The 2000s and the End of American Optimism

Over 35 years ago now, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse and President George H.W. Bush worked to secure a peaceful conclusion to the Cold War, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama infamously declared the “end of history.” “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War,” Fukuyama writes in the pages of The National Interest, “but the end of history as such: That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal...