My Sunday column, on Russian grand strategy and Ukrainian turmoil, doubles as the latest installment in my semi-recurring series dedicated to the idea that ours is still essentially a Francis Fukuyaman world — that is, a world in which the West’s combination of liberal cosmopolitanism and democratic capitalism has no ideological rivals worthy of the name. To elaborate a little on that theme and its significance, let me quote from a Walter Russell Mead essay that ran in the Journal late last week, under the Fukuyama-invoking headline “Putin Knows History Hasn’t Ended”:

… this episode is confirmation that the problem that has haunted Western statesmanship since 1989 is still with us. Both President Obama and the many-headed collection of committees that constitutes the decision-making apparatus of the EU believe that the end of the Cold War meant an end to geopolitics. ….This is not so much an intellectual error as a political miscalculation. For American and European policy makers, the 1989 geopolitical settlement of the Cold War seemed both desirable and irreversible. Powers like Russia, China and Iran, who might be dissatisfied with either the boundaries or the legal and moral norms that characterized the post-Cold War world, lacked the power to do anything about it. This outlook is Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” on steroids: Humanity had not only discovered the forms of government and economic organization under which it would proceed from here on out, it had found the national boundaries and the hierarchy of states that would last indefinitely.

There are many things that Vladimir Putin doesn’t understand, but geopolitics isn’t one of them. His ability to identify and exploit the difference between the West’s rhetoric and its capabilities and intentions has allowed him to stop NATO expansion, split Georgia, subject Washington to serial humiliations in Syria and, now, to bring chaos to Ukraine. Mr. Putin is a master of a game that the West doesn’t want to play, and as a result he’s won game after game with weak cards. He cannot use smoke and mirrors to elevate Russia back into superpower rank, and bringing a peaceful Ukraine back into the Kremlin’s tight embrace is also probably beyond him … But as long as the West, beguiled by dreams of win-win solutions, fails to grapple effectively in the muddy, zero-sum world of classic geopolitics, Mr. Putin and his fellow revisionists in Beijing and Tehran will continue to wreak havoc with Western designs.

Though this analysis may give Putin’s Ukrainian strategems a little too much credit (he’s not exactly winning this crisis so far), I think it has a lot of merit. Nobody would look at the last decade and a half in U.S. foreign policy and say that we’ve played the great game particularly well, and a naive Fukayama-on-steroids view of post-Cold War geopolitics has arguably been a problem under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama — taking the form of an overestimation of American military power in Bush’s case, and an overestimation of the influence of global norms and institutions in Obama’s.

But perhaps the issue isn’t just that our policymakers have overread their Fukuyama. Maybe it’s that in an essentially Fukuyaman world, where liberal democracy has few intellectually-credible challengers, the stakes of geopolitics are considerably lower than they used to be …. and so our policymakers drift into a kind of laziness that empowers figures like Putin on the margins … but only on the margins, so our laziness is never really fully punished, and so it perdures. In other words, we keep getting outmaneuvered by authoritarian regimes because in a world where the liberal-democratic world has the only attractive model going, the stakes are much higher for illiberal governments than they are for us: They have to be successful in their gambits, because they have so much more to lose, whereas we can afford drift and error, because our underlying mastery is unlikely to be challenged.

Thus, for instance, has Western strategy toward the Russian near-abroad been particularly wise or well-conceived? I would say not: From Georgia to Ukraine, the U.S. and the E.U. and NATO have made repeated efforts to draw former Soviet satellites into the West’s orbit without reckoning fully with potential Russian countermoves, and without being prepared to make the kind of commitment that would be required to fully back our would-be allies and clients in those regions. (And to be clear, I think making that kind of commitment — a military guarantee to Tbilisi, for instance — would be a reckless mistake.)

But at the same time, from the West’s perspective, the stakes in these disputes are relatively low. The struggle for influence is taking place on Russia’s very doorstep, and there’s no real possibility that a Putinist victory in Kiev or the Caucasus would inspire copycat right-wing movements to seize power in, say, Italy or France or Germany, the way Communist movements nearly did in the early 20th century. A true “new Cold War” scenario, in other words, remains entirely fanciful — which means, in turn, that no matter how many hands Putin wins with weak cards we’ll still be playing with house money.

You can tell a similar story about a lot of the places where lesser powers have frustrated American policymakers in the last decade — the Iranians in Iraq, Pakistan (or various Pakistani factions) in Afghanistan, Assad and Putin recently in Syria. We make a botch of things, they outmaneuver us, the world becomes marginally more dangerous and our influence marginally declines … but at the end of the day they’re still tinpot thugs presiding over basket-case economies with the mob always potentially at their throat, and there’s still no equivalent of the Comintern or the Axis (or the Holy Alliance, further back) in sight.

Or to put it yet another way … there’s a sense in which Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, touted as an alternative to Fukayama’s liberal triumphalism, has been vindicated by geopolitical events: There really are major civilizational faultlines in the post-Cold War world, and crises keep irrupting along the rough borders that Huntington sketched — where what he called the “Orthodox” world overlaps with the West (the Balkans, the Ukraine), along Islam’s so-called “bloody borders” (from central Africa to Central Asia), in Latin American resistance (in Venezuela’s Chavismo, Bolivia’s ethno-socialism, and the like) to North American-style neoliberalism, and to a lesser extent in the long-simmering Sino-Japanese tensions in North Asia.

But at the same time, Huntington’s partial vindication hasn’t actually disproven Fukuyama’s point, because all of these conflicts are still taking place in the shadow of a kind of liberal hegemony, and none them have the kind of global relevance or ideological import that the conflicts of the 19th and 20th century did. Radical Islam is essentially an anti-modern protest, not a real alternative … China’s meritocratic-authoritarian model has a long way to go to prove itself as anything except a repressive Sino-specific kludge … Chavismo and similar experiments struggle to maintain even domestic legitimacy … and what Huntington called the Western model is still the only real aspiring world-civilization, with enemies aplenty, yes, but also influence and admirers in every corner of the globe.

None of this means that geopolitics somehow doesn’t matter anymore, or that events from the Iraq War to the current Ukrainian troubles are just minor detours on a march to an inevitable destination. Liberal democracy’s current status as the only ideological game in town need not prove permanent, tensions still abound within the liberal project, and one can buy the “end of history” thesis as a description of our era without believing that it represents an actual definitive End.



But where the challenges we’re facing right now are concerned, from Kiev to Caracas, the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the context in which geopolitical maneuvering takes place still leaves our would-be rivals at a permanent ideological disadvantage, which even the wiliness of Vladimir Putin is unlikely to soon overcome.