Ours is an age of confusion. How should we navigate it? Timothy Garton Ash

In these times of planetary polycrisis, we try to get our bearings by looking to the past. Are we perhaps in The New Cold War, as Robin.

-  Timothy Garton Ash

Niblett, the former director of the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, proposes in a new book? Is this bringing us towards the brink of a third world war, as the historian Niall Ferguson has argued? Or is the world beginning to resemble the late 19th-century Europe of competing empires and great powers writ large? Another way of trying to put our travails into historically comprehensible shape is to label them as an "age of...", with the words that follow suggesting either a parallel with or a sharp contrast to an earlier age. So the CNN foreign affairs guru Fareed Zakaria suggests in his book that we are in a new Age of Revolutions, meaning that we can learn something from the French, Industrial and American revolutions. Or is it The Age of the Strongman, as proposed by the Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman? It's The Age of Unpeace, says Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

But surely it's The Age of AI, the title of a book co-authored by Henry Kissinger. If you type "the age of..." into the search box on the website of the journal Foreign Affairs, you get another bunch of contenders, including the age(s) of amorality, energy insecurity, impunity, America first, great-power distraction and climate disaster.