Let’s take a field trip in the time machine to the Year of Our Lord, 1989.
We’re on the cusp of an exciting new millennium.
The Berlin Wall, emblem of the old bipolar world order, is on the verge of collapse. When it falls, with it will go the only rival superpower to the United States and the Western liberal world order at large.
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All of neoliberalism’s ideological enemies at the global level had been vanquished and life on Earth going forward will approximate something like the utopian wet dream of Star Trek.
Material excess was the prevailing cultural zeitgeist of the cocaine-fueled decade.
Commercially viable flying Jetsons cars were going to be a reality for the middle class in the foreseeable future. (I’m just speculating that people literally believed this in 1989. I don’t know for sure because I was two years old, but that was more or less the vibe, from my understanding.)
In short, it was the “end of history.” Global liberal capitalism has triumphed.
So sayeth political scientist Francis Fukuyama in The End of History? (emphasis added), published in the summer of 1989:
The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.
The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants' markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Liberalism uber alles!
In retrospect, it seems Fukuyama may have mistaken “thirty years” for “forever,” as the “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” appears to have been nothing more than a passing fad in the grand arc of human history.
Depending on your historical perspective, eighty years was a good long run for the “global liberal order” — or not really, if you’re comparing it to the longevity of the Roman Empire.
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At any rate, time marches on, and global liberalism’s impending demise becomes more apparent.
Whereas once the belligerent nation-states of the world went out of their way to invent some pretext under international law — harboring terrorism, democracy promotion, etc. — it seems they barely try to feign fidelity to it these days.
Whatever one thinks about the Venezuela operation, the current administration is much more honest about its motivations than previous administrations’ pretexts for war.
"We are going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and start making money for the country," Trump declared, essentially conceding that it was a natural resources grab, as well as a move to box China and Russia out of the region.
Imagine the Bush regime in 2003 being as candid about Iraq. Everyone knew that the oil and the geopolitics were the major factors driving war. Yet the administration insisted on maintaining the façade of democracy promotion, floating false claims that Iraq has a nuclear weapon, and lying about Hussein’s involvement in 9/11 as justifications — because, as the de facto head of the liberal order, international law necessitated the lie.
In 2026, all of that posturing seems much less necessary.
Likewise, China’s Xi Jinping delivered a much-overlooked New Year’s speech recently in which he declared the CCP’s intention to “reunify” Taiwan by force, which he described as “unstoppable” — language he definitely would not have used so publicly in a primetime address just a short while ago.
All of which is to say: the liberal order, and the international law that underpins it, is crumbling in real time.What might replace global liberalism is an open question, but it will likely more closely adhere to the principles of realism, liberalism’s primary rival theory in international relations.
Via Independent Institute (emphasis added):
Realism is one of the prominent international relations theories for explaining the behavior of states. The core essence of realism is an attempt to explain “world politics as they really are, rather than describe how they ought to be,” presenting the world as a state of anarchy where nations, acting as unitary rational actors, compete with each other to maximize their power, “the only—variable of interest.”
Realism is often juxtaposed with liberalism, the belief that the “national characteristics of individual States matter for their international relations” and that it is possible for different types of regimes to operate in different ways, such as Kant’s theory of democratic peace. Liberal “institutionalism,” the ideology on which diplomats in the West are brought up, is the belief that “international institutions facilitate cooperation and peace among countries.” The difference between these schools of thought can be understood through their perspectives on international institutions.
While liberals assume that organizations like the United Nations are a genuine platform for international cooperation, realists assume that these institutions do very little to prevent states from pursuing their interests and can very often serve as a vector through which state interests are pursued.
