s the leaders of the world’s two superpowers, the US and China, held a summit meeting in San Francisco last week, many observers have harked back to grand bipolar simplicities. A new cold war! The west versus the rest! Democracy versus autocracy! Let’s woo the global south! But the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt warned us always to beware of the the frightful simplifiers. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we now live in a world fragmented between multiple great and middle powers who do not
