https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/new-dark-age/
The foreign policy of a progressive US administration could entail a fanatical pursuit of race-based “intersectionality” policies, similar to the proletarian internationalism of yesteryear. If US foreign policy were in fact composed of such policies, many countries would consider China the lesser of two evils. A world dominated by a progressive US on the one hand and communist China on the other could devolve into a new Dark Ages.
America is in turmoil. Some believe it is in decline. Few argue whether the decline is temporary or permanent. Almost everyone agrees that Pax Americana, the post-WWII order, and the unipolar world created by the collapse of the Soviet Union are gone forever.
Naturally, everyone wants to know the contours of the world order ahead of us. Students of history look for answers in the not so distant past. The Cold War, which went on for over four decades, contained many periods that can be called upon to justify almost any historical parallel, but the US-USSR confrontation was not unique. History offers many other relatively recent examples of global conflict, though they were not generally cast as polar battles between good and evil in the manner of the Cold War.
The world order prior to WWI was not black and white. It was gray. Several empires, real and artificial, were jockeying for world supremacy: Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Austro-Hungary, and a few smaller ones. None was particularly peace-loving. However, all were at some stage of development as a liberal democracy. Some, like Britain, were well advanced, while others, like Russia, were far behind. None was purely evil and genocidal. This state of affairs more or less defined European history from the Middle Ages through the Treaty of Westphalia.