There has arisen of late a cottage industry encouraging the thinker and the policymaker to set aside the Second World War. On the elevated end of things are works like Alec Ryrie’s 2025 book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, which argued that the postwar liberal order was a function of (post facto) opposition to Hitler. (Modern asylum law, for example, is not meant to contend with small boats bearing Pakistani men: It was written for Anne Frank.) Also on the high end is R. R. Reno at First Things, who argues in “Putting World War II Behind Us” that “World War II encourages a Manichean mindset, one that rushes to describe conflicts as world-historical clashes between unmitigated evil and unimpeachable good.” This is, he argues, deranging to modern statecraft and discourse both. At the low and base end is Tucker Carlson promoting internet historian Darryl Cooper’s revisionism, leaning heavily into apologetics for the Third Reich and hatred for its enemies, notably Winston Churchill and the Jews. This last is a narrative as old as Nazism itself, being of the same source. The former, however, is morally and intellectually legitimate and deserves a response.

Ryrie and Reno are surely correct in their descriptive analysis. The world after 1945 is indeed ordered, in the grand-strategic sense, in response to the Second World War. The major institutions — the United Nations, NATO — emerged from it, and the assumptions dictating behavior are to a meaningful extent rooted in it. Metaphors are often enough derived from it, especially when describing evils and antagonists. Reno specifically argues that the war, having been a civilizational disaster of the first order, is in the end no template. “To its orgy of violence . . . we owe the soul-eating nihilism that today threatens the future of the West,” although this is properly more the First World War than the Second. For the Western Allies, at least, the Second World War was a struggle against a species of “soul-eating nihilism” against which — see Carlson and Cooper — we still contend today.

Yet the question raised by those begging off the Second World War is whether the problem — in skewed perceptions, in unrealistic policy, in unachievably maximalist demands — is the war or the modern statesmen who keep it in mind. Reno correctly notes that “World War II participates in the inevitable moral ambiguity of the human condition,” which must place the onus upon the latter. The war itself is one of the most stupendously complex events of all human history and contains within itself a variety of moral and pragmatic questions so profound, and surrounded by events so dense, as to command several lifetimes of study and interpretation. In the American context, it stands next to the Civil War as a touchstone of identity and example; in the British, next to the First World War and Napoleonic Wars. The first thing to grasp is that it deserves its place.

The present tense must be used: The Second World War deserves its place, by its nature, and we err if we cast it aside or, worse, adopt the interpretive frames of our antagonists. However, it is entirely just to demand that those who would invoke it fully understand it. Not every villain is Hitler and not every stand against one is Churchillian. Unconditional surrender is a dramatic aspiration outside the norm of nearly every war ever fought. Not every aggression leads to another. All this is true and it is worth remembering: Pragmatism and prudence should inform statecraft, not pushing sentiment aside but tempering and informing it.

Yet set against this must be an understanding that the Second World War provides an array, unique in modernity, of useful heuristics that tend toward good policy and good outcomes. It actually is good to oppose territorial aggression early. It actually is good to prefer democracies to autocracies. It actually is good to prefer worst-case assumptions in assessments of events. It actually is good to maintain a military alliance in being, and a political superstructure over Europe specifically, versus the alternatives. It actually is good to be constantly conscious of the standing risk of a civilization-destroying world war — and to orient policy and action against it.

Because all history is contingent, there are ample counterexamples. Perhaps Kuwait in 1991 was not the Sudetenland in 1938. Perhaps Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the American-led multinational force in South Vietnam was not the Allies of 1945. Perhaps policy is led astray because officeholders cannot discern the difference between Syrian migrants of 2015 and fleeing Jews of 1937, or the difference between Serbian militias and the Wehrmacht, or the difference between a managed threat and an existential one. But the discrete exceptions do not outweigh the aggregate — and it isn’t close. The distinguishing characteristic of both the structures and the mindset of the post-Second World War order are their overwhelming success. It is 81 years since the guns went silent in May and September 1945, and we ought to be more astonished than we are at what has happened since. There have indeed been wars and atrocities, but for the most part the borders are the same; for the most part the peace is kept.

Our forefathers who survived the great and bloody strait of the war did not expect it. The general assumption was that the fighting would somehow resume, in a decade, perhaps, or two — repeating the passage from the First War to the Second. As the Cold War arose, the prospect of general nuclear annihilation was added to the forecast of doom. But none of it came to pass. Even when the Soviet empire collapsed and the continent of Europe convulsed under an unexpected reordering, it did not come to pass. We should not deny the working of Providence, but the consciousness of the Second World War was also at work.

Now those achievements are everywhere fraying, and there is war, and the rumor of war, from the European steppe to Iran to the South China Sea and beyond. Eerily echoing the 1930s, the wars slowly coalesce: North Korean infantry moves upon Ukrainian battlefields, Russia provides targeting for Iran against American bases, Yemeni fanatics launch missiles against Saudi Arabia on Iran’s behalf, China slowly encircles Taiwan with territorial grabs from its neighbors, and Ukrainian forces target Iranian vessels in the Caspian Sea. This is only the surface of events, but even the surface is amply combustible.

It is no accident that events become fraught precisely as the Second World War loses its purchase on popular consciousness, not least as the Second World War generation passes into history. The veterans of that war are now exceptionally elderly and few in number. Perhaps 40,000 remain in the United States, maybe 0.25 percent of all who served; and perhaps 8,000 in Britain, around 0.23 percent of all who served. The political leadership in both countries largely slipped away from the Second World War generation, and into Boomer hands, in the 1990s. A thumbnail of the misapplication of the Second World War might be found in this, as the inheritors of a system failed to grasp it as well as did its creators. The “Freedom Agenda” that confidently sought to re-create postwar Europe in the Middle East, which visibly failed in its first three years but took 20 years to unwind, is the signal caution of that failure. Most apt as a metaphor is the removal of Churchill’s bust, midway through that generational span, from the Oval Office. Those demanding that we move on from the Second World War are really demanding that we move on from this, and they are right.

From the war as such, though, we ourselves will never escape, because we live in its shadow and always will. Perhaps someday an intervening catastrophe will assert itself to define our times, but thanks to the actual lessons of the war it has yet to come. History’s reach is long. My grandmother, a grand lady of east Texas, is 97 and will on occasion vote Republican, which runs contrary to her political socialization generations past — an era that included the war. Yet she does it in part because her beloved grandfather voted Republican: one of only two Republicans in tiny Grand Saline, Texas, nearly a century past. He was a Republican because when he was two years old, Confederate bushwhackers murdered his father, a Unionist militiaman, in St. Clair County, Mo. To borrow from Faulkner, it is “not even past.”

If the echoes of the American Civil War are with us in 2026, the Second World War will be with us longer still.

This returns us to our current crises, which as they metastasize properly demand not yet further departures from the lessons of the war, but a rediscovery of them. It is no original observation to note that events have a pre-war quality to them, “made more sinister . . . by the lights of perverted science.” The craft and statesmanship that preserved civilization in the war are even more necessary now, from the urgency of industrial capacity, to the necessity of innovation, to the stewardship of alliances, to the discovery and communication of purpose. Our survival depends upon all of it.

In that light, the question is not whether the war is remembered but who owns the memory. If we choose to discard it, it does not go away, but it is ceded to the likes of Carlson and Cooper, for whom the difference between good and evil is curiously obscure, and those who would fight for the former are disarmed. The war is over — defending the world it won remains.