While books may end, history does not. Stories need to be continuously retold and often revised.

It was clear, even before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that the chances of the world being able to eradicate poverty by 2030 were reducing by the minute. The pandemic added substantially to the challenge and underlined the difficulties that national governments confront in working together for the common good (Chapter 5; Case Study 8). Politicians feel compelled to serve their own populations first, others second if at all.

Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with yet incalculable consequences that include a possible tenfold increase in US5.50/day poverty in Ukraine during 2022, together with a 75 million increase in extreme (below US$1.90/day) poverty globally (World Bank 2022b). Although unexpected, the invasion is explicable in terms of a failure in statecraft and the impotence of the United Nations discussed in Chapter 7.

The origins of the war are traceable to euphoria in the 1990s concerning the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy that encouraged the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama to author The End of History and the Last Man (1992). In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's pleas to join the European Union were rebuffed and the United States sought to contain the growth of a potential economic rival, financially supporting its former satellite countries at the expense of Russia (Walker 2022). With the eastwards expansion of NATO and with US bases in countries to its east, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, under pressure from failures in domestic policy, found reason to ignore international law and attempt a full takeover of Ukraine, having annexed Crimea in 2014.

While the invasion of Ukraine is understandable in terms of neorealist theories of international relations, they say little about how the world can lessen the consequences of the war for the world's most disadvantaged citizens. At the time of writing, it seems likely that global economic growth will collapse due to surging inflation, with rising energy and food prices directly attributable to the war compounding increases arising from economic dislocations following the pandemic.