Depending on how history is written, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be looked back on as the beginning of a third world war. President Zelensky’s government, along with its advocates in allied governments, has been making this argument since the war’s inception. They frame Ukraine as one battlefield in a larger global struggle, one that pits a growing axis of authoritarian nations against the Western-oriented liberal democracies that have dominated the post-Cold War world order. In this version of history, the war in Ukraine is not the Ukrainians’ war alone but the West’s war, too, an existential struggle for all freedom-loving peoples. There is plenty of evidence that lends credence to this argument. Had Putin’s initial invasion gone according to plan, a year later we would be talking about a similar invasion of Taiwan — as we anyway already are envisioning — and then the question of whether we were in the midst of a third world war would hardly merit debate.