A grinding local conflict on Europe’s periphery. Russian nuclear threats. Slowly escalating NATO military aid to Ukraine. Critics of American policy, urging caution, argue that the United States is sleepwalking into a great power war. Their diagnosis, that Washington is slowly but surely marching toward a direct conflict, might prove correct, but only if Washington follows their advice.

The “sleepwalking” metaphor in international relations gained new popularity with the 2012 publication of Christopher Clark’s history of the July crisis of 1914, which was widely read in Washington. In The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, he concluded: “The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.” Put simply, actors across the continent took understandable steps in the pursuit of their countries’ own interests but failed to foresee how those actions could interact to bring on a world-changing conflagration.