American punditry has entered a new phase of post-Cold War pessimism. Liberal internationalist optimism about the worldwide triumph of peace and democracy may have died long ago, but proclaiming its death is now more popular than ever. A steady stream of think pieces about the return of history, resurgence of nationalism, and reemergence of great-power competition all herald what might be called the rise of Risk geopolitics. How did we get here? One problem is that the pessimists had better maps. Spreading peace and democracy has never been cartographically convincing, even to its promoters. And it could sometimes look downright sinister to those on the wrong side of the map. At the same time, maps are ideally suited to essentialist visions of the world that, accurately or not, divide people into discrete, ready-to-clash units, each with their own color and territory. Perhaps as a result, maps have served nicely as a metaphor for those who assumed conflict was more natural, or more interesting, all along. The challenges of mapping global peace and prosperity were already evident 75 years ago, when Americans began to articulate a new liberal internationalist vision for the future. The end of World War II, like the end of the Cold War, led some to imagine that the world was entering an unprecedented era of international peace. Earnest optimism about this postwar world took particularly fanciful form in two striking—yet strikingly unrealistic—maps. The first is the cartographer Leslie Macdonald Gill’s 1942 map of the Atlantic Charter, which visualized U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s promise for the peace that would follow an Allied victory. Rays of sun shine down on a world engaged in commerce and industry while a man in the corner hammers artillery into ploughshares. Borders between countries are still demarcated but only barely, with dotted lines that disappear under all the bustle.