Francis Fukuyama’s Fever Dream
A little over thirty years ago a neoconservative American Political Scientist named Francis Fukuyama declared, without irony, that history had come to an end.(1) He meant it figuratively of course, but he also wasn’t kidding around. In fact he was quite serious about the idea that American global hegemony from the 1990s forward would produce a permanent break with all previous human historical cycles. It was Fukuyama’s contention that the US-led neoliberal capitalist democratic world order would be the final world order.
The supposedly no longer relevant history that Mr. Fukuyama was referring to in his best-seller “The End Of History And The Last Man”, was the history of a world that, in his mind, had completely transformed at the outset of the 1990s, just after the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War seemed to end. According to Fukuyama and his neoconservative colleagues, people like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan and Richard Perle, there would be no more roadblocks, no more obstructions getting in the way of their neoconservative globalist dream. According to Fukuyama all that remained for humanity to do from 1990 onward was to ride an all-unifying unipolar neoliberal capitalist wave of progress toward eventual prosperity for all.
Our Historical Shadow
History however, obtuse bugger that she is, did not heed Mr. Fukuyama’s memo. By 2008 Fukuyama’s ahistorical kahuna would be rudely ripped from its heavenward trajectory and pulled down into one hell of a bardo. A dark, desolate, disunified realm full of all kinds of twisted characters. These retrograde creatures would rise up in droves from all regions of the planet demanding an acknowledgment of our long, unresolved and still very relevant past, our history.
The 2008 economic crash was preceded by two decades of American deindustrialization, deregulation of the banking system (1999), deregulation of the US media (1996) and finally, just after the 08 crash, the deregulation of the American electoral system (2010). These changes have led to an unprecedented division of wealth and the creation of a war-centered oligarchic debt-entrenched US economy that is on the brink of collapse in 2025.(2) So much for the end of history.
The US Has Started and/or Been Involved in 17 Major Wars Since 2001 in Which Over 4.5 Million People Have Died
When the George Bush Jr. administration took office in 2001, US foreign policy was taken over by the neoconservative wing of what was then the Republican party (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Victoria Nuland, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, etc.). This group of ideologues, many of whom crossed over to the Democratic party in the 2010s, hold a doctrinary view that both the United States and Israel are morally exceptional.(2a) Neoconservatives therefore feel that the US has a dual moral obligation to defend Israel’s security and to spread the Western-centric socio-economic model to as many parts of the world as possible by any means necessary, including via the use of military force.(3)
Neoconservatives also hold that the use of “noble lies” is necessary in order to align the public with the goal of fending off “evil” before it gains traction and becomes a threat to American and Israeli freedom. None of what I’m sharing here about the neoconservative doctrine is exaggerated in any way. If you have any doubts, check out this remarkably candid documentary that was made about the neocons in 2003
This 23 year (and counting) attempt to thwart various forms of “evil” and/or potential evil (“unknown unknowns”)(3a) before these “evil others” invade our shores to take away our freedom, has resulted in the violent deaths of over 4.5 million people over the course of the last two and 1/2 decades.(4)
Noble Lies: The Muslims, The Russians and The Chinese
Noble Lie Number 1 – The Muslim Terrorist Threat 2002 – 2025: In late 2002, a plan was drawn up to generate “Seven Wars in the Middle East in Five Years”.(5) By creating a massive media blitz involving false claims of threats ranging from weapons of mass destruction to myriad Muslim terrorist cells supposedly suddenly cropping up in and outside of the US, the neocons were able to convince enough of the American public to begin a series of wars that were part of what they called a “war on terror” that began during the first few years of the Bush Jr. administration’s first term and continued through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations’ terms up until the present time.
These US wars and attempts at regime change by invasion or by proxy-invasion have resulted in a massive exacerbation of suffering and economic decline for the foreign nations involved in the conflicts as well as for the American public. The exception/s to the above being the super-rich and the American weapons manufacturing industry, which has turned millionaires into multi-billionaires over the course of the last two decades.(6)
Noble Lies Numbers 2 and 3 – The Russia-China Threat 2015 – 2025: I’ve written several articles about how the purveyors of the neoconservative doctrine in the US government and in the “mainstream” media have fabricated story after story about Russia, specifically about Vladimir Putin’s “maniacal imperialist” intentions and Russia’s alleged mass interventions in US politics. It’s unfortunate how propagandized we, the American public, have become in our all too often cartoonish beliefs about both Russia and China.(7),(8),(8a)
For instance, after reading the paragraph above, before inquiring what my actual opinions about Russia and China are, a decent percentage of Americans (and Europeans) will automatically make a series of predictable assumptions about how I’ve become either a “Russian propagandist” or someone with “no understanding of how backward and evil China is”. In all my years living in the US I’ve never experienced as many ham-fisted, knee-jerk inferences and McCarthyist snubs as I have in reaction to opinions that don’t precisely line up with the Western news media’s war-drum driven narrative about Russia and/or China’s intentions.
For the record, it is possible to be aware of the real problems that exist in countries like Russia, China and Iran without contracting yet another media manufactured “derangement syndrome” that results in an inability to coherently communicate about the US’ relationship to/with countries that present a challenge to the Western world order’s socio-economic model.
The Darth Vader of the 21st Century
In actuality, in the world that exists outside of the narrow, corporately curated Western news media bubble, it’s common knowledge that China, Russia and Iran don’t want to be at war or to go to war with the US or anyone else. Rather, it has been the US’ neoconservative foreign policy establishment that has been bullying and slapping huge sanctions and tariffs on dozens of countries while instigating and escalating wars all over the planet over the course of the last 25 years. US leadership has accused Russia of imperialism and China of human rights violations when in actuality it is the US that has been rampantly imperialist and unabashedly violent, killing millions of people in the name of “spreading democracy” since 2002. (9)
The record is quite clear: The US has instigated and/or militarily enabled an unparalleled number of wars, invasions and regime change operations all over the world during the last two-plus decades. This list includes the current conflict/war with Iran, the ongoing US funded and armed Israeli-led genocide in Gaza and the current phase of the 11 year war in Ukraine which is the result of decades of broken promises, US provocations and US assisted regime change operations along with over two decades of US/NATO encroachment on Russia’s borders. I’ve written extensively about this war. Here is one of several articles I’ve penned on the subject.
Ask yourself, if Russia were to move Westward, continually annexing countries until its alliance included 7 countries that were adjacent to the US’ border, countries all involved in an alliance that was originally specifically designed to take on the US, what do you think the US would do? Do you think the US would continue to allow more and more countries, including say Mexico, to enter this alliance? Come on people, really think about this for a moment! Ukraine is Russia’s Mexico, geographically, logistically speaking. Russia has been clear about this matter, about this glaring red line, for over two decades. On top of this the US promised that NATO wouldn’t move one inch eastward after 1989.
No matter what our individual opinions of Russia or Iran or China or Yemen or Iraq or Syria or Serbia or any of the other countries the US has invaded and/or bombed recently are, it is simply undeniable at this point that the US and not the aforementioned supposedly “evil others” has been the obvious aggressor, the leading terrorist state, the global conqueror, the Darth Vader of the 21st century.(10),(10a)
“Turns Out I’m Really Good at Killing People”
The fact that a US president proudly said, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. I didn’t know that was gonna be a strong-suit of mine.” as Barack Obama exclaimed in 2012, is just one of many clear signs that US leadership has become sociopathically bellicose in the 21st century.(11) In fact Obama, who many people arguably consider to be the most dovish of the last four US presidents, presided over the US’ entrance into 8 of the 17 major wars it has participated in from 2002 to 2025.(12) Obama’s drone strike/kill count numbers were also 10 times higher than those of his predecessor and those of his successors.(13)
Barack Obama’s two back to back presidential terms were the logical bridge between the utterly berserk, war and invasion obsessed Bush Jr. years (2001-2008) and the unprecedentedly inept and equally reckless Biden years (2020-2024). In fact, between the outset of the Iraq war in 2003 and the turning point (the second year of the current phase) of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2023, the US effectively trashed its global hegemonic run in a period of just under 21 years. The fact that only a small percentage of the US population knows how and why US hegemony effectively ended in 2023 is a testament to the ubiquitousness of the Western propaganda narrative that stretches across the “mainstream” spectrum of US/European reporting. If you’d like to know about the massive global paradigm shift that began in 2023, see this article.
A Simple Acknowledgement and a Simple Question
Ironically, it has been the US’ ridiculously violent, obsessively forced attempt to maintain and expand its hegemony over the course of the last 2 and ½ decades that has produced the contrary. And so, when people tell you that they’re “so confused” and they “can’t figure out why everything seems to be going more and more awry with each passing year”, from now on, simply say to them, “It’s the hegemony, stupid!”
All half-kidding aside, despite all of the man-made fear and hubris induced wars and disasters that have occurred over the course of the last few decades, there is still a chance for a desperately needed agreement to be reached.
Q: “What kind of an agreement?”, you may be asking yourself.
A: A simple agreement. A simple acknowledgement: The era of empires and global hegemons has come to an end. We can begin a new era, as a world, of global reciprocity that involves a sharing of our planet’s more than ample resources and riches, or we can continue beelining for mass destruction and extinction as a species. The choice is clear. The question is, are we clear?
What About Donald Trump and HIs Administration?
What about Donald Trump and his administration? Indeed, what about him/them? Putting aside Trump’s problematic domestic policies for a moment, If he continues to follow in the footsteps of his three 21st century US presidential predecessors, if he continues to veer, as he’s seemingly been doing lately, toward more war in the Middle East and a continuing escalation of the brutally hopeless proxy war with Russia, then the US is going to go straight to hell along with Ursula von der Leyen, Freidrich Merz and Keir Starmer’s currently World War III obsessed Europe. If, on the other hand, Trump and co. move in the direction of reconciliation with the inevitable global multipolar shift that is already well underway, if the US moves in the direction of working in concert with rather than going to economic and/or military war with the BRICS alliance which includes China, India, Russia, Brazil, Iran, South Africa etc., then there is a chance that the US will get through this global transition from unipolarity to multipolarity without incurring irreparable damage.
CITATIONS
1-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
2a-https://lobelog.com/neoconservativism-in-a-nutshell/
4-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/19/gmyj-m19.html
5-https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TJpGoKqPM0k
7-https://iai.tv/video/the-russia-hoax
8-https://time.com/6695261/ukraine-forever-war-danger/
8a-https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RySg7imW-rs
9-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/19/gmyj-m19.html
10-https://truthout.org/articles/the-leading-terrorist-state/
10a-https://www.epw.in/engage/article/insidious-imperialism-what-does-empire
11-https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-at-killing-people-2013-11
12-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States_in_the_21st_century
