In a critique of the political thinker James Burnham, penned in the wake of World War II, George Orwell wrote:Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. But a war that seems stalemated, that grinds without dramatic shifts, poses a somewhat different challenge to political judgment; the observer is always tempted to discern a certain trend, a sweeping historical judgment, amid a state of ebb and flow and wartime fog. The war in Ukraine is a case study, yielding very different big-picture arguments based on developments from month to month and even week to week. The same pattern applies to analysis of how the war fits in the global power picture.

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Persons: James Burnham, George Orwell, Orwell, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Samuel Huntington’s, Francis Fukuyama’s Locations: South Asia, Asia, Tobruk, Cairo, Berlin, London, Ukraine