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somethingelse55 wrote:True, its not one of those "the passage states" type questions.

But also, from a broader, more holistic and intuitive point of view, that whole last paragraph is kind of trying to say that the Cold War can be looked upon as a bipolarity maintaining peace. The author doesn't spend any time trying to convince you that the Cold War is just a brief period in between multi polarities. He has literally one word that even mentions that there might be a multipolarity in modern times - he doesn't spend ANY other time within the passage talking about the future.

What I'm trying to say is that answer choice E goes along with the author's main point and his argument. C is at best talking about one word in the middle of the passage. More often than not, and by that I mean like 90% of the time at least, TCR will be in line with what the passage is really about for these kind of questions.

C is just completely unrelated to what the passage is about, in other words. So the only way it would probably be TCR in a question is like you said if the passage explicitly asked something like "What type of international system does the author think Europe is in right now?"

This is why its so, so important to know what the passage is about and what the author is trying to convince you of/describe. He's not focused on the future at all here, he's talking about the past.