Latest news with #Zweig
Business Mayor
22-05-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
AppOnBoard's Quvy simulates audiences for user acquisition testing
AppOnBoard is unveiling Quvy, a tool that enables AI to test user acquisition schemes on simulated audiences to speed up a game's audience growth. User acquisition (UA) is one of the biggest challenges in gaming today. Whether indie developers or major studios, teams are forced to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to test ad creatives—often waiting weeks to identify what works with audiences. This process, reliant on traditional ad platforms and real-world A/B testing, has become a costly bottleneck, said Jonathan Zweig, CEO of AppOnBoard, in an interview with GamesBeat. AppOnboard, the company behind do-it-yourself game development platform Buildbox, is solving this with a breakthrough tool that uses simulated audiences to predict ad performance—delivering insights in minutes at a fraction of the cost—allowing gaming companies to grow their real audiences at lightning speed. The team addressed the major pain point for indie developers: high user acquisition (UA) costs. They developed a solution using AI to simulate audiences, reducing UA costs from $400,000 to $4,000, Zweig said. Here's a case study. 'The AI, developed over six months, predicts ad performance accurately, saving time and money,' Zweig said. 'The discussion also touches on the broader implications of synthetic data in AI, the challenges of eSports sustainability, and the impact of major game releases like Grand Theft Auto VI.' Jonathan Zweig is CEO of AppOnBoard, creator of Quvy. UA costs continue to climb. Acquiring a single paying user in mobile gaming can exceed $50. Creative testing now favors studios with massive budgets, leaving smaller developers behind. Quvy levels the playing field. It replaces expensive, slow A/B testing with fast, predictive simulations. Developers can now test thousands of creatives in minutes, launching only the top performers and saving both time and money. 'One of the biggest responses we got when we asked the community was about the biggest pain points for an indie developer, and overwhelmingly it was the cost of UA,' Zweig said. 'How do you compete with the big guys? Our CTO thought of this crazy idea, 'Why don't we simulate audiences to test ads to dramatically reduce UA costs?'' The company tried it and it's 'crazy effective,' Zweig said. Quvy can drastically reduces the cost of user acquisition via AI. Top gaming companies spend large sums of money testing ads before launch. With Quvy, they no longer have to. Simulated audiences allow for: Accelerated Testing Cycles – What took a week now takes minutes – What took a week now takes minutes Massive Cost Savings – Dramatically reduced ad testing costs – Dramatically reduced ad testing costs Smarter Creative Decisions – Quvy predicts winners before spending – Quvy predicts winners before spending No Guesswork – Validate thousands of variations affordably – Validate thousands of variations affordably Improved Resource Efficiency – Cost savings in man hours for tracking setup and data analysis – Cost savings in man hours for tracking setup and data analysis Higher Performing Campaigns – Resulting ads perform better and have higher campaign success rates – Resulting ads perform better and have higher campaign success rates Secure Testing Environment – Protect your unique ideas from being exposed to the public while gaining valuable actionable insights. – Protect your unique ideas from being exposed to the public while gaining valuable actionable insights. Maintaining a True Control Group – Keep your future audience and customers untapped while you find the best performing creative. The global digital ad market is projected to surpass $730 billion in 2025, with AI-powered marketing growing at 26.7% CAGR. Traditional A/B testing tools make up over $50 billion of that market. Quvy's focus—simulated audiences—is an emerging $20 billion to $30 billion category, growing at 30%+ annually. It's reshaping how developers validate creative ideas pre-launch. Read More Gearbox and Blackbird announce Homeworld 3 launches on March 8 Quvy can do tests for ads on thousands of simulated users. 'Discoverability shouldn't be limited to those with the biggest budgets,' said Zweig. 'We're proud to offer Quvy at affordable pricing so anyone can market their games and apps as effectively as the largest studios and companies in the world.' Whether you're launching your first game or managing a global UA budget, Quvy offers a smarter, faster, and more affordable way to win. 'By lowering the barrier to creative testing, we're helping developers compete based on quality and innovation—not just ad spend,' Zweig said. AppOnboard builds AI-first tools that empower creators. Its flagship product, Buildbox, enables anyone to create games and apps without coding. Quvy, its latest innovation, uses simulated audiences to predict creative performance before launch. Together, they form a unified ecosystem for building, testing, and scaling creative ideas. Quvy's results are matching that of real-world user acquisition tests. It usually takes an ad network about seven days to learn what works in terms of ads for gamers. With Quvy, it takes about three minutes, Zweig said. The company does this by testing the ads for acquiring users on synthetic people. It's a lot like how Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, talked at CES about testing robots on 'synthetic data.' A company would be lucky to test a self-driving car for a million miles, but it can't figure out all of the emergency situations that could arise when driving a car. But with synthetic data, the company can test the car for billions of miles in a virtual environment that simulates the real world. The same principle applies with synthetic data for user acquisition, Zweig said. Read More Who will compete with ChatGPT? Meet the contenders | The AI Beat 'They're synthetic people, but they have real emotions, real tastes, real judgment, real preferences,' he said. 'It's amazing. When we see an ad, what's going on in our brain is a lot different. And you can distill it into actual mathematics, which is then trainable for large data sets.' The company has run a bunch of ads on places like QVC and on Facebook to see if it can nail the best ads for those platforms. And it gets to the answer in a fraction of the time and cost of other methods. 'It's incredible what you can model with the right data,' he said. It's taken about six months to build Quvy, with a relatively small part of the AppOnBoard team. Meanwhile, Buildbox is still profitable, Zweig said.
New York Post
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
A collector's dream NYC pad 'sells in a day' for $9M cash
Alexander Zweig, an entrepreneur, collector and angel investor — and a son of the late Wall Street investor Martin Zweig — has found a buyer for his $9 million Tribeca loft, sources told Gimme Shelter exclusively. The all-cash deal is slated to close on Wednesday. 'It [found a buyer] in a day,' a source said of the 62 Beach St. aerie. The home's stylish aesthetic was inspired by the nearby Greenwich Hotel. Advertisement 15 The open living area features exposed brick and beamed ceilings. Richard Caplan 15 There's plenty of space for billiards. Richard Caplan 15 One of the home's two bedrooms. Richard Caplan Advertisement At more than 3,350 square feet, the two-bedroom, 2½-bathroom nest is a two-unit combo on the sixth floor. It has also served as a stage for Zweig's impressive memorabilia collection. That includes Charlie Sheen's helmet from 'Platoon,' Clint Eastwood's 'Dirty Harry' gun and Arnold Schwarzenegger's shotgun from 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day.' There's also John Belushi's driver's license, which is in one of the apartment's powder rooms, and memorabilia from the film 'Edward Scissorhands.' 15 Arnold Schwarzenegger with his shotgun from 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day.' Everett Collection / Everett Collection Advertisement 15 Clint Eastwood holding his handgun in 'Dirty Harry.' Courtesy Everett Collection The collection, which also includes sports memorabilia, art and photography including a black-and-white Kate Moss photo by Mario Testino — along with vintage typewriters, rare books and more — was not part of the sale, sources said. Zweig first purchased 6B in 2012 for $2.89 million, followed by 6C in 2013 for $3 million. A six-year renovation to combine the units followed. Advertisement 15 A gracious foyer inside the loft. Richard Caplan 15 The home is rife with stunning ceilings and memorabilia. Richard Caplan 15 The open chef's kitchen comes with a breakfast bar. Richard Caplan 'It's a really unique space and has some of the most insane pop-culture memorabilia inside — it's like a museum,' said Ryan Serhant of Netflix's 'Owning Manhattan,' who shared the listing with Greg Vladi, also of Serhant. Zweig inherited the collecting gene from his late father Martin, an investor who once predicted the 1987 stock market crash. The elder Zweig paid a then-record $21.5 million for the Pierre Hotel's penthouse in 1999. It was on the market for $125 million when he passed away in 2013, leaving his collection — including Marilyn Monroe's 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress — to Alexander, his brother Zachary and his second wife Barbara. 15 The residence's hidden home office and bookshelf. Richard Caplan 15 The wet bar is a welcome addition to the play space. Richard Caplan Advertisement 15 Memorabilia inside includes the driver's license of the late John Belushi, seen perched next to the sink. Richard Caplan The Beach Street abode opens to a foyer with custom closets and a modern chandelier that leads to a great room with red-brick walls, exposed brick and tin ceilings. There's also an open living/dining area with a built-in wet bar and a chef's kitchen. Design details include three exposures, a pocket door that opens to a windowed home office with built-in storage, and 20 windows facing south and west for sunsets over the Hudson River. Advertisement 15 A stylish lounge. Richard Caplan 15 A cozy nook inside the Tribeca home. Richard Caplan 15 The unit's open dining area. Richard Caplan 15 Large couches fill this lounging room. Richard Caplan Advertisement The main bedroom comes with cove lighting, a walk-through closet and an ensuite spa-like bath. Both the bedroom and office open to a courtyard-facing balcony. The residence is in a former coffee, tea and spice warehouse, the Fischer Mills Building, which dates to 1860 and is now a full-service condo. The renovation was led by DHD Architecture & Interior Design's Jill Diamant, an architect, and Emilee Pearson, a designer.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
COVID school closures did lasting damage, new book finds
(NewsNation) — Five years after COVID-19 shut down schools nationwide, a new book argues the extended closures caused unnecessary harm to American students and were driven more by politics than science. In an interview on NewsNation's 'Vargas Reports,' author David Zweig discussed his book 'An Abundance of Caution,' which examines the lasting impact of school closures during the pandemic. 'Closing schools did not help anyone. It only harmed kids,' Zweig said Monday. 'The evidence was clear before the pandemic; lots of academic literature explained why this would be the case.' Trump admin. will defend FDA against abortion pill lawsuit Zweig highlighted that 22 European countries reopened schools in April and May 2020, months before most American schools resumed in-person learning. He said this evidence was 'ignored or dismissed by our public health authorities and largely by the legacy media.' The author cited an example of what he calls politically-motivated decision-making: when the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance supporting school reopenings shortly after then-President Donald Trump posted on social media advocating for schools to reopen. 'There was nothing that changed epidemiologically in that span of time for them to change the rules,' Zweig said. 'It happened immediately after Trump's tweet.' Marjorie Taylor Greene: I'll win Georgia governor or Senate seat The book details various harms to children beyond academic setbacks, including increased child abuse cases that went unreported due to children being isolated from teachers who often identify and report abuse. Zweig also discussed the impacts on extracurricular activities that provide crucial opportunities for disadvantaged students. Zweig said medical professionals privately expressed concerns about school closures to him but feared speaking publicly against CDC guidance. 'I approach this topic apolitically. I've written for The New York Times,' Zweig said. 'I am not a right-wing ideologue by any stretch.' Studies now show American students suffered significant academic and emotional setbacks during the extended school closures compared to countries that reopened education systems earlier. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Epoch Times
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
The Barbarity of the School Closures
Commentary Another book on COVID? Yes, but the author David Zweig has written one for the ages, a definitive account of the school closures from March 2020 through the following year and extending in many places. It's called ' This policy affected everyone without exception. We are going to live with its devastating consequences for the remainder of our lives. It's already here among the under-30 population, in the form of ill-health, illiteracy, innumeracy, digital addiction, substance abuse, emotional immaturity, psychmed attachments that ruin lives, astonishing intellectual superficiality, deep and dark cynicism, and philosophical nihilism. Does it seem like we should know something about how this happened? Why did this happen? You might think so but the subject is not really part of public debate. The legacy media ignores it. It's also hard to discuss with friends, family, and neighbors because most people supported it at the time. This is why this book—I seriously doubt a better one will come along—is so crucial. The research is in depth. It is brilliantly written. It examines every facet of the policy, from its origins, its fake science, its implementation, and why it continued on as long as it did. Every page has a shocker. As much as I knew, and as much as I opposed what was unfolding from the start, this one really rattled me. The cruelty. The disregard of evidence. The sheer barbarity of it all. Related Stories 4/25/2025 4/24/2025 I've long followed Zweig's work as a journalist. His craft begins with intense curiosity and a special focus on features of the social and economic world others overlook. We long shared an interest in structural issues of work life. He has already written a great book on what he calls the 'invisibles,' workers who make everything in society function but seek neither fame nor fortune. I met him in person for the first time during the height of lockdown, in October 2020 because he was one of only a few journalists who answered a call I put out to meet three famed epidemiologists to speak about the policies that had gripped the world. The subject was the lockdowns, closures, and crazy rules about distancing to separate every person from every other. He asked excellent questions at that event (he was brave to defy the conventions by even showing up!). The result of that experience became the The story is important to underscore the point. Zweig is not just a laptop journalist. At a time when so many others were hunkered down, hiding from the invisible enemy, he dared to get out, investigate, and learn. It's hard to recreate those strange times from just five years ago, but these were days in which people were practically bathing in sanitizer and looked upon their fellow man as disease vectors. Not Zweig. His passion for the truth motivated him to dig deeper than most others. He said at the time that he was thinking about writing a book about the unfolding disaster. There are so many features of the pandemic response that merit discussion. Oddly, comparatively little attention has been paid to the school closures and the imposed regime of online learning. Industry loved it but families and taxpayers not so much. I would rather you pick up the book than trust my summary. Still, one has to summarize. He observes that not just one factor caused the prolonged wreckage. It was a combination: bad science, bad information, awful media messaging, political hysteria, labor union power, a disregard for the well-being of kids, no exit plan, and general bureaucratic scoliosis that prevented adaptation to new evidence. The power of the book is the narrative evidence. There are so many shocking facts, such as how scientific forecasters living on government money were consistently outdone and outsmarted by private-sector programmers and management consultants. He further scrubs off the veneer of a vast amount of claims from academic journals and presumptions of the expert class. You cannot finish this book with a shred of respect for what's called Public Health. It is not only misnamed; it is antonymously named. What effect has this had on the culture of education? It has fed a dark loathing that is just under the surface. The public schools in this country are backed by a kind of social contract. We pay taxes, mostly property taxes. Those with kids in school think of these as a fee for service, a forced tuition for the use of the schools. Everyone else is told that good schools are essential for great communities, so it is in their interest to pay also. Vast amounts of community life revolve around them. In mid-March 2020, the unthinkable happened. Local officials all over the country suddenly shut them down. The excuse: an 'abundance of caution.' The kids were never in danger themselves but they were suddenly regarded as disease vectors. If we were going to stop the spread, we had to keep the kids away from each other. It's in the interest of those who were actually vulnerable. Thus were the interests of the kids sacrificed for the interest of the aged and infirm. In theory. In reality, there was never a shred of evidence that school closures stopped any transmission and lowered any death rates. European schools opened quickly. Most schools in the world did too. Very early on, all these governments and their health departments were reporting no deleterious consequences from the decision. The data was all there: opening schools did nothing to increase the dangers of the disease to the public. In the United States, it was different. The international research was not reported by mainstream media. It was wholly ignored. The closures went on and on, even as fatalities plunged and the virus mutated again and again to less virulent strains. An ethos had grabbed hold in which those who pushed for opening were seen as Trump-aligned; even the closures had begun during the last year of his first term. As a means of social and political signaling, all elite circles rallied around keeping the kids spinning in despair at home, staring at laptops, and pretending to learn with online assignments. They were given fake grades while being forcibly prevented from in-person activities and socializing. Homeschooling went from a legally suspicious practice to one that became mandatory overnight, much to the astonishment of people who had pushed for this for decades. But the impact on home life was devastating. Moms and dads left work and became tutors while also trying to keep their kids up on schoolwork and otherwise keep them entertained. It was all impossible, so of course parents acquiesced to allowing more screen time that they had previously discouraged. The online classes required the use of video sites that had been previously restricted. The result was intellectual and moral corruption, and the full waste of one or maybe two years of precious time in the lives of millions. Even after having read Zweig's definitive account, I'm still left with a sense of astonishment that this ever happened, and retain some sense of puzzlement about it all. The public schools in this country, as shabby as many of them have been for a long time, have been the pride and crowned jewel of Progressivism for longer than a century. One might have supposed that the people who are progressively aligned would defend them no matter what, and certainly not permit them to be closed for a year and longer. I knew at the time that disaster would result. More than that, I knew that change would come to the entire sector. Here we are today and the Department of Education is eviscerated, homeschooling is ubiquitous, private schooling has never been more popular, and states are considering completely eliminating the funding source of public schooling, namely property taxes. There it is: the blowback. Still no refunds on taxes and tuition and precious few apologies but at least we see some change of direction. The damage simply cannot be undone. Look around today at young people and you know it. There is vast amounts of work that the remaining adults in the room must do to reverse the calamitous edicts of the expert class that wrecked life and education for an entire generation of kids. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Atlantic
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
This Is the Way a World Order Ends
In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942. The Europeans of Zweig's youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today's West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease. As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today's world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and 'the weak suffer what they must.' Imperialism, which never really disappeared, is back. Governments and think tanks now speak of spheres of influence, something the U.S. long opposed. If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition. The past holds many examples of great change: regimes ending, monarchies becoming republics, whole civilizations vanishing, ways of managing relations between peoples and states swept aside, to be replaced by new ones. Change can come slowly or suddenly. The Roman empire and its successor in the East decayed gradually, with intervals of revival. The French Revolution of 1789, Russia's in 1917, and, much more recently, the end of the Soviet regime and the Cold War happened within weeks or months. Warnings beforehand can tell us, if we pay attention, that the old structures and rules are giving way. As with an apparently solid house, the foundations start to shift, the roof leaks, and greedy neighbors start to encroach on the grounds. When old regimes fall, the causes tend to be economic: France before 1789 was effectively bankrupt. Sometimes governments have ceased to function, and large sections of society, including elites, have become disaffected. By 1917 in Russia, housewives were marching in city streets to protest a lack of food, peasants were seizing land, and many Russians saw the czarist government as irrelevant, even treasonous. Soviet citizens in the 1980s could no longer ignore the glaring differences between the utopian promises of communism and the reality of an autocratic and incompetent regime. Even party members no longer believed. George Packer: The Trump world order International orders collapse in the same way. Pressures mount on the system from within and without. Support ebbs, even among those who have benefited most from the existing order, while those who would defy it grow bolder, and embolden one another. Before the First World War, the fading Ottoman empire promised rich pickings in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Nevertheless, the world's powers shared a general understanding that they would leave it alone, for fear of setting off a major conflict among themselves. Then, in 1911, the relatively new state of Italy, using the flimsiest of excuses, invaded what later became Libya. The Balkan states watched with interest as the other great powers did very little. The next year, several of them banded together to launch their own attack on the Ottoman empire. We should never underestimate the power of example in human affairs. In our own time, we are seeing one country and then another flouting what had been a basic rule since the end of World War II: that ownership by one country of territory seized by force from another would not be recognized. President Vladimir Putin of Russia took parts of Georgia in 2008, and in 2014 invaded Ukraine to seize Crimea and part of the Donbas region to further his mission of rebuilding the czarist empire. The peace negotiations under way between Ukraine, which is being abandoned by the United States, and Russia seem almost certain to allow Russia to keep that territory and very likely acquire even more. Israel seems to be maneuvering toward annexing parts of Gaza and maybe even southern Lebanon, while in Africa, Rwandan troops are pushing into neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. China can only be encouraged to think that the world will accept its bringing Taiwan under its rule. A new world order with new rules is taking shape. The alternative to an accepted international order, much like the alternative to government, is Thomas Hobbes's dystopia: a grim, anarchic world with 'no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' The way back to a sustainable and effective international order, once that order has been lost, is long and difficult. Until recent centuries, international orders were not global but regional in scale. Those regional orders became the models for much bigger ones later on, but until the end of the 15th century, travel was slow and frequently dangerous, and one part of the world did not always know much, if anything, about the others. The underpinnings of a global order can be traced to the age of discovery, when Europeans first learned to circumnavigate the globe, then established a presence at vast distances, and followed that with empires. The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century produced, among much else, railways, steamships, and telegraphs, which connected people in far-flung territories with one another. The international orders that followed these advances assumed many different shapes. Sometimes, as in 18th-century Europe, powers balanced against one another, forging alliances and leaving them in a jostling for advantage that could easily topple into war. Sometimes international relations fell under the sway of a powerful hegemon—or of outright imperialism, where a single state, such as Rome, or an outside invader, such as the Ottoman empire, dominated its neighbors and provided them with security. For centuries, the Chinese believed that their land was the center of the world and that their emperor held the mandate of heaven to govern it. The British empire was the world's hegemon from the second half of the 19th century until, arguably, the start of the Second World War—just as the United States was from 1989 until now. Michael Schuman: Trump hands the world to China Under the Trump administration, the United States no longer demonstrates the will to dominate the globe, and China does not yet have the capacity. History offers yet another model for the present situation, and perhaps for the future: spheres of influence, in which great powers dominate their own neighborhoods or strategic points, such as the Suez Canal for the British empire or Panama for the U.S., while lesser powers within the sphere accept, not always willingly, their sway, and outside ones steer clear to preserve their own dominions. Western powers and Japan carved out such spheres of influence in the 19th century, when they took advantage of a declining China to establish exclusive zones of interest there. Britain and Russia did something similar in Iran in 1907. Such an order is inherently unstable: The regions where the spheres meet become fields of conflict known as 'shatter zones.' Austria-Hungary and Russia vied for dominance in the Balkans before the First World War, just as China and India do with the countries between them and along around their shared border today. One power can be tempted to intrude on another's sphere when it thinks a rival's grip is slackening. And the influence that powers have in their spheres can wax and wane depending on domestic factors, including political upheavals and economic downturns. Lesser powers that find themselves under the dominion of a great power against their wishes can be resentful and rebellious. By its words and actions, for example, the Trump administration has reignited anti-Americanism in much of Latin America and turned Canadians against their neighbor. A once-dominant power that fears it is declining can be particularly reckless. In 1914, Austria-Hungary saw that Serbia, nominally within its sphere of influence, had fallen under Russia's influence. Resentful and determined to destroy Serbia, Austria-Hungary instead precipitated a world war that destroyed the empire itself and much else. Perhaps history can offer some hope as well as warning. The notion of an international order based on rules, norms, and broadly shared values has deep roots. Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch scholar of the 16th and 17th centuries, talked of an international society with laws and ways of settling disputes. A century later, Immanuel Kant proposed a League of Nations, which he imagined would prevent wars and eventually enfold all the countries of the world into one peaceful society. For a time in the 19th century, what Kant called the 'crooked timber of humanity' appeared to be straightening. Democracy spread globally, and with it, challenges to the received idea of the national interest as something determined by autocratic elites, or of military power as the only kind that mattered. Democratic leaders and thinkers began to envision a new and better international order—one with worldwide laws, institutions, and values. The First World War turned such musings into a plan of action. The conflict's outbreak came as a shock to many Europeans, but signs were visible before 1914. Jobs for Europe's skilled workers were vanishing, or their wages were lowering, as production moved to areas of the world where labor was cheaper. Populist leaders stirred resentment against minorities—Jews, immigrants, elites. Revolutionaries condemned the whole system as unequal and unjust and called for the creation of a new order. At the same time, the willingness of the great powers to work with one another, as they had done in the first half of the century in the Concert of Europe, evaporated. New alliances emerged—one among Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy, and the other among France, Britain, and Russia. Crises and wars in the Balkans in the first years of the 20th century fueled resentments, desires for revenge, and an arms race. Europe had entered a danger zone where a sudden crisis could start a chain reaction. And that is what happened with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in June 1914. Ryan Crow: I've seen how 'America First' ends The war's consequences were so devastating for Europe and the wider world that many feared humanity was doomed. But catastrophes have a way of focusing attention on solutions that might once have been dismissed as fanciful or impossible. Woodrow Wilson, the president who took the United States into the war in 1917, made clear that he wanted nothing for his own country, and that his overriding aim was a new international order animated by ideals of fairness: Peoples are entitled to self-determination, and the nations of the world must come together to protect the defenseless and prevent future wars. Wilson told Congress in January 1918 that 'reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail.' To that end, a new institution, the League of Nations, would provide collective security for its members, confront aggression (with military force if necessary), and endeavor to improve the lot of humanity. When Wilson traveled to Europe for the peace conference in Paris, adoring crowds greeted him as a savior. Historians now describe the league as a failure, because in the 1930s, the revisionist powers—Germany, Japan, and Italy, which were members—defied it to wage unprovoked war: Germany on its neighbours, Japan on China, and Italy on Ethiopia. Other powers, including the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and the United States, expressed disapproval and imposed some ineffective sanctions, but shrank from anything more drastic. A second and even more destructive world war was the result. But the hope and the idea behind the league did not die. If anything, the scale of the Second World War and the advent of the atom bomb made the quest for a peaceable international order more urgent than ever. Another American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been talking about an organization of the world's nations even before the U.S. came into the war. He gained British support and brought the American people and Congress along with him, something Wilson had failed to do. He also managed to gain Joseph Stalin's grudging assent that the Soviet Union would join the new order, which included not only the United Nations but also the Bretton Woods institutions, established to organize global economic relations. After 1945, these instruments and the order they upheld allowed the world's powers to manage many of their antagonisms without resorting to war. A strong web of international bodies, special agencies, treaties, laws, and NGOs bound the globe ever closer. The Cold War threatened at times to break that web apart, and shooting wars were always present somewhere in the world. But the order held, such that even the United States and the Soviet Union found ways to reach agreements and ease tensions. When the Cold War abruptly ended with the collapse of first the Soviet empire in Europe and then the Soviet Union itself, the world looked set for greater cooperation, and perhaps even the onward march of democracy. History has a way of clarifying that what looks like the only possible future at one moment is actually just one possibility among others. Few in the 1990s anticipated the emergence of revisionist powers, for whom the existing order was a sham, a cover for the dominance of the United States and its allies. These actors saw the post–World War II order as an obstacle to their nations' ambitions, whether to restore past glories, reclaim land they felt was rightfully theirs, or dominate their own people and regions. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has threatened to reconsider the Treaty of Trianon, which assigned much of Hungary's territory to its neighbors after World War I. The greatest revisionist of all, so far, is Putin. But perhaps the most serious rebuke to the liberal international order has come from inside the democracies, where populist parties have hitched economic grievances, anti-immigrant sentiments, and the loss of faith in their own elites and institutions to an authoritarian domestic turn. Resentments and goals may differ from country to country, but populism is fueled everywhere by the promise of undoing the mistakes of the past. Internationally, this translates into contempt for the liberal rules-based order and international organizations such as the United Nations. Far-right leaders prefer to work with like-minded counterparts to further their own interests, even at the expense of others. Yair Rosenberg: Trump is remaking the world in his image Nowhere is this shift more consequential than in the United States, which was the original visionary and anchor of the postwar order. The Trump administration has characterized that role as one for suckers, in which the United States restrained its hard power and allowed other countries to bleed its wealth. Donald Trump has proposed instead for the United States to use its economic and military predominance as tools of naked coercion, dispensing entirely with the niceties of international agreements and even domestic constitutional constraint. We are witnessing the resurrection of spheres of influence. In the past, U.S. leaders decried these as characteristic of the cynical old Europe that Americans had escaped. But in truth, the Monroe Doctrine, which warned outside powers to stay away from the Western Hemisphere, asserted an American sphere of influence; during the Cold War, the United States implicitly accepted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and extended its own influence over the West. Yet, however imperfectly, the U.S. also stood for another, better order, which recognized the rights of small nations and spoke to much of humanity's hope for a world run for the collective good, not just for the benefit of a few powerful states. Today's American administration, however, seems openly wedded to the idea of dividing the globe among great powers, and oblivious to the potential for conflict where spheres interact and struggle against one another—for example, U.S. and China in the Pacific. The recent leaked proposal to drastically reduce the State Department and the Foreign Service and reorganize what is left into four regional 'corps'—Eurasia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Indo-Pacific—is a first step toward accepting such a division. The fact that Canada would come directly under the aegis of the secretary of state suggests that the Trump administration sees the whole of the Western Hemisphere as its own. In a recent Time interview, the president repeated his airy claims that Canada was a burden on the U.S. and went on: 'We don't need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.' In a new division of the world, Russia could presumably preside over Central Asia and most or all of Europe, dismissed so contemptuously by Vice President J. D. Vance and others. China may well claim hegemony in East Asia. The current drift toward authoritarian leaders in this fractured world will leave international relations at the mercy of their whims, dreams, and follies. As is often the case in history, what appears sudden isn't really. Pressures build; small changes accrete—and then burst into view. The first months of 2025 have felt like a movie suddenly speeding up, images rushing by so fast that the dialogue is an almost incomprehensible gabble. What the world once took for granted in the U.S.—checks and balances, respect for the courts, reverence for democratic values and practices—is now in question. And because America was the crucial player in the international order, the tremors of its earthquake are felt everywhere. In Asia and Europe, U.S. allies prepare to face China and Russia alone. In the Americas, a president who sounds like a 19th-century imperialist crossed with a New York real-estate developer talks about taking over Greenland, Panama, and Canada. And all at once, spheres of influence have ceased to be just something historians and political scientists study, but the emerging reality of a volatile new world.
