History. That is my word of 2019.

There will be a lot of talk about history this year, so allow me to get in first.

It is 30 years this year since a then-little-known US State Department official and emerging political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, declared "the end of history".

In 1989, he surveyed the crumbling Soviet Union and the final days of the Cold War and penned an essay for the National Interest magazine, where he crowned western liberal democracy as humanity's high point.

It may constitute, Fukuyama argued, the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution — the final form of human government".

Dr Francis Fukuyama in 2008. ( Reuters: Larry Downing )

"As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potential universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty," he wrote.

Fukuyama took his inspiration from the great 19th-century Prussian philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose writings on history helped give birth to the idea of the modern world.

The 19th century Prussian philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( Supplied )

Hegel believed that the desire for recognition and freedom were the engines of history. History was time, and time was progress. We were moving ever forward to what he saw as the "ethical state": the end of history.

It was Hegel who first believed he had seen the end of history when he glimpsed the triumphant Napoleon after the battle of Jena in 1806.

As Hegel said, "I saw the emperor — this world spirit — go out from the city to survey his realm — stretching over the world and dominating it".

Hegel and Fukuyama may yet be proved right, but rather than the end of history, we are witnessing history's bloody return.

The past is back, again

When it comes to history I am reminded of the words of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, who said, "there is no present or future; only the past happening over and over again".

Are we locked in some never-ending cycle, a death spiral from which we cannot pull out?

When you look at our world today you would be forgiven for thinking so.

The embers of old wars are flaring again: North Korea has enough nuclear weapons to turn our region into a sea of fire.

It has the missile capability to deliver its payload as far away as the United States or Australia.

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Sentosa Island in June. ( AP: Evan Vucci )

Despite the much-vaunted summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea has done nothing to denuclearise and the threat — now simmering rather than boiling — remains.

The world's two biggest nuclear-armed states, Russia and America, are threatening a new Cold War.

In 2017, old foes India and China — the most populous nations on the planet — eyeballed each other over the disputed military border of Bhutan.

In the Middle East the Syrian conflict rages on. Refugee camps are full. People are risking all to pile on to boats and hope to reach safety on whatever far shore will take them.

A father gives water to his malnourished daughter at a feeding centre in a hospital in Hodeida, Yemen. ( AP: Hani Mohammed )

In Yemen the two biggest powers in the Muslim world, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are locked in a deadly proxy war — pitting Shia Houthi rebels backed by Tehran against the Yemeni government.

United Nations estimates claim as many as 85,000 children under the age of five are thought to have starved to death in Yemen in the past three years.

To look at the images of the emaciated children — eyes bulging, skin loose, rib cages exposed — brings to mind precisely the sort of images out of Ethiopia in the 1980s that horrified the world and inspired music stars to rally in aid concerts and records. Governments stepped up and we swore never again.

But right now the UN says Yemen is facing the greatest humanitarian disaster of the 21st century — 14 million people are at risk of starvation.

A war on terrorism that began — officially at least — after the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, rages on.

It is the longest war America has fought; it is the longest war in Australia's history.

Nowhere is safe. Terrorists have struck in London, Brussels, Nairobi, Jakarta, Sydney and Melbourne.

Elsewhere, tensions continue between Russia and Ukraine.

Pakistan and India remain locked in a nuclear-armed existential stand-off.

All of this happening during what is considered to be the longest period of global peace in human history. It hardly feels like it.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2017. ( AP: Andrew Harnik )

The greatest fear

But there is an even greater fear: a war between the two biggest powers on the globe: the United States and China.

Any clash between the US and China would be catastrophic, but as much as we may try to wish it away, right now military strategists in Beijing and Washington are preparing for just that eventuality.

Global think tank the Rand Corporation prepared a report in 2015 for the American military. Its title could not have been more direct — War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.

It concluded that China would suffer greater casualties than the US if war was to break out now. However, it cautioned, that as China's military muscle increased so would the prospect of a prolonged destructive war.

We know where the conflict would most likely start: in the South China Sea.

Beijing has claimed disputed territory and already expanded it and militarised it. Air Force runways have been built on land dredged up from the ocean floor.

Loudspeakers warn foreign ships to stay out of what China claims as its waters.

USS Decatur (left) and PRC Warship 170 (right) came very close in the South China Sea in September. ( Supplied: US Navy via GCaptain )

In 2018, American and Chinese warships came within metres of each other.

This is our worst nightmare: an accident, a miscalculation that escalates beyond control.

China has continued to build its military strength, strike force and budget second only to the United States. It is developing advanced fighter jets, stealth attack submarines and anti-ship ballistic missiles.

It is building what Beijing calls its "undersea Great Wall" — and is developing a new bomber aircraft that will greatly expand China's long-range strike capacity.

Senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Malcolm Davis says these advances "make it more difficult for US forces to intervene in a future crisis in East Asia".

Davis warns that China could "leapfrog US capabilities" and that "could begin to tip the local military advantage in Beijing's direction".

America recognises the threat. Last year the US Defence Department updated its national defence strategy nominating China and Russia as the largest threats to US interests.

As the strategy stated: "It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model."

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping chat during a friendly ice hockey match between the countries last year. ( Reuters: Ng Han Guan )

The strategy called for a "fundamental shift" in policy away from focusing on countering terror groups to meet the growing threat from "revisionist powers" China and Russia.

Then-defence secretary Jim Mattis said an "urgent change" was needed to "restore warfighting readiness".

China is ruled by a new emperor: a man considered the most powerful leader of the country since Mao Zedong. In fact Xi Jinping is arguably more powerful than Mao, leading a nation that is, by some measurements, already the world's biggest economy.

Xi is a son of the Communist party — he puts the party above all. He is crushing dissent; locking up and suppressing the Uyghur Muslim minority; jailing his rivals; shutting down the media and silencing activists.

He has made himself President for life. He is a self-styled strongman who has promised his people he will deliver on the China Dream. He is not the type of leader to back down.

But then it's nothing new

Historians look at this, and see, like Eugene O'Neill, the past happening over and over again.

They look at the world and see the same fault lines as 1914. Then they said war would never happen; Germany and Britain were each other's biggest trading partners; the kaiser and the king were cousins.

How wrong they were. Australian historian Sir Christopher Clarke wrote a magnificent book about how the world drifted to war — he called it Sleepwalkers.

In 1914, the world was enjoying a great peace: economies were booming and trade connected the world. Just like today.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, shortly before their assassination in June 1914. ( Imperial War Museum )

And then the assassination of an Austrian Crown Prince in Sarajevo tipped the world into the bloodiest conflict we had ever seen. The war to end all wars.

Christopher Clark says political leaders become hostage to events.

"Causes trawled from the length and breadth of Europe's pre-war decades are piled like weights on the scale until it tilts from probability to inevitability," he wrote.

Now many believe we are sleepwalking to war all over again. The weights are tipping the scales just like 1914.

Our region is a tinderbox

The Asia-Pacific is a tinderbox of old enmities, expanding militaries, disputed territories, unfinished conflict and nuclear weapons.

A spark in the South China Sea could set fire to the region: China on one side, the US on the other, with the rest off the world forced into choosing sides.

The script for this was written by Thucydides in 400 BC, when Athens went to war with Sparta. Today military strategists warn of the Thucydides Trap: when a rising power meets a waning power and go to battle for supremacy.

Founding dean of the Harvard University Kennedy School, Graham Allison, fears the world is lurching towards conflict unseen since World War II.

He puts his case in a new book, Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides's Trap?

"It was the rise of Athens and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable," he writes.

Then it was Athens-Sparta. In 1914 it was Germany-Great Britain and now China-United States.

"As far ahead as the eye can see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides's trap. Most contests that fit this pattern have ended badly," Professor Allison writes.

On the current trajectory, Professor Allison says, war is, "not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognised".

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 minute 29 seconds 1 m 29 s China attempts global dominance with One Belt One Road project

History has moved house

2019 does not look like the "end of history".

While Francis Fukuyama trumpeted the defeat of authoritarianism, authoritarianism has returned with a vengeance.

More than a decade ago, historian Azar Gat, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, identified China's brand of authoritarian capitalism as the greatest challenge to the global liberal order.

"As China rapidly narrows the economic gap with the developed world, the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower," he wrote

I haven't yet mentioned Belt and Road, China's massive infrastructure and investment project that expands Beijing's reach into Central Asia and Europe: it has been called a new Chinese global order or a 21st-century Chinese colonialism.

China is rapidly eclipsing the rest of the world in developments in artificial intelligence, quantum physics and robotics.

Historian Niall Ferguson points out that in 1980, China accounted for 2 per cent of the world economy, now it is nearly 20 per cent — more than the US and Canada combined.

As America has been bogged down by war and financial collapse, the Chinese Communist Party claims it has a better model. History did not end in 1989, it shifted continents.

Relations may have thawed, but North Korea's missiles haven't gone anywhere. ( Reuters: Sue-Lin Wong )

'A new era of hubris'

Fukuyama's End of History has been one of the most quoted and debated essays of our times. Its critics say it ushered in a new era of hubris and complacency.

The West is accused of going to sleep at the very time its power and reach was at its height. Political scientist Joseph Nye — the man credited with coining the phrase "soft power" — said in his book The Paradox of American Power that the United States stopped paying attention to the world and turned their sights inward.

Even those who did look beyond America, he wrote, "became arrogant about our power, arguing that we did not need to heed other nations. We seemed both invincible and invulnerable".

Political scientist and former Singapore ambassador to the United Nations Kishore Mahbubani, in a recent book, poses the question "Has the West Lost It?". The short answer is not yet.

But he warns that the West, for 200 years at the forefront of history, now must adapt to a world it no longer dominates.

Mahbubani says Fukuyama's essay, "did a lot of brain damage; having won the Cold War, the West went on autopilot".

The West is suffering from self-doubt: unsure of its values and timid in asserting its virtues.

There is a dearth of leadership and a loss of faith in politics and institutions. Democracy itself is in retreat.

But it would be foolhardy to count the West out; whatever its weaknesses and failings, its fundamental tenets of freedom and representative government remain a beacon for the world as they were in 1989.

Chinese sailors wearing gas masks during a drill in the South China Sea. ( China Military Online )

So how should we approach this year?

In 2019 we need to be mindful of history. We need to learn from it, yet there remains the urge to vanquish it.

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said we are "condemned to history" — those who align with history wish to change the world.

Francis Fukuyama, at least in his original essay, did acknowledge the prospect that history would return. It is a part of his essay too easily overlooked.

"The end of history will be a very sad time … In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history," he wrote.

He warned of a "nostalgia for the time when history existed". As he concluded, perhaps, "the end of history will serve to get history started again".

Rather than liberal democracy standing ascendant, it is China that seeks to own the world, and claim its own place at the helm of history.

I am reminded of the words of another French philosopher, Albert Camus, who said: "All revolutionaries finally aspire to world unity and act as though they believed that history were dead."

Stan Grant is ABC's international affairs analyst and professor of global affairs at Griffith University.