and its partners will have to be multifaceted and draw on every tool at our disposal. Each has its own intentions and motivations, and the response of the U.S. Russia and China are going to be challenges for the next 20 or 30 years, but they are not one and the same. I fervently hope that we are not at the beginning of a second Cold War, but without question, the great-power competition facing the United States has become more complex and more urgent. What had been a sleepy multilateral system roared back to life, brandishing the weapons of diplomatic, economic and cultural connections. and its partner nations saw the liberal world order come under all-out attack in 2022 with Russia’s barbaric, catastrophic invasion of Ukraine. After several years spent observing with concern the “democracy recession” around the world, the U.S. Three decades later, Fukuyama’s prediction could most generously be described as optimistic.
Fukuyama believed, as I do, that market democracies are the best foundation for moral, social and economic progress, and that the “liberal world order” that had come into being after the Second World War - which I believe has kept humanity free from global conflagration for 75 years - would be cemented as the fundamental organizing principle of geopolitics. In 1992, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published “The End of History and the Last Man.” This seminal work of political philosophy argued that civilization had reached “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” The world was experiencing a wave of democratization, not just in the former Soviet states in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
0 kommentar(er)
