The Return of the Great Powers

by Brendan Simms

From an acclaimed historian, a sweeping study of the past, present, and future of the Great Powers, revealing the new rules of global leadership

From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between great powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan’s empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, great power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization, with liberal democracy on the march and national chauvinism seemingly in retreat. But events of the past decade have made one thing abundantly The great powers are back.  

In The Return of the Great Powers, renowned historian Brendan Simms offers a new history of the rise, fall, and return of the Great Powers in our time. He shows that over the past ten years or so, the major global actors have already resumed making decisions based on geopolitical rather than global economic considerations. Delivering a clear-eyed reckoning with today’s most pressing geopolitical issues, from the Ukraine war to the future of American dominance, The Return of the Great Powers insists that we can only understand the future of the great powers by looking to the history that forged them.

368 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 2, 2026

About the author

Brendan Peter Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Simms studied at Trinity College Dublin, where he was elected a scholar in history in 1986, before completing his doctoral dissertation, Anglo-Prussian relations, 1804-1806: The Napoleonic Threat, at Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Tim Blanning in 1993. A Fellow of Peterhouse, he lectures and leads seminars on international history since 1945