I applied to Annapolis within a few years of Francis Fukuyama writing The End of History and The Last Man. Despite decades of critics piling on to discredit his central thesis that the world was about to drift off into the sunset of Western Liberally hegemony, I’ve never really been able to move on from the ideas that set the foundation from it. Not because I’d like to argue that he was right. But because they represent a prevailing perspective of a remarkable time in history that lines up with a remarkable time in my life. It meant something to come to the decision to serve at one of the seams in history. It’s hard to say exactly what without starting with Fukuyama.
I had no idea what was coming. Neither did Francis Fukuyama. So much time has been spent on what it meant to wander into the post 9/11 world as members of the military; generation kill as we were to be. And so much ink has been spilled to explain that history didn’t end. What I think was missed is better thinking on the brief window that existed when Fukuyama wrote. And when my generation signed up to serve.
Antonio Garcia Martinez published an essay last week saying Fukuyama was right and always had been. The ideas we use to explain geopolitics, economics and even war don’t usually break down so clearly as right or wrong though. They’re more like builds. Some can be the foundation of a future reality and others can’t. The ones that can’t blow away with the wind. The ones that can, stay around, even if only to refute that the structure they’ve supported are real. The End of History is, of course, still with us. Which means it’s part of us, dismissed at some cost.
Fukuyama laid down a framework to say what the logical next steps might be in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Samuel Huntington wrote to counter Fukuyama about the limits of liberalism and the clash between civilizations that are too dissimilar to co-exist. Now that war has broken out in Eastern Europe between two ethnically similar groups, we struggle to pick a winner between the two thoughts. And I wonder what my 18 year old self would think today, three decades since I made the decision to serve when Fukuyama’s history had already ended.
Today’s hand raisers have neither Fukuyama nor Huntington to turn to. They both require the next build. Bruno Macaes offers a third idea that’s closer to Fukuyama but shifts the commonality of liberalism to the commonality of modernity. Nations we now know won’t all graduate to liberalism. Huntington was right about that. But he was wrong that we would be so different as to not be able co-exist. Instead, we all entered into the same technological and economic arena of the modern world. And in that arena we will compete for value chains, regional influence and trade advantages. There will be winners and losers. And they won’t be the ones of the last century. Between Fukuyama and Huntington Macaes emerges as a Hegelian synthesis the yields a useful reality. And that reality never really loses contact to the one that existed in 1994. Generation kill was Fukuyama and Huntington. But it was more too.
It’s not unreasonable to say that both America’s Middle Eastern Wars and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine don’t disprove that history has ended. In fact they align with the thesis. And this was part of Martinez’s point. He quotes Fukuyama:
“But the opposite danger exists as well (in the end of history), namely, that we will return to being first men engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons. Indeed, the two problems are related to one another, for the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form.”
But it’s not so simple as to say Fukuyama was right. It is even less reasonable to say that disparate civilizations are clashing. The focus must shift to the cause. It wasn’t simply rational self-interest. It was something underneath it. Something ideological. Core to Fukuyama’s thesis is that ideology, not rational self interest, is what drives political action. “For the way in which any state defines its national interest is not universal but rests on some kind of prior ideological basis, just as we saw that economic behavior is determined by a prior state of consciousness.” It’s here that the path departs Fukuyama and the notion that liberal ideology would prevail. It’s been replaced by Macaes competition. And it’s powered by the forbidden engine of nationalism.
George Packer wrote one of the better books on the politics of the late 20th century with Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century on the Balkan conflicts of the Clinton era 20 years after saw the miscalculation of Fukuyama clearly. That the book never mentions Fukuyama says much about the ubiquity of his thoughts circa 1994. “Nationalism turned out to be stronger than communism or democracy, stronger than religious belief, stronger than universal brotherhood and peace. We don’t understand other people’s nationalism—even though we have our own, racial kind—because we made our republic out of a universal and very optimistic idea. Blood and soil are for history’s losers.” What was true of the Balkans 30 years ago is true of the world today. And it always has been.
Every trade needs a counter-party. And every war needs an adversary. Blood and soil wasn’t always for losers. Someone somewhere won the wars fought over it. And in that reckoning is a truth about the world that never went away.
There are today as there was then, two different poles of the modern world. In 1994 one chose between Huntington and Fukuyama. I saw the world as Fukuyama did then. And I think the next build has more Fukuyama than Huntington in it. But the forces that pull on either end of the rope have shifted. We are in one world. It’s Macaes’ world of technological, economic integration without liberal hegemony. And in that world lives competition. Lurking in the background is the question of nationalism and just how far outside any nation’s interest it is willing to go for the glory of blood and soil. Putin shows us, for the moment at least, quite far. And that’s a troubling revelation.
We live in a world where a country who supplies the natural gas to Europe is leading a troubled invasion into country whose president won Dancing With the Stars. And the world’s response has been to go all in on economic sanctions while being wary of direct military intervention. The rules of the game are as we thought they were. But we’re not above destroying our neighbor if we don’t like the outcome of the fairly played game. And that’s the sort of thing that really only comes from a fever like nationalism. We may wake in the 21st century to find that the build on Fukuyama’s thesis finds us alive in a world of global competition and nationalism that resembles the 19th century age of empires. It took two world wars to temper the desires of those nationalists to end it. We (humans of earth) aren’t likely to survive another. And so it’s there that we find the new tension.
I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post a few years ago where I tried to be honest that I signed up and served because I wanted to go to college. And I wanted a job. When I made the decision I didn’t write any blank checks to give my life to American Freedom. I took a calculated risk that I’m grateful for. I served in some capacity for 20 years. I deployed to combat zones multiple times. I was awarded the Bronze Star for something I did in Iraq. But I didn’t sign up to do that. Not in 1994. Revising that to conform to a modern warrior ethos loses something. Leaving it to self-interest though, as Fukuyama tells us, loses another truth though too.
That truth was that I didn’t read Francis Fukuyama when I was 18 years old. I didn’t read Samuel Huntington. But I felt some part of what both of them were writing about. On one hand I wanted to believe that the long Cold War that I’d grown up in was over. That civilizations had clashed. And we’d won. America and our way of life had prevailed. And I wanted, on some level, to be a part of that. It was true that I needed someone to pay for my college. And it was true that I would one day need a job. But it was also true that I watched Top Gun and read Tom Clancy novels. And that I knew that Jack Ryan taught in the history department at Annapolis. And I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be a part of American victory.
Fukuyama understood the power of ideology.
“…while Hegel's writing and thinking could be stopped by a bullet from the material world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of liberty and equality that had driven the French Revolution.”
War is upon us. Whether it’s the cheap and meaningless one of bored liberalism as Fukuyama predicted, or the doom marked nationalist death struggles of the last century is the question. The world is not uniformly liberal though. There’s daylight between reality and the End of History. And in that daylight we may find that there’s simply no end to war.
It may be as Cormac McCarthy’s Judge told us…
“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
So it was in 1994. And so it is today. And all times before and after. That way and not some other way.