The Western alliance has been slow to respond to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia as a disruptive power. This has been a dangerous collective failure, the roots of which are structural and cultural. The hubris that mistakenly classified the collapse of a single political system for permanent triumph of our way of life is obvious with hindsight. Having been a military professional for much of the period since the Vietnam War, the perils of prediction are obvious to me.

Remember when the "inevitable" rise of Japan and the eclipse of American hegemony was the central issue of the US election campaign in 1992? Remember Tony Blair in Chicago in 1999, nobly but naively proclaiming the universal right of the West to intervene to stop genocide anywhere in the world? Then the long war against Islamic extremism, which would consume our attention and resources for the remainder of the 21st century?

It is easy to scoff at failed predictions. However, strategists and policymakers are obliged to try to forecast the immediate and long-term future. Such imperfect speculation shapes policy - and the diplomatic postures and military forces that are required to execute them. If the future defies meaningful prediction, what lessons does history offer?

The eminent military historian Azar Gat has correctly identified a decline in state-on-state warfare since the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. However, when conventional state-versus-state war does erupt, it is catastrophic and exacts a toll among non-combatants that is unprecedented in history. That would obviously be the case in the event of nuclear exchange between states.

In December 1989, I joined Bob Carr, his wife Helena and former NSW treasurer Michael Egan to walk through the chill mists towards the clinking of thousands of pick axes being wielded against the Berlin Wall. Through sheer coincidence we were attending the German Social Democratic Party Congress in Berlin. We passed through Checkpoint Charlie into an eerily dark and deserted East Berlin, whose residents had, en masse, flooded into the West to buy consumer goods denied to them for so long. All of us had lived through the era of Mutually Assured Destruction. That at least seemed to be behind us.

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Yet as Azar Gat also concluded in his panoramic scan of war through the ages, the last time two autocratic capitalist powers threatened the international order, a global conflagration ensued. Germany and Japan possessed dynamic economies under authoritarian regimes and decided to break the shackles of the liberal democratic order. Their failure now looks "inevitable".

The United States has belatedly accepted that China and Russia are also not status quo powers and that they constitute a greater threat to its interests than Islamic terrorism. In one of the few decisions which reflects any credit upon him, President Donald Trump ordered a nuclear posture review within a week of his inauguration. The US arsenal has shrunk and has lost deterrent credibility. Putin has invested heavily in Russia’s tactical and strategic nuclear forces. Last week’s demonstration of Russia’s capacity to strike the continental United States was not hollow posturing.

Under Putin, Russia has deployed about 2000 tactical nuclear warheads on the frontier with NATO. It has upgraded its strategic bomber forces to be capable of launching nuclear missiles against the United States, from Russian airspace. Its declaratory policy on the use of nuclear weapons is remarkably sanguine when it comes to escalation and de-escalation of theatre nuclear conflict in Europe.

In light of their brazen and sustained use of cyber capabilities, comprising both computer network operations and political influence activity, against Estonia, Ukraine, and even the United States, we should not doubt Putin’s resolve to use nuclear weapons.

A man traumatised by the collapse of a wall is confronted by a US president who wants to erect one. Trump’s declaration of a trade war last week, when he said he would impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminium, demonstrates even more starkly than his inertia against Putin’s direct interference in his own election the institutional crisis in the Western alliance.

Our rejection of aberrant Russian and Chinese behaviour was legitimised by an appeal to a normative system of liberal values and institutions dating back to the end of the last global war. Do we even believe that narrative ourselves any more?

Catherine McGregor is a Fairfax Media columnist.