Why the West Misread the Post-Cold War World: What Fukuyama, Huntington, and Strauss–Howe Still Teach Us About the New International Order

Thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the optimism that shaped the 1990s has largely disappeared. The liberal international order, once regarded as the inevitable destination of history under the unipolar direction of the United States, is under pressure and in retreat. Russia has returned as a geopolitical challenger. China has emerged as a global rival. Europe faces internal fragmentation, while the United States itself is deeply polarized. Rather than entering an era of perpetual peace and balanced global stability, the world has returned to great-power rivalry, geopolitical instability, a multipolar design and even faces a year-long war in Europe.

This outcome was not inevitable. Nor was it entirely unpredictable. It resulted from poor political choices throughout.

Three of the most influential political thinkers of the 1990s—Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and William Strauss and Neil Howe—identified remarkably different, and yet equally essential interpretations of the post-Cold War world. Yet Western policymakers either misunderstood or ignored their deeper insights.

Understanding these theories today is not only critical for understanding why Western strategy has repeatedly failed over the past three decades but, even more importantly, to cast a prosperous way forward.

Recognition Before Power

Francis Fukuyama became famous for proclaiming "the End of History." His argument, however, has often been reduced to the prediction that liberal democracy had permanently triumphed in the ideological evolution of mankind.

But this was not his central philosophical insight for organizing international relations.

Drawing upon Hegel and Plato, Fukuyama argued that human beings seek, individually and as collectives, not only material prosperity and well-being but also recognition—thymos, the desire for dignity, respect, and equal standing.

This dimension was largely ignored after 1991.

Rather than integrating Russia into a genuinely new European security architecture based on equal partnership, the West increasingly treated Russia as a defeated power expected to adapt unconditionally to an expanding liberal order. NATO enlargement, successive interventions, and support for political transformations throughout the post-Soviet space were interpreted in Western capitals as the natural expansion of democracy.

In Moscow they were perceived differently: as strategic encirclement and denial of recognition.

Dismissing this psychological and political dimension proved to be a profound strategic mistake. Stable international order cannot rest upon attempted unilateral military dominance. It also requires mutual recognition among major powers. A denial of these parameters triggers resistance and defiance.

This is why ignoring Fukuyama's concept of recognition contributed significantly to today's confrontation.

Civilizations Never Disappeared

If Fukuyama emphasized recognition, Samuel Huntington emphasized identity.

In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington argued that the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century would increasingly give way to conflicts rooted in civilization, culture, and religion. The principal dividing lines would no longer be political borders but competing cultural worlds.

Many critics dismissed Huntington as overly pessimistic.

Events since then suggest otherwise.

The assumption that liberal democracy represented a universally attractive destination underestimated the enduring importance of civilizational identity. Russia increasingly defined itself through Orthodox Christianity and sovereign statehood and looked with disdain at the civilizational deterioration of the West. China emphasized its own civilizational continuity. Large parts of the Islamic world resisted Western liberal universalism. In Europe and North America, debates over national identity, immigration, and cultural cohesion became increasingly central.

The Western tendency to interpret international politics primarily through liberal universal values frequently overlooked these deeper cultural realities.

This does not imply that civilizations are destined for conflict. It does suggest though that a lasting international order requires respect for civilizational diversity and overcoming the assumption that all societies across the globe will eventually adopt the model offered and imposed by the West.

History Moves in Cycles

The least discussed—but perhaps most intriguing—theory comes from William Strauss and Neil Howe.

Their book The Fourth Turning proposed that Anglo-American history develops through recurring generational cycles of roughly eighty to one hundred years. Each cycle culminates in a period of profound institutional crisis—a "Fourth Turning"—during which political orders are fundamentally transformed.

Whether one accepts the theory literally is less important than recognizing its explanatory power.

The financial crisis of 2008, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing political polarization, declining trust in institutions, and renewed geopolitical rivalry all resemble the characteristics Strauss and Howe associated with systemic crisis.

Their theory also helps explain the rise of political movements rejecting the assumptions of the post-Cold War era.

In this context, Donald Trump's "America First" foreign policy appears less as an historical anomaly than as a symptom of a broader structural transition. It reflects growing scepticism toward global interventionism, puts increasing emphasis on national sovereignty, and a reassessment of America's strategic priorities.

Whether one supports or opposes these policies is secondary. Of primary importance is the realization that they represent deeper historical forces rather than merely temporary political preferences.

From Wilsonian Universalism to Strategic Realism

Taken together, these three theories reveal a common weakness in Western strategy after the Cold War.

The dominant foreign-policy establishment increasingly embraced a Wilsonian vision of international politics based upon democratic universalism, humanitarian intervention, and the expansion of a liberal international order.

This approach often underestimated the three enduring realities introduced here:

First, nations seek recognition, not merely economic integration. Second, civilizations preserve distinct historical identities that cannot simply be transformed through political engineering. Third, historical orders eventually reach points of exhaustion requiring strategic adaptation rather than ideological persistence.

The failed policies resulted in a succession of costly strategic disappointments—from Iraq and Libya to the deterioration of relations with Russia and the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

The problem was not the probably good-willed aspiration toward peace or democracy. The problem was the misconception that these objectives could be achieved while ignoring power, history, identity, and recognition.

 

A Multipolar Future

The liberal international order is not simply collapsing. It is being transformed.

The emerging world is increasingly multipolar. Great powers pursue distinct civilizational interests. National sovereignty has returned as a central organizing principle of international politics. Strategic competition has replaced assumptions of inevitable convergence.

Recognizing this reality does not require abandoning liberal values in whatever configuration they are present in Western societies. It certainly requires abandoning the belief that those values alone can organize international politics.

A more durable international order will depend upon mutual recognition among major powers, respect for cultural diversity, and a realistic understanding of geopolitical interests.

The post-Cold War era demonstrated the limits of ideological certainty. The decades ahead will demand something different: strategic prudence grounded in political philosophy rather than political wishful thinking.

The insights of Fukuyama, Huntington, and Strauss–Howe remain valuable precisely because they remind us that successful statecraft begins not with universal power aspirations but with a clear understanding of human nature, historical development, and the enduring diversity of civilizations. Only by recovering these insights can the West hope to navigate an increasingly complex international order. 

If Fukuyama, Huntington, and Strauss–Howe each illuminate one dimension of political reality, what philosophical framework can reconcile their insights within a single theory of strategy? This question forms the point of departure for my next essay, where I introduce Idealistic Realism—an attempt to recover the transcendental foundations of strategic thought that have largely disappeared from contemporary international relations. Without such philosophical grounding, strategy risks becoming little more than the management of power without wisdom.

What Happened to Trump? Disillusionment, Ukraine, and the Return of the Deep State

I remember a time when President Trump seemed to embody a long-awaited political corrective—a repudiation of America’s imperial overreach, a purge of the entrenched bureaucracy of the deep state, and the promise to restore sanity in national security and foreign affairs. But that promise is rapidly fading.

His recent decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites—just three days before the expiration of a negotiation window—already raised alarms. But the current decision to resume arms deliveries to Ukraine reeks of strategic confusion. Quite obviously, the warmongering neocons and deep-state operatives tied to the military-industrial complex have outmaneuvered the president, confirming a suspicion long in the making: the deep state is not only alive but thriving. The very machinery President Trump once vowed to dismantle appears to have prevailed over him.

Let me be clear once again and say this to political advisors on both sides of the Atlantic: the political elites of international affairs and security in the US and the EU have placed themselves, from the very beginning of the Ukraine conflict, on the wrong side of history. The war could have easily been prevented.

I have meticulously detailed the origins of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict—most notably in this very blog, in entries since before the outbreak of the war in 2022. From the outset, I argued that the root cause was not Russian imperialism, but the West’s refusal to recognize Russia’s legitimate security concerns. NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, the betrayal of promises once made to the contrary, and the refusal to grant Ukraine neutral status were all ingredients in a recipe for war. Ukraine could have served as a bridge between East and West. Instead, it was converted into a proxy for a delusional confrontation—one orchestrated by American neoconservatives and executed by an ideologically compromised, corruption-prone Ukrainian leadership.

Mr. Trump seemed to know all of this. His initial rhetoric rightly identified NATO as obsolete, the EU as bureaucratically overreaching, and Ukraine’s role in the conflict as problematic. His claim that, had he been president in 2022, the war would not have happened bears truth. In his first term, he signaled clearly that he intended to cooperate with Russia and respect its national security concerns.

But what are we to make of his latest decision—resuming weapons deliveries to Kyiv, implicitly blaming Putin while giving Zelenskyy a free pass, and backtracking on what was once a principled rejection of globalist interventionism?

One can only hope that this does not mark the collapse of Mr. Trump’s America First doctrine. His policy shift bears the signs of a betrayal of his own strategic project—which was never about isolationism but about prioritizing national interest and strategic restraint. Yet by supporting the extension of a war that, by his own account, would never have occurred under his presidency, he now legitimizes the very structures he once challenged.

President Trump—once an opponent of ideological dogmatism—now joins the chorus of moralizers in the European Union, most notably in Germany, France, and Great Britain, who refuse to face geopolitical reality.

Even now, in the fourth year of this tragic conflict, the West’s political elites have failed to learn their lessons. Instead of critical reflection, they double down on failed policies and reject the application of long-established theoretical frameworks in international relations. They ignore the philosophical underpinnings required to understand global affairs. They dismiss, for instance, the insights of thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, whose central warning—the need for recognition in global relations—remains as relevant as ever. It is precisely the failure to recognize Russia’s demand for dignity, its civilizational space, and its strategic red lines that led to war.

For now, the neoconservatives and other war hawks have won. They have reasserted their control over foreign policy by outlasting Mr. Trump’s initially meaningful stance. They are exploiting a moment of crisis—the Russians have intensified their military advance, and the war is clearly lost for Ukraine—to reinstall their failed doctrines. It is quite disheartening that Mr. Trump would fall prey to their pressure and allow himself to be talked into such an intellectually dishonest and historically tragic course. He is not aware—and nobody in his administration seems to explain to him—that the planned resumption of weapons delivery will only prolong an already lost war, increase the casualty rate, and cost further meaningless loss of human lives, territory, and treasure. 

The president demonstrated throughout his first term that he understood the conceptual tragedy of America’s post–Cold War strategic design. He took promising steps to reverse it, returning to a more principled and philosophically grounded posture—one that drew inspiration from the restraint of the Monroe Doctrine.

As I’ve written repeatedly on www.edwinseditorial.com and elsewhere, including in my political-philosophical study 44 & 45. The Tenures of US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the proper orientation of international relations demands a return to foundational insights of political theory: sovereignty, recognition, the minimum standards of international law, an ethics of foreign policy, and respect for civilizational diversity. These would be the prerequisites for peace.

Trump once seemed to intuitively grasp all this. That he has now forgotten—or forsaken—it is cause for serious concern.