What the road to World War II can teach us (It’s not what you think)
Is history repeating itself?
What the heck is going on?
The world seems more dangerous today than it did a decade ago. Authoritarianism is on the rise. For the first time since 1945, the number of democracies and the percentage of people living in democracies are falling.
For a brief, shining moment at the start of the twenty-first century—for the first time in world history—more people lived in democracies than lived in autocracies. In the last decade, that’s changed. Has the zenith of global democracy passed us by?
To make matters worse, lots of folks who aren’t exactly fans of democracy and liberal values keep getting together. For example, take the September 2025 meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The meeting took place at a huge military parade in Beijing. Nobody knows exactly what the three authoritarian leaders decided (although sources say they shared hints for achieving immortality). Still, a viewer could be forgiven for thinking it looked less like a meeting of world leaders and more like a conclave of the global underworld’s top brass, who gathered to decide who would get which slices of the pie (that is, the world). Certainly, their neighbors thought so. Those neighbors—Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and South Korea—responded by expanding cooperation among themselves and with the European Union for their common defense. Noticeably absent was the United States. And if you’re an American like me, you probably aren’t quite sure where your country stands in this increasingly polarized world.
A growing alliance of autocracies joining together while international institutions and liberal democracies falter…it all sounds hauntingly familiar. Is the world careening toward a repeat of the Second World War? And if it is, which side will we be on?
A new Axis?
It’s notable that the meeting between Putin, Kim, and Xi included the Chinese commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of victory over Japan in the Second World War. There are, in fact, certain parallels between the early years of that conflict and the world today. The totalitarian powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarized Japan also formed a three-way alliance at the beginning of that war—the so-called Axis powers. In hindsight, it’s obvious that their leaders were villains.
Less well-known is the fact that America hung in the balance in the years leading up to World War II. Our decision to join the Allied states fighting against the Axis powers was far from inevitable. To many Americans in the 1930s, Hitler’s Germany seemed a shining beacon of order, unity, and dynamism. Most weren’t overly concerned with the growing evidence of the Nazi’s obvious discrimination against Jews and other racial minorities. In fact, many of the Nazi’s eugenic practices mirrored America’s racial order. Remember, in the 1930s, Jim Crow segregation shaped daily life for many Americans, and it was only one of several forms of overt discrimination.
The fact is that in the 1930s, the average American shared a problem with citizens of both the Axis and Allied powers. They were all suffering from the failure of a shared global economic and political order. The people of the world had been promised that liberal democracy and free trade would protect them, provide them with opportunities, and give their children a better future. Instead, the Great Depression caused chaos and impoverished most everyone. If unemployment in 1932 Germany was a catastrophic 30%, in the United States it was just a few notches lower—25%. In democracies like the United States and Great Britain, as much as in Weimar Germany and the Italian Republic, citizens who looked to their governments to save them found only leaders frozen by gridlock between political parties and gross inefficiency.
It’s no wonder so many of the world’s people turned to populist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler who promised to save them from the chaos of democracy. Even in the United States, sympathy for extremist ideas ran deep. As the Great Depression wracked the country, populist authoritarian movements like the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts gained support in many parts of the US, and racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-Semitism were very common.
Balanced on a knife’s edge—parallels to the present
There was no inevitability to the United States ending up on the Allied side of the war. Our choosing the right path was partly the result of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But we also need to recognize hard work and commitment to democracy by Americans of all political parties. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt played an important role. His New Deal policies, which were meant to address the Great Depression, were passed as legislative compromises rather than imposed by executive order. The promise of these reforms kept most people invested in government instead of seeking radical alternatives. But Roosevelt’s opponents also played a key role. In Congress, they limited the President’s power, notably by rejecting Roosevelt’s 1937 proposal to add justices to the Supreme Court. Perceiving a world moving toward division, Americans—Republicans and Democrats—reinforced our democratic order and made choices that led to Allied victory. Still, we have to admit that it might well have gone very differently.
It's important for us to look back on American involvement in the Second World War in the context of our current global and domestic position. Once again, the world is moving toward division. Old alliances—many forged in the crucible of World War II—are weakening. Big countries are carving out spheres of influence: China in the Pacific and parts of Africa, Russia in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In this context, Americans can’t ignore our own government threatening Canada, Greenland, and other neighbors. Meanwhile, as I write this blog post, Russian drones are flying over Poland—the same country where the Second World War began. The Polish government has now called on its NATO allies—including the United States—to step up to its defense. It seems possible that open conflict in Europe is looming once again.
One effect of all this instability is that people are once again dissatisfied with the global economic and political order. After decades of relative stability and the growth of a global middle class, the world today is seeing widespread poverty and insecurity. Our collective leadership fails to address the great questions of our generation, and the result is a widespread feeling of hopelessness and alienation. For many of us, it feels like once again much of the world is turning away from the kinds of inclusive, open, empathic, democratic societies that are best at addressing shared problems. Instead, people are once again seeking the comforts of authoritarianism.
It's not too late to act to reverse these trends, but the longer we wait the worse things become. Looking back to the 1930s for lessons, I see not only dark paths that we thankfully did not take but also missed opportunities to head off the slaughter of the global conflict that followed. Some of those lessons include foreign relations issues like committing to support our democratic allies. A lot of the necessary actions, however, have to do with how we act in our own society—embracing free speech, civil action, and democracy—even when it’s uncomfortable for us, even when our “side” loses. The lesson to be learned from World War II—and from lots of other historical cases like the ones shown below—is that only democracy can defeat the turn to autocracy, and only if people commit to it.
Where do you fit?
In both the victories achieved and opportunities missed, history—particularly the events of the 1930s—holds lessons for citizens like you and me. First, we will need to hold our own governments to high standards of international collaboration. That means enforcing the rule of law worldwide and honoring our treaty obligations. Second, we need to ensure that we are on the side of the democracies, and not the authoritarians. That means turning away from a politics of fear and refusing both acts of political violence and the structural violence (or legalization) of discrimination against groups based on their religion, gender, race, or politics. It means embracing empathy. It means voting and guaranteeing the vote for others. It means cutting through the whirlwind of news by using critical thinking practices and evidence-based decision-making.
The best time to act to preserve democracy and liberty was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.
About the author: Trevor Getz is professor of African history at San Francisco State University. He has written 11 books on African and world history, including Abina and the Important Men. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.