The inevitable failure of the post-WWI liberal world order is increasingly obvious to everyone now, but they’re still not connecting it to the even more inevitable failure of the Enlightenment and its false ideals.
What was the clearest early sign for you that the unipolar order was beginning to fracture?
The theorists such as Huntington, Faye, and Pat Buchanan were all writing about the inevitable fracture in the early 1990s. But for me, there were three events that conclusively indicated that the unipolar world was cracking.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the first real irreversible breach. This wasn’t merely territorial – it was civilizational. President Putin invoked the baptism of Kievan Rus in 988, positioning Russia as the Third Rome inheriting Byzantium’s mantle. While Western elites dismissed this as nothing more than manipulative propaganda, they missed the core signal: a major power was reorganizing its legitimacy around its own territorial hegemony based on religious-historical continuity rather than liberal democratic norms.
The second sign was China’s 2015 declaration of cyber sovereignty. When Beijing asserted that nations have an absolute right to regulate internet activities within their borders, it wasn’t fundamentally about censorship – it was about civilizational control over cyberspace. The split internet wasn’t a bug; it was the architecture of civilizational spheres reawakening through technology.
The third indicator was the 2016 Brexit vote paired with Trump’s election. Brexit represented the first time a globalist institution like the EU actually contracted and shrank. And Trump ran on a political platform that promised to dismantle the liberal international order. These weren’t isolated populist spasms but the first mass democratic repudiations of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, as he himself has admitted. The liberal order’s legitimacy collapsed not from external attack but from internal hollowing – its own populations voting against its continuance.
This is the deeper point that a lot of observers are missing. They’re still trying to figure out how the Enlightenment ideals in which they still believe can be implemented in whatever replaces the failing world order, but this is a fundamentally flawed perspective because it is the failure of the ideals that is causing the failure of the world order.
However, simply attempting to return to traditional ideals won’t work, not because the ideals are false, but because the knowledge upon which they are based and their practical applications are at least 300 years out of date. Hence the need for a new post-Enlightenment philosophy that is capable of serving as the intellectual foundation for humanity’s eventual post-crash recovery.