Certainty and Strange Thoughts [View all]

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/certainty-and-strange-thoughts/





Something very fundamental is happening in world history, again. If anyone had been hoping that the Western alliance’s rallying together after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or the scattered (and at times self-contradictory) efforts of the Biden administration to shore up international law would be enough to save the so-called liberal international order, the first few months of the second Trump administration should be enough to dispel that notion. The three pillars of liberal internationalism—multilateralism, democracy, and free trade—have already taken severe hits and more are likely to come. At the very least, this moment marks the end of the post–Cold War order.

Almost as striking as the speed with which things are getting dismantled is the fact that no one—academics, policymakers, journalists, social media influencers, podcasters—seems to have a clear idea about what comes next. Talk of crisis and disorder abounds; some analogies to the 19th and 20th centuries pop up here and there, with comparisons to imperial competition and lessons from the interwar period or predictions about a Cold War 2.0. But this is all very backward-looking, all very muddled. Contrast the present with the end of the Cold War. Those who were around for that last world-historical moment will remember that there was no shortage of projections about the future then, some optimistic, some pessimistic—which is to say, too, that there is no greater proof that liberalism’s current crisis is real than the establishment’s inability today to imagine anything about what will follow.

In 1989, I was a child in Istanbul. By the time I was in college in the United States a decade later, a few early post–Cold War visions had already gained quasi-canonical status and were guiding debates in introductory political science classes. Among the most popular were Francis Fukuyama’s essay ”The End of History?” published in The National Interest in 1989; Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” published in Foreign Affairs in 1993; and Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy,” published in The Atlantic in 1994. Much has been said about these arguments—especially the first two—in the intervening years, a lot of it quite critical: Both “The End of History?” and “The Clash of Civilizations?” have more than 50,000 citations in Google Scholar. The essays were then expanded into books.

Certainly, Fukuyama, Huntington, and Kaplan got a lot wrong and oversimplified things, and they deserved much of the criticism that came their way. When I first encountered their essays as a teenager from Turkey studying in the U.S., they angered me, too: Whatever the apparent disagreements among them, they all reeked of an unquestioned assumption about U.S. or Western superiority and put forward judgments ranging from dismissive to sensationalist about the rest of the world. Rereading these texts three decades later, however, I find myself feeling more generous toward them.

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