OPINION: OPINION: We're moving into a new era of history, or are we?

Dec. 23—It was supposed to be the end of an era. Data showed that war had declined. While the first half of the 20th century marked a period of extraordinary violence, the world had become more peaceful in the past 30 years, a statistical analysis of the global death toll from war showed.

Those findings, by mathematicians at the University of York, and innovative databases like The Correlates of War Project, used new techniques to show battle deaths of combatants and civilians had been declining globally since the end of the Second World War.

They did verify another widespread belief. Namely, that the world has seldom been without war. Right now, there are a number of U.S. military actions playing out in various theaters of war around the world or in support of various military actions. Wikipedia has a list that includes the latest: Operation Prosperity Guardian, otherwise known as the Israel-Hamas war theater, plus ongoing operations in the Syrian civil war, Niger and Yemen.

Not listed is the Ukraine war theater, as the U.S. has no boots on the ground, despite a massive outlay of funds and armaments for Ukraine. The U.S. isn't the only country involved in conflicts, of course. It's a world in turmoil.

For a moment back there, though, many seemed to forget that. There was a mindset that crept into the Western body politic and leadership in the so-called post-Cold War era, which followed the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. That mindset was the tendency to declare a historic end to certain eras — much like "the end of history," the infamous declaration by political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama believed that after the fall of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy was the end-all of political systems and could never be surpassed.

More than three decades later, that seems a rather premature view. As Princeton University historian David Bell puts it (Foreign Policy, July 2022): "The pie of history gets endlessly re-sliced. It is the end of wars, and the collapse of regimes, that most reliably marks the end of an era. The end of the post-Cold War period is far harder to measure. Indeed, it has already been proclaimed many times: with the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; with 9/11; with Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia; with Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea; with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president."

The post-Cold War new-reality mindset had consequences that historians will probably ruminate over for some time. In the attack on Ukraine, for example, Western leaders appeared to be caught off guard, even though Russia had been signaling its intent to invade for a long time, massing tanks and troops at Ukraine border.

The Washington Post reported (Aug 16, 2022) that, "Some in the White House found it hard to wrap their minds around the scale of the Russian leader's ambitions. 'It did not seem like the kind of thing that a rational country would undertake,' one participant in the meeting later said of the planned occupation of most of a country of 232,000 square miles and nearly 45 million people."

This shouldn't be happening, you can almost hear them saying, bolstered by a post-Cold War mentality. As the invasion unfolded, John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, was quoted as suggesting that the war was getting in the way of the more important climate change battle. War had to take a back seat now. We had to save the planet first. Like a plot of the Chinese blockbuster "The Wandering Earth."

But like it or not, the winds of war started blowing hard again in February 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And, as we've seen, things seemed to worsen in 2023. (Historians put the start of the Ukraine conflict almost a decade earlier, with tensions building again ahead of the 2022 invasion.)

How bad a year has it been? Vox.com has a detailed graph of 600 years of war the rate of death per 100,000 people. After World War II, those rates of death dropped off precipitously. Recently, however, death rates of combatants, which had been declining, have begun marching up.

The Washington Post reported last year that "the top 25 percent of wars, in terms of intensity, witness just over 200 battlefield deaths per day. ... The Russia-Ukraine war already passes that threshold, even using conservative estimates of fatalities." If it continued into 2023, the Post warned, we'd see death rates from wars returning to a high point. "This war will be among the deadliest of the last 200 years ..."

Well, 2023 has come and almost gone, and the warring has continued.

There'll be more 'end of' declarations — the end of history, democracy, capitalism, borders and life as we know it. There's been talk around academic circles and political analysts that we're in the middle of a seismic cultural shift and a political, social and sexual revolution.

But as Bell said about the Cold War: "I would not be at all surprised if, 10 years from now, following some new international horror, a fresh chorus of instant analysts declares it over yet again."

Obviously, we humans lack the techniques to bring wars to an end completely. We do know that this world is increasingly connected, and a holistic stew of issues can trigger wars around the globe: injustice, land, mistreatment of various groups, misunderstandings, lack of education, religious differences, government mismanagement, a lack of enough resources, food shortages. Anarchist intellectuals blame wars on profit. That's part of the stew, too. In fact, that entire stew is the world right now.

Despite predictions that 2024 will be a terrible year, there's always hope with the start of a new year — and remember, those declarations about historic changes are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Leacock is deputy opinion editor at the Journal