The end of the Cold War was a missed opportunity to build a peaceful and prosperous world based on east–west and north–south cooperation. Instead, geopolitical rivalries have resurfaced. World powers compete openly for power, territory, and resources, resembling the inter-imperial rivalries of the early twentieth century. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is both a colonial campaign and a military challenge to the NATO alliance, which President Putin holds responsible for Russia’s post-Cold War decline. NATO has not only functioned as a defensive alliance, as in Ukraine, but also as a protector of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, as an instrument of US global hegemony, and as a vehicle for western military interventions in the global south. Israel is a sub-imperial power, umbilically linked to the USA, whose security interests it projects in the Middle East. Both in Russia and in Israel global geopolitics intersects with virulent nationalism, denying the rights and identities of Ukrainians and of Palestinians. In Russia war stems from and reinforces an authoritarian political system. Israel’s democracy is compromised by the foundational injustices of settler colonialism, and of violent rule in the West Bank and Gaza.