Commentary The defeat of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in World War II ushered in the Cold War era. For the four and a half decades between the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism, global affairs unfolded within a bipolar backdrop of “mutually assured” destruction between the two nuclear superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a unipolar moment of unquestioned American economic, diplomatic, military, and geopolitical supremacy on the world stage. Multiple generations of Americans, millennials and Gen Z alike, have come of political age in the unipolar moment. As a millennial born in 1989, the unipolar moment is all my generation has ever known. The various manifestations of the unipolar moment, such as unparalleled American naval might to secure free trade on the …