Biden, Kissinger and Soros, who helped shape the post-Cold War world, are worried their life’s work is being undone.

(Originally published May 25 in “What in the World“) Old men with the experience to know—and at their ages arguably little but their legacies at stake in the outcome—have concluded we’re on our way or already embroiled in a global conflict between Western civilization and Eastern authoritarianism.

U.S. President Joe Biden, 79, is a Catholic born in World II who launched his career at the height of the Cold War, became involved in arms control talks with the Soviets and spent over a decade on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee helping shape American foreign policy in post-Soviet Europe. Now steering U.S. foreign policy as president, he appears resigned to a world war with China and Russia to defend democracy and Western civilization.

George Soros, 91, is a Hungarian Jew who survived Nazi occupation and Soviet liberation, started building his fortune during the Cold War and has in the past 20 years funded pro-democracy institutions in former Soviet republics. He believes the war in Ukraine may be the start of a third world war that will determine the survival of Western civilization. Soros is at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, giving the talking points from a new and somewhat discombobulated op-ed in which he argues that the rise of authoritarianism began with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been abetted by technology.

But the oldest of them all is Henry Kissinger, 98, another Jew who as a teen escaped Nazi Germany for the U.S., returned to help defeat Hitler and win a bronze star, then became a master of modern realpolitik and the architect of U.S. Cold War policy as national security adviser and secretary of state. Kissinger is in Davos warning that it’s the West that’s nudging us towards world war by pushing Russia into a corner over Ukraine rather than recognizing its historical importance as a buffer between Europe and Russia.

No matter whose memory you trust, each of these men seem to agree we’re locked in a mortal clash of civilizations. On one side is the West, fighting for democracy against the authoritarianism of the East. On the other is the East, fighting against an American-led imperialism of liberal values. Only Kissinger’s analysis appears to offer avenues for de-escalation.

Biden’s trip to Asia has only helped cement both narratives. Biden’s aim in visiting South Korea and Japan was to signal support for allies in Asia worried about an increasingly assertive China and North Korea and to galvanize that alliance with economic ties and greater military cooperation between Australia, India, Japan and the United States.

As if to justify the cost of Biden’s trip, China and Russia responded to this containment confab by conducting joint military exercises that saw their bombers fly early Tuesday—while the Tokyo summit was still underway—from the Sea of Japan south to the Philippine Sea. Biden flew out of Tokyo late Tuesday. This morning, North Korea bid him farewell by launching three missiles into the Sea of Japan.