Public Talk by Moritz Pollath, Assistant Professor of Public History, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich
The warning signs of the 1930s feel alarmingly familiar today: nationalist rhetoric, revisionism, military rearmament, political polarization. The liberal order is eroding, autocracies are rearming, and the West appears weaker than at any point in decades. In this book talk, historian and security expert Dr. Moritz Pöllath argues that these patterns function as an early warning system for the present: a new authoritarian axis — Russia, China, North Korea, Iran — is forming, exploiting a strategic power vacuum to impose a world order beyond freedom and democracy. The years ahead may prove decisive: between 2027 and 2030, the world may decide whether it descends into a new global systemic conflict, with a possible attack on Taiwan as its most dangerous flashpoint.
Speaker Bio
Moritz Pöllath is an Assistant Professor of Public History at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, where he teaches courses on the History of Democracy, US History, the Cold War, and history teaching methods for secondary schools. He studied Diplomatic and Military History at Hawaiʻi Pacific University and American History at the University of Cologne. His first book, Out-of-Area? NATO and Decolonization in Africa and Asia 1949–1961 (2017), explores the roots of NATO's global security policy during the early Cold War; his second book (habilitation), Narrating Freedom: Challenges to American and German Master Narratives in the 21st Century, was completed in 2023. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Leipzig and was previously a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and the University of Udine.
