President XI pledges reunification between Taiwan and China just days before the disputed island elects its new President. Russia pounds the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv with missiles and drones, hours after Moscow accuses Kyiv of carrying out a deadly air assault on the city of Belgorod. American helicopters repel an attack by Houthi militants on a container vessel in the Red Sea, killing 10 militants. Israeli airstrikes kill scores in Gaza as Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has shown unparalleled morality in its response to the October 7th attacks. The world-famous Cologne Cathedral is closed after a terrorist threat. People around the world gather to celebrate the new year.

It was early afternoon on New Years Eve, but in East Berlin, the fireworks had already started, and every few moments there was a loud crackle or boom which shook the ground. In Shakespeare and Sons, a bookshop and bagel café on Warschauer Strause, a woman sat at a table chatting on her phone to a friend, seemingly unperturbed by the noise outside.

“What he doesn’t understand,” she said, “is that for me, achieving this level of complexity is the most important thing in my life. More important than my job, more important than my relationship, more important than anything.”

Around her, shoppers ate bagels, talked about politics and their New Year plans and looked at the titles on sale: Techno Feudalism – What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Voroufakis; I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be by Colin Grant; Wellness by Nathan Hill; The Contented Vegan by Peggy Brusseau; and Polysecure – Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Non-Monogamy by Jessica Fern. 

I left the store, the booms and crackles continuing, and headed west, passing posters promoting intravenous drips which could be delivered to people’s homes after a night of heavy drinking to prevent a hangover, and a rotating advertising hoarding marketing a firm called Dildoking, with a message below it ‘Sex Macht Schon’ – ‘Sex is Good’. On a nearby wall were a variety of stickers with political messages: “Fuck the Patriarchy”, “Smash Fascism”, “Animal Liberation = Human Liberation”; next to them was a poster decrying gentrification “Rent is a Fuck”, it read. 

A couple of hundred yards away was a long stretch of the Berlin Wall which ran along the River Spree into the centre of the city. The wall, which once divided Berlin between the Communist East and the Capitalist West, seemed an appropriate starting point for a journey across the Western world: from here, I would head west across Europe, Canada and the United States, looking at how the countries I was visiting were responding to the challenges they faced from both outside and within, and assessing whether they were ready for the challenges I feared lay in store for them over the decades ahead.

I reached a stretch of the wall that had been turned into an outdoor street art collection, covered in brightly coloured murals and graffiti slogans of solidarity, hope and creativity.

“Inferno ruled too many years until the people chose the light,” the message with one mural read, “I put my faith in you, Berlin, and give to you my colours bright.” 

“Say yes to freedom, peace, dignity and respect for all,” another read, “say no to terror and repression towards all living beings.” 

Fifty yards away, a mural fusing the German and Israeli flags, with a blue Star of David over the black, red and yellow of the Federal Republic, had been daubed with red paint, and a message of peace in the post-Holocaust world from the mural’s creator had been pasted over with a decrial of the “abomination” of Israeli’s military action in Gaza following the October 7th attacks.

It was almost three months since October 7th, and across the western world, there had been huge protests against Israel and – in more limited numbers – against the wave of antisemitism across Europe, North America and Australasia which had followed the Hamas attacks. In the wake of October 7th, Western leaders had queued to visit Israel to give their support to the nation after it had suffered the most devastating attack in its history, but as the civilian death toll in Gaza had mounted, with estimates of more than 20,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, Western support had diminished and calls for a ceasefire had grown. The United States – Israel’s staunchest ally – had resisted those calls but had challenged Israel to reduce the civilian deaths in the war. Other nations had gone far further, with Turkey, a key member of the NATO alliance, amongst those accusing Israel of genocide, and South Africa referring Israel to the International Criminal Court.

Here in Berlin, the Israeli flag still flew on many public buildings, but it was clear not all the country’s citizens shared the state’s solidarity. As I headed into the city centre, the crackle and boom of fireworks becoming frequent, there were signs of anger all around. A series of posters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas since October 7thhad been ripped or painted over; on one poster, someone had written ‘Israel tausenden kinder getotet’ – ‘Israel has killed thousands of children’ – in red pen. Over eight of the posters, someone has scrawled ‘Free Gaza’. Nearby, I saw swastikas graffitied on walls and a sticker which read: ‘You cannot be the victim and the oppressor’. 

At the main synagogue of Berlin, I saw a small memorial to the victims of October 7th: a few photos of those killed, candles, flowers and a message reading ‘Your Pain is Our Pain’. The memorial had temporary fencing around it and was guarded by three police officers. 

As I looked at the photos of those killed, a man approached me.

“My best friend was Palestinian,” he said angrily, “he was 16, he was killed by the Israelis. He had his hands above his head, he knelt down on the ground and they still shot him.” 

“I spit on Israel,” he said, spitting towards the memorial from beyond the fence, “and I spit on Jews”.

The police officers approached and ushered him away. He argued with them, demonstrating how his friend had knelt with his hands above his head. They told him to leave and he reluctantly moved on. 

The police officers returned to me. 

“I’m sorry,” one said, “we have a lot of troubled people living nearby.”

I asked whether this kind of thing happened regularly. 

“Every day,” he said.

I headed west towards Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War crossing point between Russian East Berlin and American West Berlin. Here, tourists now queued to have their photos taken at the iconic site, now surrounded by fast food outlets and shops selling pieces of the Berlin wall and nicknacks from the Fifties and Sixties. Next to the queue was a Christmas Tree with scores of Ukrainian flags hanging off it as adornments; on the flags someone had scrawled a series of messages: ‘Free Gaza’, ‘Free Palestine’, ‘No Pride in Israeli Apartheid’. Nearby a mural depicted an unarmed, Ukrainian prisoner of war, Oleksandr Matsievskyi, who had become an icon after being filmed declaring ‘Slava Ukraina’ – ‘Glory to Ukraine’ – while smoking a cigarette before being shot dead by Russian soldiers.

Around me, the booms and crackles were becoming louder as the last sunlight of 2023 faded to the west. I walked up to Unter den Linden, the main street leading to the Brandenberg Gate in central Berlin, where a small group of Ukrainians kept vigil outside the Russian Embassy, playing music and protecting a small shrine to those killed in the war. They cut lonely figures in the cold as tourists enjoying the post-Christmas break passed them by on the way to new year parties, unmoved by the signs showing the devastating numbers of children killed, missing or displaced since the Russian invasion. Nearby a message scrawled on a wall read – “Nicht Unser Kreig” – “Not Our War”, while near the Brandenberg Gate anti-war protestors handed out leaflets decrying German support for Ukraine. 

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine two years earlier, the German response had been heavily contested. Many commentators, particularly within Ukraine and Eastern Europe, had felt that the response of the continent’s richest and most powerful nation had been too slow and indecisive – an analysis I agreed with. While still continuing to buy Russian oil and allowing German firms to sell to Russia via other countries, I couldn’t help thinking that Germany was fighting Russia with one hand and supporting its war effort with the other. Much had been made of Germany’s aversion to war after the horrors of the Nazi era, yet by equipping Ukraine for no more than stalemate, I feared that Germany, like other Western powers, were perpetuating the conflict, not ensuring peace.  

That night, Unter den Linden was closed off by the city authorities as young people from around the world congregated for music and fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate, the site of Europe’s biggest New Years Eve party.  Big screens by the Gate proclaimed positive messages of peace and unity, but just before midnight, I saw German police in riot gear confronting a crowd close to the Russian Embassy. The group were not protesting Russia, however, but Israel, and the police struggled to control them as the group let off fireworks and pushed against barriers. Nearby a memorial to the Kindertransport, which had taken Jewish children of Europe to safety from the Nazi regime, was defaced. There were fires on the streets where boxes of sparklers had been abandoned while still alight, and police cars, ambulances and fire engines sped around the city, their sirens blaring. 

At midnight, there was a cacophony of noise as fireworks were let off all around the city, and as I watched the crowds celebrate the new year by the River Spree, I thought back to Checkpoint Charlie and the ‘Free Gaza’ messages scrawled on the Ukrainian flags adorning the Christmas tree. The war in the Middle East had taken public and political attention away from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and both conflicts had shown faultlines between Western states and their citizens. These fractures worried me both in themselves but also because I felt that neither conflict was the biggest challenge to the West. The year just ending, 2023, had been the hottest on record on earth, and I feared even greater long-term threats to global stability from the climate crisis, scarce resources, and mass migration. I also felt that the greatest threat to the global order and to universal human rights came from the Chinese Communist Party; and I feared if the West couldn’t get its act together in response to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, there was little hope of a robust response to China. 

As a police car whizzed by and a firework was shot across the street next to me, I feared western attention was consumed by the internal struggles rather than those across the globe. Here in Germany, the far-right was resurgent, and there was a similar story across Europe, while in the US, Donald Trump was ahead of Joe Biden in many opinion polls ahead of the 2024 US Presidential election. Economic growth across the West was sluggish at best, some populations were shrinking, and internal culture wars seemed to command much more attention than global threats. Far from confronting big external challenges, Western nations seemed overwhelmed by their own problems and I wondered if anything could awaken western nations from their malaise before it was too late.

As I returned to my hotel, the cacophony of fireworks and sirens continuing, I thought back to East Berlin, which had been under austere Soviet rule within my lifetime but was now a place of over-priced bagels, mobile hangover cures and books about consensual non-monogamy, and where the notion of fighting for western values would be seen by many as problematic, an echo of an imperial mindset which had cause huge damage in the not-so-recent past. I recalled the start of the Ukraine war and Russian commentators’ decrial of Western weakness and decadence. President Putin’s calculation, it seemed to me, was that the West was too comfortable and self-absorbed to really have the stomach – the courage to sacrifice and to accept pain in defence of a larger goal – needed to defend democracies like Ukraine. As I travelled through Europe and north America, I wanted to explore whether he was right, or whether western nations could somehow find a way to come together in response to threats to democracy and the rules-based order while at the same time addressing internal fractures and avoiding a lurch to the far-right. West is the story of my journey.