The Holiday from History Is Over
Brendan Simms' book, The Return of Great Powers, critiques the post-Cold War era's assumption of a peaceful global order. He argues that the West's neglect of hard power has led to a resurgence of geopolitical tensions among major states. Simms emphasizes the importance of understanding historical power dynamics to navigate the current international landscape.
- ▪Brendan Simms' book examines five centuries of Great Power conflict and critiques the post-Cold War era's false sense of security.
- ▪He argues that the West's focus on economic cooperation over military might has emboldened rivals.
- ▪Simms highlights the return to a Great Power system where military strength is prioritized over economic and legal considerations.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | The Bulwark |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-holiday-from-history-is-over-return-great-powers-brendan-simms-review-china-russia-japan-europe |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 09:32:53 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T09:40:00.118Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T09:40:00.118Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Holiday from History Is OverAnd the great powers are back.Brian StewartMay 29, 2026Share(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Shutterstock)The Return of the Great Powersby Brendan SimmsBasic Books, 480 pp., $32BY NOW IT’S CLEAR THAT THE INTERLUDE of relative peace, prosperity, and democratization (for most of the world) that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union was not the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but a short blip in which the gears of global history briefly slipped.With his meticulous new book, The Return of Great Powers, Brendan Simms arrives as the stoic chronicler of the post–Cold War false dawn, and of the grim realities of power that confront us anew.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Bulwark.
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