The 'End of History': Are We There Yet?
It wasn't long ago that every forward-thinking American politician understood that the unipolar world order under U.S. leadership was the only game in town.
Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote the following in his 1997 Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
How the United States both manipulates and accommodates the principal geostrategic players on the Eurasian chessboard and how it manages Eurasia's key geopolitical pivots will be critical to the longevity and stability of America's global primacy.
Anyone resisting this new normal was considered a holdout of an obsolete past age and ignorant of the inevitable Darwinian forces of natural selection propelling humanity toward a long-awaited "end of history," as outlined by neo-con academic Francis Fukuyama, who is now mingling with the members of the Ukrainian "Azov battalion," which, up until recently, was described in the U.S. Congress as a terrorist neo-Nazi organization.
Ironically, this philosophy brought to the White House a self-proclaimed "world leader" named Joseph Biden, a pathetic and corrupt throwback of an obsolete past with no geostrategic vision or acknowledgment of reality.
In his 1992 article "How I Learned to Love the New World Order," Biden was equally "foresighted" in jumping on the "End of History" bandwagon even before Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, and other advocates of the U.S. world's hegemony.
In 1998, Biden was instrumental in getting enough Senate votes in favor of NATO expansion, which New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned would be "the opening door to future nuclear war."
Too few realized that for the unipolarists, NATO was meant to evolve into a global military force with a jurisdiction stretching far beyond the limits of the North Atlantic.
The premise that history could come to an end is based entirely on the presumption that human nature is programmable like any computer and defined by those whose strength can subdue the weak in a world of diminishing returns. Once sufficient power is consolidated into the hands of a few alphas, advocates of unipolarity believed that no resistance to the inevitable world empire is possible. All that awaits humanity is to be assimilated. Whether in politics, finance, or the Intelligence Community, one's willingness to become a creature of this system will determine whether your life will be categorized among the few elite "haves" at the top of the pyramid or the multitude of slavish "have-nots" at the bottom.
Some believed that the evils done in the name of this theory were simply necessary means toward just ends.
The weaponization of finance in the form of sanctions, economic speculation, and usurious loans tied to punitive conditions didn't stop after the Cold War ended, but only increased with the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization, which continued to serve as enforcement mechanisms for neo-colonialism rather than actual instruments for national development as they were intended to become during the heated conference at Bretton Woods in 1944.
No large-scale infrastructure was built in poor recipient nations, and only obsessive demands for "fiscal austerity" via budget cuts, privatization, structural adjustment, and cash-cropping were enforced across the developing sector.
Beyond military interventions and economic warfare, the methods of color revolutions and regime change operations also have been implemented. Organizations such as George Soros's "Open Society Foundations" and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) bankrolled the overthrow of governments that didn't abide by the "End of History" formula.
Things were moving along with a destructive force that few could question or resist for almost two decades when it seemed that NATO could expand eastward without much resistance.
But then something new began to happen, and the old script stopped working. The old grand chess master Zbigniew Brzezinski was right when he warned his disciples that "the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an 'antihegemonic' coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances."
The coalition of these nations into a united Eurasian and Latin American bloc now called the "Global South" caused some to contemplate that instead of a clash of civilizations, per Samuel L. Huntington, there was a possibility that they could actually work together for common aims.
Perhaps this process of cooperation was actually more natural and more in harmony with "Natural Law" than the Hobbesian theory that diverse civilizations were destined to fight in a world of all against all until a supranational leviathan could impose "order" from above.
China's "Belt and Road Initiative," Russia's "Eurasian Economic Union," the African Union's continental free trade zone, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the BRICS began to develop rail corridors, energy deals, and industrial zones that might grow into the new multipolar alliance. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina, and the UAE will soon become full members of BRICS, and over 40 other nations have made their intentions to join this multipolar bloc. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has grown robust, numbering nine states, and 10 ten more have submitted applications to join.
If humanity is not composed of organic hackable machines, but actual citizens with unalienable rights and powers of genius capable of making new discoveries in science and the arts, then perhaps the "End of History" was always an illusion.
Presently, America is deeply divided. When Biden, his supporters, and the Deep State are pushing all of us toward nuclear Armageddon, it is the time for "the other America" to reject the continuation of the hegemonistic approach and join the rest of the world in selecting a new win-win civilizational choice, where all nations on this planet enjoy real equality and justice for all.
Judging from demographic, geographic, and even economic factors, humankind is inclined to follow this path...so why not America?
Matthew Ehret is vice president of the Rising Tide Foundation and senior fellow of the American University in Moscow. Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow.
Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).