In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History and the Last Man." He argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall had brought the end of ideological conflict and the beginning of a post-political era.
Fukuyama declared that the West had won. Western-style liberal democracy would be the final stage of humanity's social development.
The book was criticized, especially by Samuel Huntington in his 1993 book "The Clash of Civilizations." Unlike Fukuyama, Huntington argued that there are no universal values, and the world is divided into distinctive cultures and civilizations.
"The Islamic civilization," Huntington wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world "do not share the general suppositions of the Western world."
America and the West have taken Huntington's words to heart in the last three decades, especially after the 9/11 tragedy, and declared war on terrorism and Islam. America and its allies invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and destroyed Libya and Syria.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed things. Putin didn't read either Huntington's or Fukuyama's books. His war in Ukraine is neither a clash of civilizations nor of ideologies; it is based on Putin's old-fashioned Russian nationalism and pride.
Russia has been run by oligarchs tolerated by the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin wasn't anti-West, as David Hearst explained in the Middle East Eye, an online news outlet, he repeatedly tried to engage the West and was repeatedly rebuffed.
"America — and it alone — defined democratic behavior and issued waivers to pro-Western autocrats to ignore it," Hearst writes. "Thus human rights or a values-based foreign policy became highly selective — to be used against Venezuela but not Saudi Arabia or Egypt."
