By Nick Deiuliis
Today the world is trembling with international strife. Russia continuing its brutal grind in Ukraine, Iran funding terror and disrupting Mideast shipping, Israel facing down dual terror threats of Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and the Golan, Venezuela massing along its border with Guyana to invade for oil, North Korea opening another nuclear reactor and firing ballistic missiles, and China signaling to everyone that an invasion of Taiwan is imminent.
The geopolitical gameboard is blinking red, with a new Axis of China-Russia-Iran plotting and building hegemony to counter and ultimately destroy the West.
Meanwhile, Western leaders dither and blabber with hollow phraseology that lacks tangible action. Worse yet, those Western elites insist on focusing more on the abstract fear of future climate instead of the tangible danger of present actors. The West fights with itself, where its once-proud institutions and values are systemically overturned and uprooted by our supposed leaders.
A 1989 Root Cause to What Ails the West in 2024
How did our elites and experts arrive at such a state of ineptitude? How did they not see this coming? And why do they continue to behave as paralyzed ninnies as troubling events unfold, one after another?
Thank a person few outside of elite foreign policy and political science circles have heard of: Francis Fukuyama. He is a noted geopolitical analyst, who has done it all in his field, from serving as an advisor to Muammar Gaddafi to being a thought leader for the US neoconservative movement.
In 1989, Fukuyama published his now famous essay, whose title was in the form of a question: “The End of History?” Fukuyama posited that the geopolitical fight between freedom and totalitarianism was over, that right prevailed over wrong, and that classic liberalism reigned supreme and unchallenged.
“The End of History?” influenced many a policy and leader through the years; it was fundamental to the thinking of everyone from Bush the Second to Obama to Kerry to whoever is running foreign policy in today’s White House.1 It was widely accepted as sage and the authority on how one should view geopolitics.
And that was quite unfortunate. Because the core premise of “The End of History?” has proven to be hogwash.
Contrasting the Expert Prediction and the Current Reality
Consider key excerpts from the influential 1989 paper and then contrast them with reality in early 2024. Doing so exposes the danger of Western elite arrogance, smugness, and overconfidence and their bad consequences.
The paper’s opening paragraph starts with a key sentence: “The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that ‘peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world.”
What is breaking out across the world today? Iran developing nukes, Hamas manufacturing terror, North Korea firing missiles into international waters, Russia annihilating Ukraine, state-sponsored terrorists disrupting global shipping lanes, and China prowling Taiwan. Is that peace breaking out? Or more like the late 1930s when the Axis Powers were aligning and gearing up?
Fukuyama wrote 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.”
Do you feel that classic liberalism is alive, well, and winning—in Putin’s Russia or the Ayatollah’s Iran? Is the free market running on all cylinders in Xi’s China? To posit such today is laughable.
Fukuyama saw much of history and conflict stemming from a war between ideologies. Which is true. Then and now. But here’s what Fukuyama misjudged: he argued that the rival ideologies to republican democracy, the West, and capitalism were dead. Vanquished. Beaten.
Fascism and communism were supposedly wrecked and ruined. The first, fascism, was literally ruined by World War II bombs, both conventional and nuclear. And the latter, communism, was assumed to be destroyed by, for lack of a better term, Westernization and liberalization of places like China and Russia.
Fukuyama was dead wrong about communism and socialism being slain.
Once you assume the alternatives are gone, then it’s not a big leap to declare what Fukuyama proposed: that it’s the end of history, as we knew it. In his words: “That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
That assessment was tragically mistaken. The Left might have been on the ropes in the late 1980s and 1990s, but it was far from the point of surrender. And now the Left and its ideologies have Western civilization on the brink and on the ropes.
If you seek perfect examples of how bold statements that might feel good to say then, or enjoy popularity then, can age incredibly poorly, consider these snippets from “The End of History?”:
“…the appeal of communism in the developed Western world, it is safe to say, is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War.”
It was not, and is not, safe to say that.
And: “…those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.”
Fukuyama should visit an Ivy League campus these days and see what ideological vibe he picks up from students.
There is an interesting pair of sentences on China sitting in proximity in the essay: “…the past fifteen years have seen an almost total discrediting of Marxism-Leninism as an economic system.” And “But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bourgeois consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution.”
Fukuyama should’ve checked with Chairman Xi first. Marxism and the Left are the things that matter most in China today. By cold, calculating design of the elite there.
Epic Miscalculations of China and Russia
Fukuyama was all-in when it came to the once-popular Western elite view that China would simply Westernize itself once it saw how great of a system we had. That China would become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ among enlightened nations.
He wrote, “…the pull of the liberal idea continues to be very strong as economic power devolves and the economy becomes more open to the outside world. There are currently over 20,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. and other Western countries, almost all of them the children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that when they return home to run the country they will be content for China to be the only country in Asia unaffected by the larger democratizing trend.”
Too bad it was hard for Fukuyama to believe that. Or for Wall Street and DC. Or for Republican and Democratic presidents. They all believed it. And every one of them got it decisively wrong. It wasn’t until Trump, that threat-to-democracy despot, that the West started to wake up. Yes, the crude-angry-narcissist-megalomaniac of social media got right what all the experts got wrong, at least when it came to China.
It gets worse for the aging of China musings from “The End of History?”
Consider: “The central issue is the fact that the People’s Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia’s future, became an anachronism, and it was the mainland Chinese who in fact were decisively influenced by the prosperity and dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics – the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan.”
It is painful to read that in 2024, to where one feels embarrassed for Fukuyama. The CCP, the Left, and communism are beacons today for nations with the Belt and Road Initiative; they run the curriculum across Western higher education and elite academia; and they fund chaos when it benefits them, from Ukraine to Israel.
And Taiwan victory? It doesn’t even officially exist in corporate brochures and on foreign office maps. And it may not actually exist by year end, or whenever China decides to move on it.
On Russia, Fukuyama was just as bad with his predictions. He wrote that Russia was reforming and that it was moving toward a society where “…people should be truly responsible for their own affairs, that higher political bodies should be answerable to lower ones,…that the rule of law should prevail over arbitrary police actions…that there should be legal protection for property rights, the need for open discussion of public issues and the right of public dissent…and of a political culture that is more tolerant…”
Did Putin smile to himself or outright laugh when he read that? And be certain that Putin has read Fukuyama. As has Xi. The Left studies its enemies and is always probing for weakness.
Fukuyama took to task those who said the fall of the communist state USSR would lead to a more nationalistic Russia led by a strongman. He wrote: “The automatic assumption that Russia shorn of its expansionist communist ideology should pick up where the czars left off just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore a curious one.”
Not so curious now, just ask Ukraine and eastern Europe.
He had the same view with China not going aggressive. He proclaimed, “Chinese competitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have virtually disappeared: Beijing no longer sponsors Maoist insurgencies or tries to cultivate influence in distant African countries as it did in the 1960s.”
Proof positive that Deng Xiaoping’s mantra of ‘hide your strength and bide your time’ was effective in lulling Western elites like Fukuyama into a foreign policy coma.
The opening paragraph of the essay’s conclusion does a great job of summarizing the failure that is “The End of History?” and its apostles with China and Russia policy:
“The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance. For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing ‘Common Marketization’ of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.”
Today’s darkening world serves as a decisive rebuke of Fukuyama.
What Filled the Supposed Vacuum in the West?
If the United States was truly a unipolar power and it was indeed the ‘end of history’, then something had to replace the old way in the West.
How we should behave in the end of history era was a big question. A vacuum needed to be filled. Ironically, the very ideology Fukuyama said was eradicated: communism, socialism, the Left, was what filled that vacuum of values in the West.
The Left superimposed its value system on the West once experts and elites like Fukuyama assured and convinced everyone that communism and socialism were dead. That China and Russia would surely start behaving like us.
What did the Left fill our culture and values with? Well, it is rigidly secular. To the point where it becomes not just ideology, but a new religion. Strangely, secular purity morphs into a religion. With true, ardent believers.
Some call it postmodernism. Its foundational pillars are evident with the big ideas and movements of today. Three stand out.
First, it manifests in the expert class demanding that the global/universal issue takes primacy over national/local issues. There is an ethical duty and responsibility to put yourself, your community, and your country behind and secondary to what is best for the public good or the planet or humankind. The select few decide what best serves the global/universal, of course.
This leads to things like unbalanced globalization and open borders. Consider the open border issue these days. Texas, of course. But also, Italy. And even, of all places, Finland, on its border with Russia. The Left use open borders as an effective divisive tool.
A second notable manifestation of the value system of the Left is a religious fervor on Code Red and climate change. Where the planet is in peril and we all must take a back seat with our interests and place in life to tackle climate change. Climate alarmism looms so large these days, touching everything, that it deserves to be placed as its own foundational pillar of the Left’s new ‘end of history’ toolkit.
The third manifestation is a cleansing. Not an ethnic cleansing, but a values cleansing. Orwellian in many ways. Wiping away, erasing, vilifying, and, yes, canceling the prior values of the West, of capitalism, of the individual and their rights, and of America. Ignoring science to the benefit of ideology. Replacing factual history with subjective fiction. There are many current examples; you know them well.
Hope?
The epic transformation that Fukuyama predicted was a complete misread. A historic blunder that influenced more historic blunders by those in power who believed it and set policy from it.
The good news is certain thought leaders are calling for a tipping point, where the skewed values that the Left injected into the vacuum created by the “End of History?” crowd are exposed and the West turns against them.2
Carry healthy skepticism about such predictions. Today the Left hasn’t just injected the new values into this ‘end of history’ time, the Left is also running all the wheels of power and influence in the West necessary to keep such ideology in place, fed, and protected.
Academia indoctrinates on behalf of the Left. Indoctrinated minions leave the campus quad and enter the halls of government and corporate America where they end up leading both and setting policy for the former. And many of those minions end up in what has become the ministry of propaganda for the Left: mainstream media.
Yes, have doubts about the tide turning now for the better. It may get worse for America before improving. And let’s hope that prediction ends up being as wrong as Fukuyama’s in 1989.