After 1989

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a momentous event in world history. Timothy Garton Ash, now a prominent academic, writes in his political memoir that the feeling at the time was outright pentecostal: ‘‘Ordinary people spoke in tongues. ‘I think the sick will get up from their hospital beds,’ one East Berliner told me’’ (Homelands, p. 147). The televised destruction of what had been until then a constant reminder of German war guilt and Soviet oppression now signaled to the free world a willingness, even on the part of communists, to abandon the divisions of the past and entertain certain liberal ideas about government, the economy, and society. The collapse of the Soviet Union less than two years later marked the end of the Cold War and ushered in the unipolar moment. Liberal capitalist democracy was now the dominant political arrangement and the United States its chief model (Liberal Capitalist Democracy). 

This placed enormous pressure on George H. W. Bush and his administration not to squander this historically unparalleled opportunity to set an acrimonious world on a new liberal footing. Bush was quick to recognize that the United States now found itself in ‘‘a unique and extraordinary moment,’’ a ‘‘rare opportunity’’ to create a ‘‘new world order’’ based on ‘‘the rule of law’’ rather than ‘‘the rule of the jungle’’ (The Jungle Grows Back). When Saddam Hussein sought to exploit the uncertainty of the moment by invading Kuwait in hopes of consolidating his regional power, Bush was immediately confronted with the urgent question of ‘‘how to stop the bully without becoming one’’ (After the Fall, p. 23). 

Bush responded to his first major challenge as leader of this new ‘liberal leviathan’ with remarkable restraint and law-abidingness (Liberal Leviathan). The administration garnered the world’s high praise for seeking UN support before launching a major offensive, committing itself to clear military objectives, and executing a successful operation. The period between 1989 and 2003 is rightly remembered today as the high point of American global supremacy: a time of euphoria, high hopes, and unquestioned political legitimacy (The World America Made).

America’s standing and prestige in the world has since then cratered to an all-time low. A Pew Research survey found that for the first time in almost 20 years, more people around the world view China more positively than the United States. Support for China is particularly high among the U.S.'s closest regional partners, Mexico and Canada. Historical allies are not the only ones to have lost confidence in the U.S.: the majority of Americans think that by 2050 their country will be ‘‘less important in the world’’ than it is today. 

‘‘The world has come a long way since the jubilation of 1989,’’ writes Ian Shapiro, the author of After The Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World. ‘‘In place of cheery prognostications about a liberal-democratic end of history,’’ he explains, ‘‘ominous comparisons to the 1930s’’ abound (After the Fall, p. 197). These days fascist ideas and leitmotifs are proudly invoked, alongside communist talking points and aesthetics, to boost the popularity of once-defunct illiberal movements. 

We have also seen an increasing number of politicians, including the Vice President of the United States, call themselves ‘post-liberals.’ Others eschew labels but have chosen instead to pursue resolutely anti-liberal politics. Attacks on the press are rampant, censorship valorized, and the rule of law under constant testing by an openly authoritarian regime. Shameless wars of aggression are also on the uptick, forcing nations to ramp up their military spending, and to seek new alignments. Protectionism is currently the order of the day in both the U.S. and China, with the number-one and number-two economies battling out to see who will be the first to achieve autarkic status. 

Equally unsettling is the bashful resort to racist and dehumanizing language in modern politics. Talk of ‘the Jews’ is once more on the lips of influential figures, while brown-skinned foreigners are routinely singled out for social and political persecution. Antisemitism, white supremacy, xenophobia, and other ugly passions are no longer hidden but casually injected, often with brimming pride, into our public conversations. Liberal capitalist democracy is not defeated, but certainly besieged. Stagflation, eugenics, red scares, oil embargoes, tariffs, price and rent controls, fear of market collapse—a whole host of ideas, movements, events, policies, crusades, emotions, and styles liberals thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history now seem to have made an unwelcome comeback. 

‘‘If we are living in a sort of Long 20th Century,’’ writes the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, ‘‘it is hard to know exactly why.’’ Shapiro’s latest book is an attempt to solve this mystery by tracing the fortunes of liberalism from its heyday in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall to its nadir under Trump. One of his most consistent themes is the failure of modern politicians to heed the mistakes of the First World War, particularly the Treaty of Versailles (After The Fall, p. 84). The first mistake that the Great Powers made was to think that they could cleanly remake the world to their liking. A second mistake often followed from the first: a belief that their reconstruction of the world would not produce enduring resentment and enmity. 

It was this sort of stunning hubris which in generations past led to the creation of the so-called ‘Middle East’ and the political turmoil which still now engulfs the region. Pencil and chart in hand, excited statesmen got down to ‘‘the business of arranging the world,’’ by ‘‘cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake.’’ As the British political writer and broadcaster Harold Nicholson recognized at the the time, the results of this cartographic exercise were disastrous for the millions of ‘‘people whom our errant lines enclose’’ (The Conservative Sensibility, p. 410). British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was also apprehensive. Taking over Mesopotamia meant a large racially mixed army ‘‘in an unfamiliar country, tackling every kind of tangled administrative question, worse than ever had it in India, with a hornet’s nest of Arab tribes’’ (Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 510). 

Colin Powell would use the same language to describe the situation in 20th century Lebanon. The U.S had stuck its ‘‘hand into a thousand-year-old hornet’s nest with the expectation that our mere presence might pacify the hornets.’’ As the Americans would soon learn, the Lebanese conflict involved twenty-five different armed factions and a ‘‘bewildering array’’ of religious and ethnic groups, amounting to seventeen sects in total. After American engagement in the region resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people working at the U.S. Embassy and Marine quarters in Beirut, the chastened Reagan administration seemed resolved not to repeat the mistakes of the past and throw itself once more into the cauldron of Middle Eastern politics (The American Century and Beyond, pp. 574–576). 

Memory of the 1983 Lebanon disaster and other fiascos weighed heavily on the minds of Iraq war strategists, but did not ultimately stop modern politicians from trying their hand at the same world-making project. A senior advisor for Bush Jr. told a journalist that when America acts, it creates its own reality: ‘‘While you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’’ (After the Fall, p. 47). 

As it turns out, a study of ‘what they did’ and the ‘world they created’ reveals a trail of destruction and chaos. In Iraq and Afghanistan, efforts to turn these lands into workable democracies failed for reasons all-too-familiar to political scientists. Shapiro notes for example that an economic threshold for sustainable democracy seemed to be $10,000 per capita GDP in 2001 dollars. Afghanistan’s GDP per capita at the time was less than $200 and Iraq's roughly $800 in 2003. In other words, the prospect of democracy in both countries was likely illusory (After the Fall, pp. 44–45). 

As for Libya, Obama’s decision to get militarily involved was a source of tremendous global disorder. Shapiro notes that the collapse of Gaddafi’s fiefdom flooded the Muslim world with weapons. Most of these weapons landed in the African Sahel, a region of the world which holds only 10% of Africa’s population, but accounts for more than 75% of coup attempts on the continent since 2020 (After the Fall, p. 115). Mali, which until that point was one of West Africa’s most stable democracies, fell to a military coup, followed by Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Gabon, all within the span of three years. In total, there have been at least nine successful coups on the African continent since 2020, transforming the region into the ‘coup belt’ of Africa, as well as the global center of jihadi terrorism. The proud anti-Western nationalism of these new military dictators also complicates European and American attempts to pry African nations away from Chinese and Russian influence, and to combat the spread of religious extremism. Jason Pack was one of the first geopolitical experts to argue that the world has entered a period of enduring global disorder, thanks in no small part to the chaos in Libya. His thesis looks much stronger today (Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder). 

And then there is the issue of Europe, particularly Russia. Here politicians simply failed to follow the Marshall plan. Instead of investing money, time, and resources into the mutually beneficial task of reintegrating former Soviet countries into the society of nations, the American government refused to forgive Soviet-era debt and to spend large sums of money helping Russian institutions stabilize. As a result, Boris Yeltsin and other Eurasian leaders were left exposed to hyperinflation, declining standards of living, and social instability (After the Fall, p. 61). Ali A. Allawi, Iraq’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, has noted that in the immediate aftermath of the western economic intervention, few former Soviet nations saw real income growth. In Georgia and Moldova, GDP levels in 2000 were an ‘‘incredible 34% and 32% of what they were in 1989,’’ and in Central Asia poverty levels actually rose from a 1988 rate encompassing 15% of the total population to a whopping 66% of total population in 1995 (Rich World, Poor World, p. 309). 

Most liberals, however, have remained stolid in the face of criticism outlining the long record of diplomatic blunders which brought the world to these new heights of insecurity. Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Time magazine ran a cover announcing “The Return of History: How Putin Shattered Europe’s Dreams.” Then came the October 7 attacks, the Venezuelan operation, and the offensive in Iran. It took five years for the core assumptions of liberal internationalism to be thoroughly challenged. A bemused Condoleezza Rice confessed that she had honestly ‘‘thought we had moved beyond…fighting for territory, thinking in ethnic terms, using resources’’ to wage war. ‘‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’’ she added, ‘‘We thought the linearity of human progress should have left all of this behind’’ (Anger, Fear, Domination, p. 22). 

This is the problem pundits of Ganesh’s caliber have been soberly wrestling with. His suggestion is that perhaps there ‘‘are certain physical facts—bodies of water, deposits of gas—that technology was never going to transcend, except in the ultra-long term.’’ Perhaps it was wrong, he explains, for liberals to have thought that these constraints of geography were ever going to go away. He is certainly right that modern politicians have for far too long underestimated the role of geography in politics, but it is important never to lose sight of the very human role in creating the current crisis of democracy. As George Will observes, ‘‘most of the political calamities through which the world has staggered since 1919 have resulted from the distinctly modern belief that things—including nations and human nature—are much more malleable than they actually are. It is the belief that nations are like Tinkertoys: They can be taken apart and rearranged at will,’’ without grave evil (The Conservative Sensibility, p. 411). We are still living through the consequences of this delusion in Iran.

The politicians who broke our world made avoidable mistakes. They failed to apply the painful lessons of history, and to make the absolute best out of favorable historical accidents. ‘‘Whether out of shortsightedness, hubris, or both,’’ writes Shapiro, ‘‘they missed how fleeting the opportunity was or what the costs would be of failing to seize the moment’’ (After the Fall, 84). It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that liberal politicians got everything wrong or that the world is not a much better place now that Soviet communism is gone. Consider, for example, the case of Poland. Thirty-four years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, this small country of 38 million is now one of the world’s 20 largest economies, ahead of Switzerland. In the eyes of liberal economists, Poland did everything right: it submitted itself to shock therapy, joined GATT in 1967, the WTO in 1995, NATO in 1999, then the European Union in 2004. Since then the country has been recession-proof and growing in riches that now exceed $1 trillion in GDP. To top off this amazing run, Poland has been invited as a guest member of the 2026 G20 Leaders’ Summit in Miami, making it the first time a Central Eastern European country has been deemed fit to associate with this elite economic club. Poland’s success is a reminder that liberal economics and political philosophy, when assisted by the mobilization of civil society and the can-do spirit of people groups, can indeed transform a nation for the better, but not without careful steps and a respect for history and culture.

Featured image is "Wreck of Cabo de Santa Maria," CC BY-SA 4.0 Simo Räsänen 2010.