End of Dreams, Return of History

Abstract

Abstract The world has become normal again. The years immediately following the end of the cold war offered a tantalizing glimpse at the possibility of a new kind of international order, with nations growing together or disappearing altogether, ideological conflicts melting away, cultures intermingling, and increasingly free commerce and communications. But that was a mirage, the hopeful anticipation of a liberal, democratic world that wanted to believe the end of the cold war did not just end one strategic and ideological conflict but all strategic and ideological conflict. People and their leaders longed for “a world transformed.” Today the nations of the West still cling to that vision. Evidence to the contrary—the turn toward autocracy in Russia or the growing military ambitions of China—is either dismissed as temporary aberrations or denied entirely.

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