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.

Ignorance, Causality, and the Lost Conditions of Peace: Why the Ukraine War Cannot Be Understood—Let Alone Ended—Without Sound Theory

What the Ukraine war has revealed with unusual clarity is not merely a crisis of security, but a crisis of judgment. This issue remains unresolved in ongoing peace negotiations, which only deepen the dilemma rather than resolve it. Consequently, these discussions have failed to yield meaningful progress towards peace.

At the core of this failure lies a fundamental epistemological error: the inversion of cause and effect. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his work Twilight of the Idols, identified this confusion as one of the most persistent and dangerous mistakes in human reasoning. He argued that people tend to moralize outcomes while ignoring the conditions that produced them and tend to treat effects as origins while elevating consequences into causes.

This error is not confined to mental acrobatics and philosophical speculations where it might lead to a stalemate in debate. In politics it results in catastrophic outcomes affecting real lives.

The war in Ukraine is commonly depicted as a geopolitical rupture—a sudden breakdown of order, an eruption of irrational aggression, a moral shock to Europe. Although this interpretation appears comforting, it is fundamentally incorrect. Wars of this magnitude do not arise from fleeting moments of madness; rather, they emerge from long chains of reasoning, diplomatic efforts, and moral failures that precede the first shot fired by years, sometimes even decades.

The case in point is Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014—eight years before the war’s commencement. In Western political and media narratives, Russia’s annexation of Crimea is frequently cited as the origin of the conflict and as a first step in supposed imperial expansion.

However, this interpretation reverses cause and effect and lays a harmful judgmental error at the foundation of the conflict.

Following the Maidan uprising, Russia faced—for the first time—a government in Kiev openly committed to NATO membership and hostile to Russian strategic interests. This was not a marginal concern. It directly threatened Russia’s access to the Black Sea and the operational viability of its southern naval forces.

In strategic terms, therefore, the annexation of Crimea was not an expansionist indulgence, but a defensive necessity. One may dislike this reality. But once ignored strategic reasoning is abandoned altogether; a neglect that has persisted ever since.

The same error in thinking – inverting cause and effect – has been applied to Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) that began in February 2022.

The prevailing Western narrative treats Russia’s military action as the cause of the conflict, rather than its effect. Acceptance of this false reversal—which is widespread among Western security elites—leads to the collapse of moral judgment into mythology. Responsibility, guilt, and blame are assigned without thorough and impartial analysis, diplomacy degenerates into provocation, and war is recast as one-sided righteousness and political necessity, rather than acknowledged failure and moral disaster.

Strategic literacy—seemingly rare nowadays—once provided a safeguard against such illusions. Carl von Clausewitz already made us understand that war is never an isolated act; it is the continuation of political conflict by other means, embedded in context, and shaped by threat perceptions, ideological aspirations, and power ambitions. Western leaders have insisted that Russia launched a War of Aggression “without provocation,” a demonstrably false claim.

For years, Russia clearly and consistently articulated the existential threat posed by NATO expansion into Ukraine. Diplomatic channels were pursued and red lines were stated, but proposals were rejected or dismissed—at which point the strategic situation crossed a classical threshold.

While International Law does not explicitly address preemptive war—except possibly as an exception under Article 51's Collective Defense Clause—preemptive war is neither new nor inherently illegitimate from a moral perspective.

As previously explained in my blog essay of August 12/08/2025, “Alaska Summit: President Trump is Setting Himself Up for Failure! No Peace Without Ending Zelensky’s Destructive Role and Changing the EU’s Flawed Stance,” strategic theory suggests that preemptive action may be justified when existential threats are imminent, diplomatic remedies have been exhausted, and delay would irreversibly worsen the strategic position.

This certainly does not sanctify war, but it places it within the tragic logic of statecraft, rather than within moral mythology. To deny this logic is strategic infantilism and the declaration of moral inferiority.

Describing the war as “unprovoked” and demonizing its initiator is simply malicious propaganda.

The refusal of Western elites to acknowledge legitimate Russian security concerns, the instrumentalization of Ukraine as a forward strategic platform, and the systematic replacement of diplomacy with moral exhibitionism have created the conditions for war. Once these conditions were in place, escalation was no longer an aberration, but a structural outcome.

The tragedy of Ukraine can thus not be separated from the intellectual collapse of Europe’s post–Cold War order. Politics was stripped of philosophical seriousness; strategy was reduced to slogans, and moralising (not moral) language replaced genuine judgment. In such an environment, peace ceased to be a goal and became a rhetorical ornament.

This failure also explains why current peace proposals remain so implausible. Plans built around militarization, buffer zones, or permanent foreign troop deployments repeat the very logic that produced the war, promising stability through force while ignoring the underlying causes for insecurity.

History teaches a different lesson as outlined in the previous blog of 01/09/2025. In 1955, Austria regained sovereignty not through alignment, but through neutrality. By renouncing bloc politics, Austria transformed itself from a strategic object into a stabilizing subject. Neutrality was not weakness, but strategic intelligence grounded in restraint.

Applied to Ukraine, the logic is straightforward and highly relevant: a neutral Ukraine—outside NATO, free of foreign troops, and committed to peaceful coexistence—would remove the core driver of the conflict. Militarization should not and cannot secure sovereignty where predictability and restraint can.

The deeper lesson, however, goes beyond Ukraine. The war exposes what happens when politics loses its transcendental grounding—when duty, dignity, and moral responsibility are replaced by utility, ideology, and moralising posturing. In such a world, power is mistaken for principle, and destruction is justified as virtue.

All of this I’ve addressed in the Philosophy&Strategy video series on YouTube. I provide the links below. The forthcoming videos in this series will tackle the following three steps whose illumination is indispensable for peace in Ukraine: first, the epistemological error of attributing false causalities; second, the strategic misreading of aggression and responsibility; and third, the conditions of a sustainable peace rooted in neutrality rather than militarization.

YouTube Videos:

Idealistic Realism: Grand Theories of the 1990s: https://youtu.be/aXtt7QJBU2E

From Kant to Crisis: The Forgotten Foundation of Political Reason: https://youtu.be/1HCz7D-bhOM

The Brzezinski Curse: From the Grand Chessboard to the Ukraine War: https://youtu.be/uQp5Dq5iaNk

The Revival of Mises:Transcendental Economics in a Changing World: https://youtu.be/sRd71gDxELk