Much depends on the way in which the war in Ukraine is concluded. The only thing we know for certain is that whatever the outcome, the world is rearming.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History? in The National Interest. In his seminal essay, published before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama argued that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the ideological alternative to liberalism in representative government and the market economy - in a word, communism - had been eliminated.

As a consequence, international relations would be overwhelmingly concerned with economic and technical matters and no longer with politics or strategy, thus reducing the chances of a large-scale, violent international conflict.

Fukuyama sensibly placed a question mark at the end of his title. While its economy opened up under pressure, China did not, however, liberalise its political environment. Authoritarians waited, adapted and came back in Russia and elsewhere, including in Africa. In the Middle East some wobbled, briefly, but an illiberal order remains more or less untroubled.

Now we may be seeing a return to history.

World rearming

Much depends on the way in which the war in Ukraine is concluded. The only thing we know for certain is that whatever the outcome, the world is rearming. This is likely not to be at the 2% of GDP levels much of the...