Scholars, pundits, and politicians make bad predictions all the time, and some of the mistakes are real doozies. For what it’s worth, my nominee for the worst geopolitical forecast of the past 50 years was the post-Cold War belief that the world was being inexorably swept toward a peaceful and increasingly prosperous liberal future. This view—expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim that humankind had reached the “end of history” but hardly confined to him—assumed that democracy would continue to spread, barriers to trade and investment would continue to decline for the benefit of all, nationalism would fade, borders would become increasingly irrelevant, global institutions would step up to manage the most difficult global issues, and the danger of war would be confined to a handful of weak and increasingly irrelevant rogue states whose leaders hadn’t gotten the memo.
It would have been wonderful if that had all come to pass, and one can easily understand why many smart people embraced this seductive vision in the 1990s. Soviet-style communism had collapsed, the United States stood alone at the pinnacle of power, and much of the world seemed to be embracing the liberal formula. Democracy was spreading into Eastern Europe and Latin America, globalization was accelerating, respect for human rights was gaining momentum, and both pundits and politicians expected China and other one-party states to gradually move toward multiparty democracy. Liberal internationalists and neoconservatives dominated policymaking ranks in the United States and were strongly committed to remaking the world in America’s image and creating a global liberal order.
Fast-forward to 2025. If one looks back at the past quarter century, it’s clear that these optimistic forecasts were almost entirely wrong. China became more authoritarian, and Russia reverted to autocracy after a brief experiment with genuine electoral democracy. Indeed, democracy has been in steady decline around the world for nearly two decades, including in the United States itself. China, Russia, and the United States are converging, but it is the United States that is becoming more like these corrupt autocracies rather than the reverse. The Trump regime is expanding executive power with scant restraint; the rule of law is eroding; Trump is extorting concessions from universities, law firms, and private corporations, much like Xi Jinping has done in China; the administration is waging personal vendettas against anyone who has drawn the ire of a petty and unchecked president; and federal troops are now being deployed in the nation’s capital in a show of force intended primarily to intimidate ordinary citizens. Globalization has given way to rising protectionism. Illiberal leaders now govern in India, Hungary, and the United States. Aand global institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, the European Union, or the nonproliferation regime are weaker than they were 30 years ago.
In sum, the liberal optimism that underpinned U.S. (and European) foreign policy turned out to be wildly off the mark. It’s easy to point to a variety of causes for these developments—American hubris, the corrosive effects of “forever wars,” the toxic consequences of social media, China’s economic rise, the 2008 financial crisis, lack of elite accountability, rising inequality, and so on—and some of us have written whole books explaining why efforts to expand the liberal world order failed. But there were deeper forces at work, as well, which help explain the illiberal turn that politics has taken in many different places, including in the United States. And the common thread in all those deeper forces is the fear of an uncertain future.
Consider all the things that people who are not extremely wealthy and privileged are worried about these days.
The first item is growing economic uncertainty, whether due to rising inequality, growing corruption and crony capitalism, the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on the workforce, youth unemployment in many countries (even in some STEM fields), lagging productivity in some large economies, aging populations, a U.S. president who doesn’t understand international trade or macroeconomics, another ill-advised round of financial market deregulation (what could possibly go wrong?), and a stock market that shows many signs of being a bubble. If you’re not ultrawealthy already and you’re not at least somewhat worried about your economic future, then you haven’t been paying attention.
The second item is climate change, whose effects are increasingly apparent, almost entirely harmful and expensive, and likely to get worse. Trump and the MAGA world may be in denial about this and doing everything they can to make the problem even worse, but the laws of physics and chemistry don’t read social media posts or watch Fox News, and most ordinary people know that we are in for a hotter, windier, wetter, and more dangerous future. Young people around the world understand that we have a big problem, which is one of the reasons why some of them are leery of having kids.
Next is the return of great-power competition. The unipolar moment is over; China, Russia, and the United States (and some others) are at odds, a new arms race is beginning, and there are plenty of flashpoints where a direct clash could occur. World War III is not inevitable, but the risks are growing. More states are likely to try and acquire nuclear weapons, which might be stabilizing in the long run but will create big incentives for preventive war in the short term, and then we will have yet another reason to be fearful.
Let’s not forget about terrorism, either. To be sure, the actual danger that most people face from terrorism was always overblown (or, in some cases, deliberately exaggerated for political purposes), but it is still a serious problem in some parts of the world, and the fear of random acts of political violence still cast a long shadow over public perceptions.
Then there’s immigration and refugees, and the fear that different countries will be swamped by a flood of people from abroad and will suffer some sort of cultural extinction as a result. This is the fear behind paranoid fantasies like the “great replacement theory,” a central pillar of the white nationalist movement. Even aging countries that desperately need more people remain highly sensitive to this concern, and melting-pot societies like the United States are now erecting barriers and expelling productive residents in an attempt to turn the clock back. Instead of blending into a world of tolerant cosmopolitanism, fear of the “other” has generated a profound backlash all over the world.
But wait, there’s more! Unless you can afford your own personal immunologist or have a private island to retreat to, then you’re probably worried about the next pandemic. We’ve already lived through several of them in recent decades—AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and, of course, COVID-19—and another big one is going to occur eventually (and probably sooner if U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has his way).
Lastly, don’t forget all the phony threats that we keep hearing about: transgender people, books in libraries, lifesaving vaccines, pizzagate, or crime in Washington, D.C., and other blue cities. Even when these dangers are either wholly imaginary or grossly exaggerated, they add to the widespread sense that the world is brimming with dangers that democratic systems cannot handle and that what people really need is a dictator—because turning to a strongman worked so well for other countries, of course.
Unfortunately, when people are fearful, they tend to crave strong authority that will provide protection above all else. After the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda, Americans didn’t question the wisdom of the Patriot Act, the expansion of domestic surveillance, or the advisability of occupying foreign countries even when they had nothing to do with the attacks. When people are sufficiently scared, they don’t wait to figure out what the facts really are and carefully consider how to respond; they want someone to take charge and just deal with the danger.
Ideally, this would lead the electorate to choose highly competent leaders who would work 24/7 to develop effective responses to the various challenging problems sketched above. But fear makes it all too easy for people to succumb to the snake oil peddled by would-be autocrats who are adept at projecting an image of strength and competence, no matter how far from reality that may be. Ambitious autocrats know this, of course, which is why they take legitimate concerns and inflate them, or they invent or manufacture fictitious emergencies to justify their efforts to consolidate power and distract people from the consequences of their actions.
At his first inauguration, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That’s not quite right, however; there are some genuine problems that need to be addressed without delay, and you’re correct to worry about them. What we cannot do is let fear paralyze us or cloud our judgment. The biggest danger that we face is letting our fears for the future tempt us to rely on leaders who show every sign of making problems worse and whose lust for personal power could make the liberal vision of a freer world just a fading memory.
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