The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities. Great powers are once again competing for influence. International competition between the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raises new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new competition between Western liberalism and the great Eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, there is the violent struggle of radical Islamists against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have polluted the Islamic world. The expectation that after the Cold War the world had entered an era of international convergence has proved wrong. We have entered an age of divergence.

In his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the questions facing the liberal democratic world today. For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty.

But, now History has returned, and the peoples of the liberal world need to choose whether they want to shape it or let others shape it for them.