In 1992, both writer and scholar Francis Fukuyama and Disney’s film “Aladdin” promised us “a whole new world.” Thirty-two years later, the world seems much worse than anyone expected, and 2024 may prove to be a major turning point.
“Aladdin” wasn’t very specific about what the new world would be like, but Fukuyama, author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” was.
History was an evolutionary process with a goal, he wrote. That goal was liberal democracy, and we had reached it in the late 20th century. The whole world would put aside ideology, and be drawn into the promises of free trade, prosperity, and ever-expanding freedoms. Liberal democracy would not change into anything else, because all other forms of political order or ideology were so bad in comparison. The new world would not be one in which nothing new happened. It would be boring, though, because politics would be more about managing economies than competing visions of the Good Life, or mediating tribal and ideological conflicts. Nevertheless, the only challenge to liberal democracy would come from within: not everyone would want to be equal to everyone else, and some would struggle not within the liberal system but against it. Or so the argument went.
Fukuyama’s vision was easily misinterpreted. Post-Cold War exuberance was seemingly impossible to resist. We had won, and the only serious challenge or potential alternative to Western power and culture was gone. Figuratively speaking, it was easy to sit back, relax, and enjoy the unfolding of an evolutionary process that was not only good but inevitable. This explains the West’s collective failure to predict and to prepare for the trouble we now face. We stopped taking external threats seriously, we systematically disarmed ourselves, cut military budgets, and gave up on our culture. History was over, after all.
This was foolish. There clearly are, and always have been, malign actors in the world who do not wish us well, and who do not want liberal democracy at home. They resent it abroad too. Strongmen and autocrats of adversarial regimes have little in common except the desire to see the West humiliated or at least taken down a few pegs. But they are now working together to try to achieve exactly that. They detected weakness and acted as soon as the West was most vulnerable and distracted.
So far, we have seen constant election interference, warfare in Ukraine, and more recently war in Gaza (initiated by Hamas and Iran’s prompting). Will these problems grow and spread? Will China seize the opportunity to invade Taiwan soon?
Any of those possibilities may test Western, and especially American, resolve to the breaking point. Our enemies know this. They also know that the main question will not be whether Western militaries are up to the challenge—though that is definitely a question worth pondering. What we need to ask ourselves above all is whether or not the West, and especially America, has enough self-confidence to stand up for its own interests. There will be no point in continuing to defend a Western-made international system if no one believes in it and no one wants to preserve our values.
If the West, with America at its head, is too divided or preoccupied with internal matters to police the world system that it created, and to punish those who seek to undermine it, then authoritarians and strongmen will keep pushing, taunting, and attacking us until we give up and withdraw.
I raise these matters now, because the world in 2024 looks set to be much more dangerous and violent than it has been in a long time. The trouble is not just abroad, but also at home in the form of violent protest and hyper-polarization. Looming in the distance, drawing closer by the day, is the spectre of the U.S. presidential election in November. Whatever the outcome, it seems likely that the losing side won’t recognize the legitimacy of the winner as in 2016 and 2020. But let’s hope this isn’t how things turn out.
In the meantime, let’s hope and pray that we can reconnect ourselves with the values that made the West great, and recover the nerve required to defend ourselves and the world that we built.
