russia, which we underestimated and misunderstood after the collapse of the Soviet Union; in the naïve belief that economic integration alone would deliver democracy in China; in the Middle East, where Western idealism has collided with the hard realities of political Islam; and in our failure to grasp energy as a geopolitical weapon, particularly in Europe. 
We won the Cold War—but we lost the peace.
HENRIK DAHL (b. 1960) is a Member of the European Parliament and a former member of the Danish Parliament for the Liberal Alliance, a Danish centre-right party (2015–2024). He holds a degree in sociology and has for many years worked as an author, commentator and public intellectual. Henrik Dahl lives in Copenhagen and Brussels.