Why the Cold War can distort views of earlier disorder

What critical moment made the early twentieth century go wrong?

No single break explains it; the period continued a long history of conflict, while the later Cold War created an unusually organized comparison point.

The search for one moment when the early twentieth century suddenly went wrong assumes an earlier period of relative order. Frequent wars and unstable alignments in preceding centuries complicate that assumption. The Cold War can appear unusually orderly because two large alliance systems and nuclear arsenals constrained direct conflict between their leading powers. Judging earlier violence against that later structure can obscure how common disorder was across longer periods. An organized rivalry still involved conflict, so this comparison does not describe the Cold War as peaceful.