As Israel begins its ground invasion in Gaza, Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens on the hard strategic decisions facing the West.

“Life is a cabaret, old chum,” sang Sally Bowles in the musical based on Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories.” I suspect the movie version of “Cabaret,” which won Liza Minnelli the Oscar for best actress, is the nearest older Americans ever got to the Weimar Republic.

Still, it’s not a bad place to start, if you want to talk Weimar and its relevance to Donald Trump’s America.

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November, writes Niall Ferguson.

It has been nearly four and a half years since I began writing this column, which works out at roughly 240,000 words altogether. As these will be my last words in these pages, it’s time to look back and take stock. If part of your job is to be a pundit then, as the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Philip Tetlock argues in “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” you need to keep score.

The U.S. response to the novel coronavirus divides many Americans along partisan lines. Democrats criticize President Donald Trump for a mismanaged response with grave consequences, and Republicans defend him, downplaying the need for social distancing and measures that ensure it.

For anyone past the age of retirement, 2020 has been the year of the village. Cities have been risky — the excess mortality rates from COVID-19 are higher for London than for England, much higher for Madrid than Spain, and vastly higher for New York than for the United States.

Niall Ferguson, one of a handful of historians with star status and a global reputation, has extensively studied the phenomenon of power through the shifting sands of history and published numerous books on the subject.

In Cixin Liu's extraordinary science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem," China recklessly creates, then ingeniously solves, an existential threat to humanity by establishing contact with the planet Trisolaris and then thwarting a Trisolaran invasion.

"Niall Ferguson's Networld" from PBS is a look at the rise of online social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but it also explores the same principles that are a matter of life and death as the globe confronts a killer virus.