World War X / Alex De Waal

World War X began when existing conflicts metastasized into a global, interconnected system. That happened with parallel events in the early 2010s – the NATO intervention in Libya and that country’s descent into civil war, the war in Syria and the international escalation of Russian influence operations when Vladimir Putin returned to Russia’s presidency in 2012. By the time Trump began his first term, vast regions of the world were run as political marketplaces.