How Fear Killed Liberalism

Scholars, pundits, and politicians make bad predictions all the time, and some of the mistakes are real doozies. For what it’s worth, my nominee for the worst geopolitical forecast of the past 50 years was the post-Cold War belief that the world was being inexorably swept toward a peaceful and increasingly prosperous liberal future. This view—expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim that humankind had reached the “end of history” but hardly confined to him—assumed that democracy would continue to spread, barriers to trade and investment would continue to decline for the benefit of all, nationalism would fade, borders would become increasingly irrelevant, global institutions would step up to manage the most difficult global issues, and the danger of war would be confined to a handful of weak and increasingly irrelevant rogue states whose leaders hadn’t gotten the memo.