Speaking as someone who started with Herodotus in the early 80s and has been working his way forward, I'd suggest anyone looking for a 'lens' on our current world situation start with Peter Zeihan's "Accidental Superpower". His explanation of geopolitics in the first half of the book is a good framework for pretty much any history. He continues on with how the current global situation comes out of the Bretton Woods Accords. which I somewhat agree with (Bretton Woods predated Kennan's Long Telegram by a couple of years; it's unclear it started out as a device to contain the USSR even though that was an end result. The Cold War is a spectacularly interesting period.

One of Zeihan’s points (maybe in that book but more forcefully of late) is that the Bretton Woods arrangement wasn’t just a worldwide monetary agreement, but it was the US guaranteeing international blue-water goods movement at its own cost — and opening up the US home market. I see that, plus the Marshall Plan as ‘bribes’ to keep countries out of the Soviet orbit. The US has been moving away from the accords. Economically, we don’t need trade from outside the Americas — and now with the shale oil revolution (AKA ‘fracking’) it’s an energy exporter — something that I cringe about, given Global Warming — but it’s a reason for progressing disinterest in the Middle East.

Zeihan’s convinced that the US will eventually resign from the job of global trade guarantor; he’s spent the last few years figuring out what might happen then (hint: it’s less than excellent for the RF or China — or Germany). It’s all pretty provocative and can be dismissed as an attempt to read tea leaves. But I can tell you that what he says about the current global arrangement and the Bretton Woods Accords (modified by the later Jamaica ones) absolutely tracks the bits of the Cold War I’ve dug into.