The Geopolitics of Ideology: Intellectual Tumult and the Slow Demise of a World Order

Abstract

Individuals living in the very early twentieth century did not, with rare exception, realize that they soon would experience the collapse of a world order which, at the time, appeared extraordinarily stable. Only with the benefit of hindsight did the fissures in the old, multipolar world order became clear to all. This essay contends that the international system presently is undergoing a geopolitical shift in the most expansive sense of that term. Global political and economic conditions are undergoing a change as epochal as in the years of the first half of the twentieth century; technological change, and its impact on everyday life, is even more swift and radical. Also like the early twentieth century, this is a time of intense ideological foment, as individuals seek to place these changing conditions in an intellectual framework and reveal a path to an future they find amenable.

Headnote

Abstract

Individuals living in the very early twentieth century did not, with rare exception, realize that they soon would experience the collapse of a world order which, at the time, appeared extraordinarily stable. Only with the benefit of hindsight did the fissures in the old, multipolar world order became clear to all. This essay contends that the international system presently is undergoing a geopolitical shift in the most expansive sense of that term. Global political and economic conditions are undergoing a change as epochal as in the years of the first half of the twentieth century; technological change, and its impact on everyday life, is even more swift and radical. Also like the early twentieth century, this is a time of intense ideological foment, as individuals seek to place these changing conditions in an intellectual framework and reveal a path to an future they find amenable.

Key Words: international system, geo-political, shift, intellectual framework

Introduction

Many of the developments of recent decades have been profoundly positive; the percentage of the global population living in near- or absolute poverty, for example, has dropped precipitously. However, at least in wealthier countries, many early twentieth century trends, also were strongly positive-increasing literacy, improvements in housing (including electrification) and sanitation, the increasing ubiquity of radio (which provided muchneeded access to information and entertainment), and so forth. Nonetheless, these positive trends did not prevent the World Wars. Indeed, in an indirect sense, they helped create fertile ground for cataclysmic events. Millions of citizens were angered or disgusted by changing-and, for the less fortunate, seemingly mercilesssocieties, and thereby became politically mobilized. Unfortunately, this provided daring ideologues of all varieties with extraordinary opportunities. This was particularly the case in the years following 1914, when the leaders tasked with guarding the existing world order, acting with hubris and short-sightedness, led the world's most powerful states into a cataclysmic war, thus discrediting themselves and creating fertile conditions for unscrupulous political adventurers/

As humanity enters the 2020s, global social, economic, and political conditions certainly do not precisely mirror those of the early 1900s. However, there is an unsettling general similarityin global conditions. Of course, one might believe that major warfare is a problem that has been solved. While one hopes such an analysis is accurate, it seems imprudent, to say the least, to casually wager the fates of millions on the mere assumption that the future will be "major war-free." It is impossible, at least with existing datagathering and social science methods, reliably to predict the likelihood of a future interstate conflict resulting in fatalities reckoned in the tens or hundreds of millions. Yet, even a one percent probability of such a conflict should be, given the horrific suffering that would result, a matter of intense concern on the part of policymakers worldwide. If the probability of catastrophic interstate warfare might plausibly be far higher than one percent, deployment of the overused term "international emergency" surely is warranted.

As in the early twentieth century, it is all too easy to ignore systemic instabilities, trusting that dangers will be eliminated in the future and potential disasters thus averted. To assume that an event will occur within a given time frame is, however, very different from assuming that it will occur near the end of that period. This essay does not assume that any catastrophic conflict may only occur well in the future, given political leaders and others ample time to defuse potentially combustible interstate tensions. In, say, 1913, people had no particular reason to assume the world order was about to begin a horrifying long collapse. The psychological phenomena of normalcy bias generally inclines people to assume that, even if devastating events mighthappen in the future, they will not soon occur-in essence, that normality will endure in the near term."

This assumption works well most of the time. Conditions that are considered "normal" by a particular person can endure for decades-even an entire lifetime. An individual whose lifespan extended from 1955 to 2015 never experienced a time in which a devastating World War was ongoing. One who lived from 1895 to 1955 would have had a very different experience in this regard. An optimistic observer may be inclined to conclude that this is because massive interstate wars will never again, for some reason or combination of reasons, occur. And it conceivably might be true that destructive warfare on a massive scale is a phenomenon entirely left in the past.iii

The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and, subsequently, the Soviet Union seemingly provides powerful evidence for this proposition. Given its massive Soviet military and intelligence apparatus, Moscow was physically exceedingly well-prepared to meet any challenge to its international power. Yet, the Soviet Union chose to remain in its sickbed and die quietly, apparently vindicating the belief that something happened in the twentieth century that made great power warfare on a massive scale impossible post-1945. However, there are disturbingly powerful reasons to presume that a new cycle of wild ideological imagination is underway and that this intellectual fecundity, in turn, will create a fertile environment for violence of every description, including warfare on a gargantuan scale.

Ideology and the Death of the Old Multipolar Order

The First World War battered the global system fiercely, and led to the demise of some of its key players. Multipolarity did not collapse altogether, but the political landscape changed radically between 1914 and 1919. Huge multiethnic polities such as the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires collapsed, even though, at that point, the "Victorian model" of global imperialism appeared intact.

The odd, decaying multipolar system of the interwar years was inherently unstable, and in many respects parallels today's conditions. The unfinished business of the First World War proved ample fuel for ideological turmoil and military conflict. Victory in the Russian Civil War permitted Leninism to establish itself as a political philosophy with a firm state power base and consistent global influence. Benito Mussolini and the Italian thinkers orbiting around him drew on a variety of socialist, militarist, and other inspirations in "inventing" fascism-with German Nazism soon emerging as an especially twisted tributary of the fascist river. The long collapse of the Qing Dynasty and subsequent events had left China in a condition of grave weakness, riven by internal ideological discord and the collapse of dynastic institutions. At the time, Japan's political turmoil was less obviously catastrophic, but the Japanese political system was transformed, leaving political institutions little changed on the surface yet thoroughly radicalized.

Great powers which prided themselves on democratic rule were beset by unhealthy intellectual contradictions in their governance. For the Americans, the most compelling issues were internal, centering on racism within the United States itself. For London and Paris, the challenge was effectively global, with imperialist and democratic imperatives pulling in opposite directions. Increasing worldwide resistance to European imperialism presented a critical challenge to the long-term survival of the British and French Empires. Unsurprisingly, given human nature, policymakers in both imperial capitals argued endlessly and considered plans for reform, but relatively few squarely confronted the likelihood that imperial governance was, at least without the near-continuous use of ruthless violence, unsustainable. Yet, even leaving aside potential mass revolution by oppressed populations, domestic revulsion to events such as the 1919 JallianwalaBagh/Amritsar Massacre showed that many voters in the imperial core rejected vicious colonial policing. Indeed, already by May 1921 the British government had passed the Government of Ireland Act, thus placing most of Ireland (aside from the six counties of Northern Ireland) on a short road to full independence.

While the post-1917 rise of aggressive totalitarian governments is critical to understanding how the Second World War came about, it is far too simplistic to frame that conflict simply as a struggle between "democracy" and "fascism." Aside from the glaring fact that Stalin's Soviet Union was a brutal totalitarian regime, the three major Axis powers often lumped together in the fascist category varied significantly, in ideological terms. It is true that Rome, only a marginal great power, progressively Nazified under German pressure-and the Italian Social Republic, declared in northern Italy in September 1943, following the surrender of Italy's legitimate government, was merely a German-occupied puppet state. The Japanese Empire, however, always had relatively little in common ideologically with its European partners; its trajectory was distinctive. Categorizing Tokyo as fascist was expedient for Allied wartime propaganda, but the term confuses discussion of Imperial Japan's ideology more than it clarifies.

Beyond the narrow question of what sort of regime should be considered fascistic (or, for that matter, democratic), there is a larger matter: the aforementioned landscape of ideological creativity characteristic of the early and middle twentieth century. Simple binaries-fascists versus democrats, or the subsequent Cold War between communists and a vague "free world"-encourage underappreciation of the kaleidoscopic diversity of political movements jockeying for a place in the minds of potential adherents during the early and middle twentieth century. Even movements that accepted a broad label such as Marxism varied wildly in their particulars. Specific political thinkers and parties propounded Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and so on, seemingly without end. In the decades following the Second World War, ruling parties in countries as disparate as Albania, Cuba, Ghana, and North Vietnam developed their own Marxist variants, purportedly tailored to their country's specific needs. Similarly, believers in electoral democracy supported a broad range of socio-economic arrangements; "socialist," notably, was (and still remains) a word of such widely varied usage that both totalitarian parties and democratically-oriented ones, such as France's Socialist Party, were comfortable applying it to themselves.

When the Cold War was ongoing, self-identified sophisticates tended to be dismissive of the importance of political philosophy in the superpower struggle. This certainly was the case with Western social scientists, who, as a group, tended to prefer explanations for the tension between Washington and Moscow that downplayed the importance of ideology. To emphasize the importance of ideological belief was perceived as crudely reductionist, while stressing the importance of military-industrial complexes, trade and development planning, and similarly bureaucratic matters was thought more refined.

The events from the summer of 1989 to the Soviet Union's dissolution in late 1991, however, had a curious effect on "sophisticated" opinion. The importance of ideological belief was belatedly acknowledged-it was, after all, virtually unimaginable that the Politburo of Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev would have presided over the downfall of Soviet power without deploying immense violence. Clearly, political belief-or, perhaps more accurately, a lack thereof-had played a pivotal role in the Soviet collapse. It was not that the Soviet leadership had lost faith altogether in their project-Gorbachev and other senior Party officials controlled the apparatus of the state; they were not political dissidents. As their empire crumbled, they addressed aspects of the crisis indecisively or improvisationally. Desperately trying to craft some arguably successful outcome-most Soviet leaders clearly were unable, until nearly the end, to believe that their state might simply come unglued and collapse-they were both powerful leaders and passive observers who lacked the will to act with reckless conviction.

Cynical or craven though individual members of the nomenklatura might have been, this does not mean that most of them had altogether lost faith in the Soviet system. To assume that Soviet leaders somehow intellectually and emotionally processed that Leninism had demonstrably failed is to presume facts for which the contemporary evidence appears quite thin.iv Rather, they were members of a ruling elite whose once fanatical faith had corroded over the years; their political worldview was still largely intact, yet at the same time brittle and confused. Only when circumstances had finally made their previous ideological certitudes embarrassing did the faith on which Soviet power was built truly collapse.

There is good reason to believe that an intellectual and ideological crisis even more cataclysmic than that which afflicted the latter Soviet Union is imminent. Having discounted the role of ideology during the Cold War itself, Western elites quickly adopted an almost entirely opposite perspective-that, in fact, the Soviet collapse had demonstrated definitively that not only was ideology central to global politics, but that a very particular form of economic and political neoliberalism had triumphed, proving itself to be not only correct, but historically inevitable.

Thus, what is often referred to as the "Washington Consensus" came to be the predominant lens through which global elites assessed international politics. The term was coined in 1989 by British economist John Williamson to refer to a list of the typical proscriptive conditions that international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund would attempt to impose on countries experiencing a financial crisis. The phrase soon slipped well beyond this constrained usage, however, and came to be used as a shorthand for the economic and political neoliberalism characteristic of the 1990s and early twenty-first century.

For a brief time, the Washington Consensus enjoyed enormous momentum globally. The title of Francis Fukuyama's famous 1989 article The End of History?was, minus its question mark, appropriated as a sort of unofficial mission statement for the Washington Consensus.v History was coming to a close, and a rather specific vision of liberalism and free markets had triumphed; the only task remaining was to organize the world accordingly. Marx believed he had discovered the great truths of history and explicated them, but he had been wrong. Now, though, the true map to global peace, prosperity, and liberty had been discovered. The highest levels of the global elite-billionaires, major Western politicians, and similar folk-had (unwittingly, in most cases) embarked on a utopian endeavor sure to end in grief.

The Decline of the Washington Consensus and the Rise of the Populists

In historical terms, the Washington Consensus' reign was quite brief. Even during the 1990s, and even in Washington itself, a minority doubted the intellectual premises underlying the Consensus. At the time, however, they were largely regarded as backward-looking pessimists incapable of appreciating how fundamentally global politics had shifted.

The effort to create a stable, global Pax Americana in which a benevolent United States would oversee the transition to a vaguely imagined era of global peace soon proved to be a tragic fiasco. US military power proved unable even to accomplish comparatively modest goals such as stabilizing Somalia and ensuring solid democratic governance in Haiti. Larger strategic projects, such as the decision to expand NATO, set the stage for dangerous future confrontations; Russia, not unreasonably, saw NATO expansion as an aggressive gesture that took advantage of Moscow's temporary weakness.vi At the same time, potentially critical geopolitical problems, such as questions regarding control of the South China Sea, were left to fester. (If Washington had been less preoccupied with appearing sufficiently stern toward China in the years following the Tiananmen Square massacre, it might have been able to serve as a diplomatic broker whose assistance and gentle prodding would have been most useful in resolving the various territorial disputes over waters off the Asian Rimland.)

The United States, in short, proved an inept hegemon, even in the salubrious conditions of the 1990s.vii In the period following the 9/11 attacks, matters worsened, as Washington first took on an open-ended mission to convert Afghanistan into a stable democracy and, even more disastrously, commenced a similar quest in Iraq in 2003. In a cruel irony, these efforts unleashed chaos throughout a wide swathe of Central and Southwest Asia while concurrently destroying the United States' reputation as the guardian of international stability.

As the United States was unwittingly undermining its global power, cracks in the Washington Consensus grew deeper in the European Union, Latin America, and elsewhere. The backlash took different forms, depending on local circumstances. The most straightforward reaction occurred in countries such as Venezuela and Argentina, where the citizenry elected hard left governments which straightforwardly rejected many of the key economic ideas associated with neoliberalism. In Britain, voters became increasingly dissatisfied with governance by European technocrats shielded from democratic accountability, and with their own elected leaders' willingness to surrender power to Brussels. Speaking globally, illusions that had appeared plausible in the 1990s-that the world's countries would increasingly, and permanently, embrace neoliberal economic and trade policy, that international organizations of various descriptions increasingly would exercise the powers formerly wielded by states, and so forth-progressively disintegrated.™

The "Davos hyper-elite," which imprudently assumed that history was approaching a happy conclusion, today is intellectually flailing. Much like its Soviet counterpart circa 1990, it is desperately seeking to understand precisely what is occurring and how it can be reversed. These anxious efforts, on the whole, have demonstrated little imagination. Insofar as a coherent story even has been constructed, it closely mirrors the notion of false class consciousness-ironically, a favorite crutch of the old Marxist left, when it needed to explain the curious enthusiasm of Western workers for free elections and markets.

The narrative, in essence, is that vicious and obtuse (yet, paradoxically, brilliantly cunning) populists have tricked voters into rejecting the benevolent rule of a globalized neoliberal elite, whose wise measures are beneficial for virtually everyone. In this telling, history was moving forward on an ascendant arc, but populists learned how to use the dark side of human nature-particularly xenophobic, racist, sexist, and similar impulses-to dupe voters into seeing a cruel and dangerous world. Beset by hallucinatory demons, voters gave power to populists, who are destabilizing the world and demolishing the accomplishments of more than a quarter century.

This analysis contains elements of truth. Certainly, many neoliberal economic policies- relatively free flow of capital and goods and the related globalization of supply chains, most conspicuously-have been essential in creating circumstances that allowed hundreds of millions of people to rise from absolute or near-absolute poverty into the global middle class.ix Moreover, many of the leaders widely labeled as populists indeed do, to a greater or lesser degree, cultivate electoral advantage by sowing anger and fear. The reaction against neoliberalism contains many dangerous elements, and these do present a danger to prosperity and democracy globally.

The eagerness of many neoliberals to paint their opponents as little more than a collection of troglodytes, however, provides a clue concerning the weaknesses in their analysis. In the United States and Europe,x many of the most respected media outlets regularly assert that Western democracy is being strangled. Warnings implying that the European and American right is increasingly dominated by near-, if not outright, fascists have been ubiquitous in recent years.xi Monstrous historical events, particularly the Holocaust, are invoked, with some commentators even implying, grotesquely, that elected governments in Europe and North America are morally quite similar to a regime that intentionally rounded up millions of innocents so as to enslave and murder them.

This is ideological derangement, not serious analysis. However glaring the ethical flaws of figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, they are not fascists. In a few EU countries, such as Hungary and Poland, right populists in power might plausibly be accused of trying to reshape their countries into electoral democracies that are nonetheless decidedly illiberal. Even this, however, is more generically authoritarian than specifically fascistic, a point that far too many commentators ignore.xii The term fascism is, in appropriately careful usage, closely associated with totalitarian government.

The distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism has been critical to sound ideological analysis since the 1920s. Actual fascists enthusiastically embrace totalitarianism in an unambiguous sense of that word. As Richard Pipes notes, Mussolini himself explicitly embraced totalitarianism, crafting Italian fascism into a governing philosophy that "politicized everything 'human' as well as 'spirtual': 'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.'"xiii

There is a dearth of evidence that even the most unappetizing major populist right officeholders in Western countries any intent to establish governments of totalitarian character. A substantial percentage of such figures exhibit illiberal tendencies, and some no doubt would happily establish a straightforwardly authoritarian regime, if given the opportunity. Indeed, a distressing number of formally democratic countries exhibit strong illiberal tendencies.xiv That trend is likely to accelerate in coming years, unfortunately.

It is simplistic and inaccurate to throw highly varied local movements in dozens of countries into a barrel marked "fascism." It would be similarly ill-advised to toss the globe's various left populist movements together into one marked "communism." Neoliberal elites almost invariably have avoided the latter error, most likely because of a combination of two factors. First, although memories of the Cold War era are fading, Western elites in particular tend to recoil at any analysis with the flavor of McCarthyite anticommunism; crudely painting every movement of the populist left as a reincarnation of Leninism would be embarrassing to them. Second, left populists tend to be viewed as less menacing than right populists, partly because they have not yet enjoyed much electoral success in the most prominent Western democracies. If figures far on the left become heads of government in major Western countries, however, this relative indulgence of the populist left likely will decline substantially. Elite observers would not be so silly as to accuse such leaders of being communists, they surely would deploy the sorts of criticisms which they today apply to Trump: that such leaders are dismissive of the rights of political minorities, dangerous to global economic stability, and so forth. And, just as with Trump, such accusations probably would not be entirely baseless.

As the political environment continues to corrode in numerous democratic states, it is becoming increasingly clear that the neoliberal global vision of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century will not endure. Insofar as the term "Consensus" ever was applicable, it is no longer. The Washington Consensus now is little more than an intellectual bunker in which a relative handful of wealthy and influential, but nonetheless deluded, people shelter. They dare not leave it, because they do not understand, much less know how to reverse, the populist movements that are transforming the neoliberal environment they prize. Thus, they sit forlornly, reassuring each other (with false bravado) that the storm soon will pass. It will not.

The analysis in this article focuses mainly on post-Cold War affluent countries in Europe and North America because these countries have endeavored to serve as the engines driving global neoliberal reform forward. The populist turn in the West, therefore, deeply undermines the effort to ensure neoliberalism's dominance of the "global ideological imagination." The dangers that resurgent populism might present to domestic tranquility and regional peace may be most acute, however, for non-Western countries with longstanding religious and/or ethnic animosities. Indeed, one of the inherent weaknesses of the global neoliberal project is its relative indifference to local conditions outside of Europe and North America.

Conditions in South Asia present a particularly concerning example. Indian Prime Minister NarendraModi and his BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) certainly have leveraged exclusionary populist themes for electoral advantage-and, indeed, were doing this long before the recent populist wave in the West. Broadly speaking, the BJP might reasonably be defined as a populist party of the right, although it should be noted that Western-based left/right labels fit somewhat awkwardly when applied to countries with a very different political and cultural history. Regardless of definitional particulars, however, BJP policies such as removing the special autonomous status previously enjoyed by the Indiancontrolled portion of Kashmir and stripping large numbers of Indian Muslims of their citizenship are extremely dangerous. Such efforts not only may endanger India's domestic peace, but also raise tensions with Pakistan and other countries, endangering international peace and encouraging the further rise of popular extremism in South Asia and beyond. While minority populations face particular jeopardy, it is not difficult to imagine how a "cycle of outrages" may take hold, in which India and Pakistan were to respond to perceived serial provocations with increasingly risky rhetoric and behavior.

Such a dynamic could spin out of control, with nuclear warfare being a disturbingly plausible ultimate outcome. Of course, such a horrific turn of events would impact the entire world profoundly, perhaps even opening a long era of extreme populism, de-globalization of trade and governance, and frequent interstate war. While the rise of neoliberalism is inextricably linked to the Cold War and its outcome, in the multipolar world of the twentyfirst century any number of powerful actors will possess the capability to bring an end to the age of neoliberal hope for global

Whistling Past a Thousand Graveyards

For as long as they have possessed a mythic/historical imagination, humans have attempted to understand ongoing political circumstances by looking to the past for guidance. Looking backward allows for reflection on enduring aspects of human motivation and behavior. The past is a spectacularly renewable resource- so long as it is remembered, there is always more of it from which to draw.

Making appropriate intellectual use of the past, however, is a tricky endeavor. First, there are simple questions of fact-that is, whether persons and events are remembered accurately. For some, such as historians, anthropologists, and other scholars attempting to reconstruct the past, maximizing historical accuracy is a critical consideration. For those simply trying to make use of the past to inform their strategic thinking, however, historical exactitude sometimes is a secondary issue; a generally accurate record may provide good instruction, so long as unintentional inaccuracies do not misshape the overall lesson. In a few cases, careful factual accounting even might be irrelevant. The Iliad is factually fanciful, but nonetheless has served as a strategic teaching tool for millennia; the text is a powerful myth which sharpens a careful reader's appreciation of myriad strategic realities, not a "history" of the Trojan War in the modern sense of that term.xv

The major events of the twentieth century, such as the two World Wars and the Cold War, are anything but obscure, having been recorded by a huge number of observers. These events are known to us in a manner which, for instance, Julius Caesar's conquests in Gaul cannot be. By modern standards, the details of the latter were barely recorded by contemporaries; the tens of thousands of pages of records produced by any one of the hundreds of divisions that fought in the Second World War dwarf the modest surviving descriptions of Caesar's imperial adventures. (No matter how intently they study, scholars cannot recover that which has been lost irretrievably.) Even the finest scholars of Rome must extrapolate from a small number of documents that, moreover, sometimes are of questionable accuracy in key respects. This lack of available data itself inspires humility. Any self-professed expert who claimed to know, in detail and with certainty, every significant fact relating to the Gallic Wars would thereby expose themselves as a fraud, a fool, or both. Trustworthy people do not claim to know the unknowable.

More recent major events do not impose the same discipline upon their students, yet the enormity of the records relevant to the great events of the twentieth century ensure that no one individual human can read and process them all. A mountain range of material relating to the Cold War already is available (much, of course, still remain classified). The prevailing understanding of these events is an amalgam of the work of a vast number of individuals, each focused on a tiny piece of the overall subject or, if they are addressing matters broadly, picking a relatively few details which they will convey to their readers.

In historical terms, the Cold War ended only very recently. It might be possible to discuss Caesar's politics without passion, but the Cold War's ideological battles are too closely related to those of today to permit truly disinterested analysis. The Cold War is too near at hand chronologically, and too obviously connected,to the present moment to place much trust in our ability to comprehend its lessons fully. Yet, even before the final Soviet collapse, the sheer quantity of available information, combined with the confidence that comes from having lived through recent events, tempted even quite thoughtful observers into an unwarranted belief that they fully understood the Cold War and its lessons.

It was, in retrospect, deeply unwise of the global political elite-not to mention a vast army of scholars, journalists, and others-to treat the West's Cold War victory as the lodestar for a new global political order. Of course, in the immediate Post-Cold War period, leaders had to respond to the circumstances of the moment and, even more perilously, plan for the future. This, however, is true of leaders at all times, in all places. The absence of humility that marked the response of the Western elite to the outcome of the Cold War ultimately was a choice. Leaders who prided themselves on their supposed sober judgement chose to extrapolate a self-flattering, crude "political theory of everything" from recent events, and made policy accordingly. Past imprudence is now being paid for in irregular installments, but no one knows the full amount of the bill.

The left and right populism of today will continue to develop and grow in coming years. In turn, representatives of the incumbent but fading neoliberal elite-fearful of being unceremoniously dumped on history's roadside, as Hilary Clinton was by US voters in 2016-will become increasingly desperate in their effort to contain the "populist virus." Though loudly proclaiming their commitment to liberalism, however, they, like the populists, are not reliable guardians of liberty. In recent years, they have shown a disturbing readiness to cast aside longstanding norms, embrace dubious conspiracy theories, and otherwise engage in behaviors largely indistinguishable from those of the populists whom they so bitterly resent. (Many questions relating to Russian interference in the 2016 US election remain unanswered, but the eagerness of so much of the Western elite to embrace all manner of improbable conspiracy theories and casually claim that Russia is attempting to destroy democracy globally do not reflect well on them.)xvi

Conclusion: A Fragile World

One of the most striking aspects of the unfolding crisis is its very obviousness-to not see that the global order has entered a period in which the arrangements characteristic of the Post-Cold War world are collapsing. They cannot be repaired-whatever global order solidifies in the future will be radically unlike that of today.

Precisely what the ideological disposition of the world's great and medium powers will be is unknowable. Decaying liberal democratic systems certainly will not all be succeeded by unashamedly authoritarian regimes of the right or left-although the readiness of elected governments, including those in North America and Europe, to comprehensively surveil their citizens and menace those they find suspect is disconcerting. What the Chinese, Russian, and other presently authoritarian governments will look like in a decade or two is even more mysterious.

Regardless of how specific regimes change and adapt to international conditions, however, we should not expect the ideological tension simply to dissipate. Many issues that today are largely or entirely speculative likely come to the fore. Notable, the knowledge required for genetic modification of human beings in utero is increasing rapidly. Hundreds of millions worldwide surely will be enraged if their governments allow "unnatural" manipulations of the genome, but hundreds of millions of others will be similarly angered if they do not. As the robotic and AI revolutions mature, there is a very real possibility that the employment prospects of billions of workers will be negatively impacted.xvii The twenty-first could be the greatest century in humanity's history-the age in which absolute poverty, slavery and other forced labor, and a dozen other grave evils are definitively crushed. The road to that magnificent outcome, however, is a most dangerous and uncertain one, full of perils both known and, as yet, undiscovered.

The ultimate task for the global leaders of today and tomorrow is to navigate between a troubled present and a future that will permit humanity to flourish to an unprecedented degree. To do so will require the ability to discern the difference between appropriate expectations regarding the domestic and international behavior of states and misguided, dangerous demands for global ideological conformity. Unfortunately, there is no clear line between these two categories. Clearly, however, those leaders and thinkers who chose to draw grand, sweeping lessons from the outcome of the Cold War and acted on that analysis to force a final historical victory for liberal democracy have caused grave damage. It is now necessary to, with an attitude of humility and caution, analyze and learn from these errors and use that knowledge to defuse the conditions that might lead the world's peoples into a Third World War.

For a discussion of several works addressing the failures of statecraft leading to the First World War, see Lawrence Freedman, "The War That Didn't End All War: What Started in 1914 and Why It Lasted So Long," review essay, Foreign Affairs 93/6, pp. 148-53 accessed online 3 September 2019 at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/war-didntend-all-wars.

An enlightening discussion of why humans ignore potentially devastating, but seemingly unlikely, potential outcomes is offered in Nicholas NassimTaleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010).

Some thoughtful authors do believe this to be case. See John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

For a contemporary view of the issues confronting the late Soviet Union, and the attitude of Soviet leaders regarding these challenges, see Mikhail Heller and AleksandrNekrich, Phyllis B. Carlos, trans., Utopia in Power: A History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986).

Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?," The National Interest no. 16 (Summer 1989), p. 3-18. Fukuyama subsequently expanded the article into a book that was widely misunderstood by policymakers and pundits. Idem.,The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

On this point, see C. Dale Walton, "War, Peace, and the Geopolitics of a Multipolar World," Modern Diplomacy website, 24 March 2015, accessed 4 September 2019 at: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2015/03/24/war-peace-and-thegeopolitics-of-a-multipolar-world/.

This point is explored in greater detail in C. Dale Walton, Grand Strategy and the Presidency: Foreign Policy, War and the American Role in the World (New York and London: Routledge, 2013).

See Gillian Tett, "Davos Man Has No Clothes," Foreign Policy online ed., 16 January 2017, accessed 3 September 2019 at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/16/davos-man-has-no-clothesglobalization/.

On the virtues of neoliberal economic analysis, see Sam Dumitriu, "In Defense of Neoliberalism," CapXwebsite, accessed 2 September 2019 at: https://capx.co/in-defence-of-neoliberalism/. The connection between neoliberal economics and personal freedom is explored in depth in Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Idem.,Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

On the general attitude of EU elites toward Eurosceptic populism, see CasMudee, "The European Elite's Politics of Fear," Open Democracy website, 18 March 2013, accessed 4 September 2019 at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-makeit/european-elites-politics-of-fear/.

See, for example, Jonathan Chait, "How Hitler's Rise to Power Explains Why Republicans Accept Donald Trump," New York magazineonline ed. Intelligencer section, 7 July 2016, accessed 9 July 2019 at: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/donaldtrump-and-hitlers-rise-to-power.html; Federico Finchelstein, "Why Far-Right Populists are at War with History," Washington Post online ed., 23 April 2019, accest 31 August 2019 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/04/23/why-farright-populists-are-war-with-history/; Michael Kinsley, "Donald Trump is Actually a Fascist," Washington Post online ed., 9 December 2016, accessed 31 August 2019 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-isactually-a-fascist/2016/12/09/e193a2b6-bd77-11e6-94ac3d324840106c story.html?noredirect=on; Paul Krugman, "Why It Can Happen Here," New York Times online ed., 27 August 2018, accessed 31 August 2019 at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/opinion/trump-republicanparty-authoritarianism.html; John McNeill, "How Fascist is Donald Trump? There's Actually a Formula for That," Washington Post online ed., 21 October 2016, accessed 31 August 2019 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/21 /how-fascist-is-donald-trump-theres-actually-a-formula-for-that/; and, Robin Wright, "Madeleine Albright Warns of a New Fascism - and Trump," The New Yorker online ed., 24 August 2018, accessed 31 August 2019 at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/newsdesk/madeleine-albright-warns-of-a-new-fascism-and-trump.

A particularly unfortunate example, given the author's prominence, is: Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward, Fascism: A Warning (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 243.

On the characteristics associated with illiberal democracy, see FareedZakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, rev. ed.(New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). More recently, and controversially, Zakaria has argued that the United States itself now is strongly displaying such tendencies: "America's Democracy Has Become Illiberal," Washington Post online ed., 29 December 2016, accessed 2 September 2019 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-is-becominga-land-of-less-liberty/2016/12/29/2a91744c-ce09-11e6-a747d03044780a02 story.html.

On the The Iliad's value as a tool for understanding strategy and warfare, see Christopher Coker, Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us About Conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Idem.,The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).

On the dangers of exaggerating Russian capabilities and intentions, see George S. Beebe, The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral Into Nuclear Catastrophe (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019).

See Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)