World On Edge: Why This Security Analyst Thinks We're In a New Era of Conflict

Jim Sciutto shares 5 key insights from The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War.

Did you watch last night’s debate? If so, you saw some stark contrasts in personality and policy, including differing postures on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. These conflicts, along with what feels like an ongoing slow-motion trade war with China, will be top priorities for whoever makes it to the White House. And according to Jim Sciutto, they mark a precarious and perilous realignment of superpowers that’s been happening right under our noses for decades — a realignment he maps out in the new book The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War. Jim is CNN’s chief national security analyst and anchor of CNN Newsroom on Max. His work has earned Emmy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the George Polk Award and the Dupont-Columbia Award. Read or listen to his key insights below:

The 5 Key Insights:

1. The Ukraine invasion was a 1939 moment.

2. Churchill was right about the crocodile.

3. Their security is our security.

4. Americans have a choice.

5. There are still heroes.

1. The Ukraine invasion was a 1939 moment.

As I walked the streets of Ukraine during those first days and weeks of the war, I found myself constantly seeing images that seemed borrowed from another time, back to the middle of the last century: people running into bomb shelters, families packing their belongings into suitcases and boarding trains heading west, soldiers piling sandbags in city streets.

With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin calculated he could absorb Europe’s largest nation by force (an idea its people explicitly and repeatedly rejected) and that the West would allow him to. He was resurrecting 1939 rules in the 21st century; a model he hoped to apply not just in Ukraine, but to rebuild the old USSR.