After the Fall: Reckoning with the End of History | Ian Shapiro

In Episode 485 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/after-the-fall-reckoning-with-the-end-of-history-ian-shapiro/ of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro—author of After the Fall—about how the widespread optimism of the post–Cold War era gave way so rapidly to the fractured, combative politics of today, why American unilateralism hollowed out the very international institutions the US claimed to champion, and what it will take for mainstream democratic parties to recover their legitimacy in the populist era. The first hour traces the critical decisions of the 1990s and early 2000s that Ian believes set this unraveling in motion: the choice to enlarge NATO eastward and invest meaningfully in Russia's post-Soviet transition, and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the first major military action taken without UN Security Council authorization. They then turn to the unilateral invasion of Iraq as the seminal rupture in the international rules-based order, followed by the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which delivered a parallel blow to the elite consensus that had governed Western countries since the onset of the Cold War. The second hour opens with the 2011 intervention in Libya and the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, which Shapiro argues was cynically deployed to topple Muammar Gaddafi, leaving behind a failed state and further discrediting the international norms it was meant to uphold. From there, they trace the cascading fallout across the Middle East and Europe—through Syria and Ukraine—to the present moment, before turning to the central political question of the age: whether mainstream parties can deliver an industrial policy and a model of inclusive growth capable of addressing the economic grievances and insecurities driving the populist revolt across the democratic world. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 06/25/2026

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Ian Shapiro, professor of political science and global affairs at Yale University, whose new book, After the Fall, explores how and why the widespread optimism of the post-Cold War era gave way so quickly to the fractured and combative politics of today. We begin the first hour of this conversation exploring how the United States, throughout

• 0:42Demetri Kofinas?

  key moments in the 1990s and early 2000s, chose to act alone, repeatedly, and in defiance of the very international institutions that it claimed to support, while simultaneously expanding the scope of its military alliances and operations in the face of a collapsing post-Soviet empire. We focus in particular on the decision to enlarge NATO eastward, the failure to invest in Russia's transition, the decision that helped give rise to gangster capitalism and the oligarchs, and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the first major unilateral military action taken without Security Council authorization. We then turn to the 9/11 attacks and the unilateral invasion of Iraq as the seminal

• 1:23Demetri Kofinas?

  moment in which the consensus supporting the international rules-based order was shattered, followed by the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which did the same for the legitimacy of the elite consensus that had governed countries throughout the Western world since the onset of the Cold War. The second hour begins with the 2011 intervention in Libya and the doctrine known as the responsibility to protect, which Ian argues was cynically invoked to topple Gaddafi and the West's own economic interests, leaving behind a failed state and further discrediting the very international norms and institutions it was meant to advance. From there, we trace the fallout across the Middle East and Europe, including in Syria

• 2:06Demetri Kofinas?

  and Ukraine, that has led us to the present moment. We spend the balance of that hour laying out the nature of the world that we now inhabit, and why Ian believes that the most consequential choices facing the democratic world and the global economy lie in whether mainstream parties can deliver an industrial policy and a model of inclusive growth capable of addressing the grievances and economic insecurities of the populist era. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation, become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius

• 2:51Demetri Kofinas?

  Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats. You can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this historical retrospective about one of the most consequential periods in global history, what we learned from the failures of its leaders to seize the moment, and where we go from here, with my guest, Ian Shapiro. Ian Shapiro, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:38Demetri Kofinas?

  It's awesome having you on the show. I don't remember how I came across your book. It was sent to me either by your publisher or by someone who read it. And once I started reading through, maybe probably just the very beginning of it, I knew it was a book I wanted to review and to have you on the podcast, because the book is largely a historical treatise on what went wrong. Well, what happened? And then there's a subjective interpretation that what happened didn't need to happen. And I think that's also an important observation of the book with respect to the end of the Cold War, the 1990s and the early 2000s, a subject that we have explored on this podcast

• 4:21Demetri Kofinas?

  on many episodes, and I've talked about it many times. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Before we get into that conversation, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. I know you were born in Johannesburg, South Africa. You studied... In London and in the United States. So tell me a little bit about you and what your background is and what you teach at Yale.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Sure, I was born in South Africa, as you said. I left South Africa in 1972 and went to the UK where I lived for most of the seventies, the run up to the Thatcher era. And then I left the UK in 78 and came to the US, did a PhD and a JD at Yale, PhD in political science, and was hired there in 1984. So I've been teaching at Yale now for 42 years, terrifying thought. And I'm a professor of political science and global affairs there.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  So I teach both in the Jackson School of Global Affairs and the Political Science Department.

• 5:27Demetri Kofinas?

  What is the difference between political science and political history?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Well, political science is the social science. They're looking for causal explanations of things. They tend to use quantitative methods a lot and modeling, whereas historians tend to give narrative accounts from how we got from X to Y. There's a lot of overlap, in fact, but it's more a difference in emphasis. Political scientists are looking more for law-like generalizations. I think historians are looking for depth of understanding. This book tries to be a hybrid of those two things.

• 6:05Demetri Kofinas?

  What is it that led you to the field of political science in the first place?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Well, I grew up at the height of apartheid in South Africa. When I left in 72, it looked like the country was heading for civil war or a military coup or something. No one, what no one predicted was that there would be a peaceful negotiated transition to a democratic order. And that's what ultimately happened. So that, you know, immediately when I sort of started, came of age, thinking about politics, I wanted to understand the role of contingency in politics. How could, you know, such unexpected things happen? Did we know why such things happened? And so that sort of was a natural magnet, if you like, to get me into the study of politics,

• 6:54Speaker 01

  particularly the politics of regime change, the sort of politics of the fundamentals of regimes, as opposed to sort of day-to-day politics.

• 7:04Demetri Kofinas?

  So I mentioned to you before we began recording that I normally write out a lot of questions for interviews. I don't necessarily go off of them all, but it's a helpful exercise. In this case, I've really only written one question, which is the question to begin the interview. And then I was hoping to just explore this past, which is entirely a period that I've lived through. I'm 45 years old. I went to college in beginning in 2000. I wasn't old enough to really remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, my first memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall was actually when Zack Morris's dad and Saved by the Bell came back to visit him with a piece of the wall in his hand. And I'd heard

• 7:46Demetri Kofinas?

  about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember seeing a Time Magazine cover of the Gulf War. I remember some conversations about how people were worried that it was going to be another Vietnam. But I still lived through this period. And so I have not only studied it, I've lived it in real time. And I think it's something that is not only worth reflecting on, but also it's important for younger people who haven't lived through it to be able to to learn about it. So I'm going to begin by taking an excerpt from the very first chapter of your book titled "The End of the End of History," which is, of course, an allusion to Francis Fukuyama's epoch-defining phrase. And you begin with

• 8:26Demetri Kofinas?

  the following: "The explosion of virulent politics across much of the democratic world since 2016 stands in stunning contrast to the widespread optimism that prevailed a quarter century earlier. Then, the Soviet Union was collapsing. The Cold War was ending. The stagnation of the 1970s and the industrial strife of the 1980s were in the rearview mirror. Economists were debating whether the fine-tuning expertise of central bankers had rendered the business cycle obsolete. The trifecta of deregulation, privatization, and free trade christened neoliberalism at home and the Washington consensus abroad reigned supreme. The United Nations had authorized a multinational force to expel Iraq from Kuwait,

• 9:11Demetri Kofinas?

  signaling the advent of a new global Democracy was on the march in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and much of Asia. Long-stalled peace negotiations in Northern Ireland and the Middle East were moving forward after decades of bloody gridlock. Amazingly, a peaceful transition was unfolding even in apartheid South Africa. Surviving communist regimes in China and Vietnam were adopting capitalism with the zeal of converts and angling for membership in the World Trade Organization and other international bodies. Russia would soon join the G7, turning it into the G8. Francis Fukuyama became a celebrity for declaring that the end of history had arrived. And then you go on to give an accounting of what happened in the years since then,

• 9:56Demetri Kofinas?

  everything from the shock therapy visited on the former Soviet Union, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and then 11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq, the 08 financial crisis, the various Russian invasions of Georgia, occupation of Crimea, and subsequent invasion of Ukraine, the intervention in Libya, the Syrian civil war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing war against Iran, to say nothing about the breakdown of relations between the US and China and the denigration of US multilateral institutions and alliance structures. And then you end this germy attic opening by asking, how did we get from there to here?

• 10:40Demetri Kofinas?

  How could the widespread optimism that prevailed when the Berlin Wall came down give way so quickly to politics whose closest historical parallels are to the 1930s, when fascism and communism obliterated democracies and took the world beyond the brink of catastrophe? Was it inevitable? Or did political and economic leaders make decisions that produced our reality, or at least made it much more likely? If the latter, what can we learn from studying those choices and the foregone opportunities from attending to the path it's not taken? Those questions are what motivates this book. Let's start with the first question, Ian. How did we get from there to here?

• 11:24Demetri Kofinas?

  What is the story that you would tell to me and to our audience about how the Soviet Union fell, leaving the United States standing as the most powerful country in the history of the world, to where we find ourselves now, more than three decades later, in a world that feels increasingly like it's coming apart and where the end of history that Francis Fukuyama foretold feels like it was only a dream?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  So I appreciate that summation of the book's agenda. It is, I'd say, you know, it's how did we get from there to here? What were the paths not taken? And I want to emphasize, it's not a 2020 hindsight book. I really make the case that there were serious people inside and outside of government advocating that we not do certain things that we ended up doing and that we do things that we ended up not doing. So, you know, that's partly why it's a historical book, because I really want to go back into the world as it appeared to the players at the time. And I think if you said, how did we get from there to here?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  If I were to reduce the argument of the book to one word, it would be unilateralism, by which I mean somewhat different things in international affairs and in domestic affairs. In international affairs, it was the refusal, starting with the first Bush administration, but then the Clinton administration as well, and the second Bush administration, the rejection of the idea that the international structures that had prevailed in global politics throughout the Cold War could be radically refashioned in the post-Cold War. Most obviously, there were arguments that NATO should be radically rethought and perhaps

• 13:12Speaker 01

  even replaced from people as different as Francois Mitterrand, Hans-Joachim Genscher, Germany, and many people also within the US who were strongly, George Kennan, Sam Nun, many others who were strongly opposed to... Growing NATO into Eastern Europe with, rather than focusing on the big prize, which was refashioning relationships with Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, even so, you know, as unlikely a figure as Richard Nixon said, the lesson he had to learn is what we did after World War II with Germany when we, and Japan, when we created

• 13:51Speaker 01

  a Marshall Plan, we folded them into the new international security structures, reincorporated them into the emerging economic relationships. And Harry Truman and George Marshall did that because they didn't want to repeat the mistakes that had been made after World War I, when a vanquished adversary, namely in Germany, had been so badly treated and was, you know, widely blamed, or its side settlement was widely blamed for making the rise of Hitler so much more likely. They said, let's not do that. And, you know, and so Nixon, among others, comes along at the end of the Cold War and says, this is what we should be doing with Russia. You know, never mind the East Europeans, they can wait, they're not in

• 14:36Speaker 01

  any imminent danger. What we need to do is make huge investments in the post-Soviet reality, help them create a modern diversified economy that will support democratic institutions, really negotiate our major arms deals, and incorporate them also into the post-Cold War international security structures. And they wanted to do it. Yeltsin was desperate to do it, as I detail in the book. And indeed, although Yeltsin's relationship with the Clinton administration deteriorated in the second half of the 1990s, throughout which we eked out dribbles of aid to Russia, they staggered from, they were a basket case for the whole

• 15:21Speaker 01

  90s, till in 98, they eventually went to the IMF to get bailed out. So, but when Putin came in in 2000, again, for the first three years of his presidency, he was angling to join NATO, he was angling to join the EU. People as different as, you know, Berlusconi was former Prime Minister John Major. In addition, it wasn't just Richard Nixon. They were all saying this is the way to go. And instead, we, as I detail in the book, we blew that off and we expanded NATO into Eastern Europe, steadily closer and closer to Russia's borders. And by 2008, when we were openly talking about adding Georgia and Ukraine,

• 16:06Speaker 01

  that completed the alienation of Putin and, you know, he went in a very different direction. He may have done that anyway, but we made it more or less inevitable that any, any Russian leader would have gone down that path. So it was a huge missed opportunity. George Cannon called it the most faithful misjudgment of the post-Cold War, and I think he was spot on.

• 16:29Demetri Kofinas?

  So that's the first half of the history that you tell in the book. The other half is what happened in the 2000s, namely the war in Iraq, as well as the intervention in Libya. Let's just sit a bit longer with the 1990s here. What would you identify as being the most glaring, obvious mistakes? I mean, so you talked about NATO enlargement, for example, but be more specific. What exactly was it? The first enlargement? Was it subsequent enlargements? Was it the fact that NATO existed at all, that it should have been disbanded? How do you think about what the mistake was in that case?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think either it should have been disbanded or Russia should have been included from the beginning. I think either one of those two would have completely transformed Western relationships with the former Soviet Union. The incorporation of East Germany was more or less unstoppable because it happened. The unification of Germany was so rapid that it sort of bypassed the debates. But the big mistake, I'd say, was twofold. It rapidly became clear to the Clinton administration that there was a tension between adding the East European countries and adding Russia, because the East European countries felt threatened by the Russians and the Russians saw expanding NATO. NATO into Eastern Europe is threatening them.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And so, you know, there was a kind of a fork in the road. And so that actually General Shalikas really came up with a great temporizing device to head that off, where he, they said they created something called the Partnership for Peace. And the idea was anyone who wanted eventual NATO membership would need to join that and then we would see how it goes. You know, nobody knew what was going to happen anyway. The world was very unstable. And so we'll see if we can cooperate through this new institution in dealing with the issues that arise, the most pressing of which was the collapse of the former Yugoslavia into civil war.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  And Yeltsin said, great, you know, and the Eastern Europeans were kind of grumbling because they said, no, we want to join NATO now. But it was working. And this was a way of sort of kicking the can down the road and just waiting to see how things developed. And then what happened was Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to the first takeover of Congress in forty years in nineteen ninety four, which completely spooked Clinton. And then as now, we had swing states. And his advisors pointed out there were large numbers of Polish, Hungarian and Czech Americans in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And they were lobbying to join NATO.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And so he jumped off the fence and got behind that. And you can see why he would have done that, you know, he was very spooked. It was very important for him for the ninety six reelection. But the big mistake was after he was reelected in ninety six. And that issue essentially was off the table that he carried on regardless. And so in ninety seven is when the big invitations are being issued and eventually those three countries are added in nineteen ninety nine. So that was the one piece of it. Dealing with

• 19:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Poland.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Hungary and the Czech Republic.

• 19:48Demetri Kofinas?

  The Czech Republic and Hungary.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, joined in ninety nine. That's one of the last things the Clinton administration does. The other thing was completely ignoring the arguments of people like Nixon, saying, we must make a massive investment in the new Russia. Instead, they dribble out aid to him. And this, the key moment is in, in nineteen ninety six, because what's happening in Russia, because the economy is performing so badly, is that Yeltsin is getting steadily more unpopular. And the communists are in danger of becoming, you know, a resurgency. And it looks very likely that they'll actually beat him in the nineteen ninety six Duma elections.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And so, you know, he's desperately trying to get the Americans to stop talking about NATO enlargement and to invest in the Russian economy and they, they do neither. And so what does he end up doing? He goes to the oligarchs. And this massively accelerates Russia's transition from, you know, into sort of gangster capitalism, because they come up with all of these schemes, like the loans for shares scheme, where basically they give him money and bail him out in return for collateral in former state agencies, you know, state enterprises, which when he can't repay them, they then take. And they grease the skids of all kinds of corrupt privatizations.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  And so it's kind of off to the races in producing this economy that becomes completely dominated by the oligarchs until, actually, until Putin takes them on in two thousand. He wants to get rid of Yeltsin's oligarchs and put in his own, but that, you know, that coming later. So I think the twin choices to ignore the big agenda of treating a vanquished Russia like we had treated a vanquished Germany in nineteen forty five. And the gratuitous expansion of NATO, which really starts us down the road to the new Cold War. And then that goes into overdrive in two thousand and four, when George W. Bush adds

• 21:59Speaker 01

  seven countries, mostly as a quid pro quo for their having supported his coalition of the willing to destroy Iraq the previous year. And then it's really off to the races.

• 22:11Demetri Kofinas?

  So my question is, what was the reason that the Clinton administration not only chose to go down the path of NATO enlargement, but didn't seek to institute something akin to a Marshall Plan in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse in order to further the likelihood that Russia's foray into democracy and market capitalism would take hold? Was it institutional inertia among the Cold Warriors? Was it domestic politics? Did it reflect an underestimation of how weak the Russian economy was or how unprepared its people were for the introduction of a market economy? Or was it all of those things and more?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think Clinton, you know, Clinton had a very different agenda. He was really a domestic politics president. For reasons I talk about elsewhere in the book, he thought his job was to really pay down the deficit of the debt that Reagan had run up. Now, one of the ironies about here is Republicans talk about cutting debts and deficits while growing them, while Democrats end up cutting them. So he did not want to spend any political capital convincing Congress to invest big time in Russia. And then he was, as I said, very, he felt very vulnerable. Because, you know, it wasn't just the swing voters.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  He had Madeleine Albright, who's a Czech-American, pushing for the Czech Republic. He had Brzezinski, who wasn't actually in the administration, but he was hovering around, sort of throwing spitballs at the Partnership for Peace and pushing for Poland. The Europeans wanted Albania and Romania to join for their own reasons. And the Europeans have a very different agenda, we can go into if you want. So it was kind of the path of least resistance. And I think they felt empowered, as I said at the end of that chapter, you know, the principal reason they went down this path was because they could. They knew the Russians couldn't stop them. But, you know, it was only going to be a question of time before the Russians would have introduced.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Get back on their feet, which they do off about two thousand and three. When, you know, Putin has prepaid most of their debt, built up a hundred and sixty billion rainy day fund. They were quite insulated when the financial crisis hit because they had gotten their house in order. He had completely reorganized their tax system and so on. And so by the time Russia was in a position to do something about it, we had gone way down this path. And so they did it because they could get away with it and basically because nobody could stop them.

• 24:54Demetri Kofinas?

  What about you take some time to discuss the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the book? Why was that important?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  It was important because they were constantly saying to Yeltsin. Why do you get so anxious about NATO? It's not a, you know, NATO is a defensive alliance. It's not a threat to you. Just stop worrying about NATO. We, you know, we're giving these East Europeans, you know, suspenders in a belt, but we're not threatening you and so on. You know, NATO is going to evolve into some kind of benign force for international stability. The problem with, you know, their bombing Yugoslavia, this was the Kosovo Albanians that were being attacked by the Serbs in mid nineteen ninety nine was twofold.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  One, first of all, no NATO country was threatened by this, you know, what was going on in Kosovo. So it wasn't a defensive action. And secondly, it wasn't authorized by the Security Council. They didn't go to the Security Council because they knew that Russia, which was a Serb ally, and China would have vetoed it. So it was essentially, this is the first big unilateral action that they just took. They just did it. And so this was the final nail in the coffin in their relations with with Yeltsin. It was hugely unpopular in Russia. And it was a sort of, you know, putting down a marker that we are the US and the Western powers are going to act unilaterally in the world when we think it's appropriate.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Regardless of the fact that we are not threatened here and regardless of the fact that there's no international authorization for it. So I think it was the thin end of the wedge for American unilateralism that then goes into overdrive with the war on terror and all that's still in the future, the war on terror, George Bush's invasion of Iraq, what we did in Libya, and so, yeah, these are all unilateral, the West essentially behaving as though we are hegemonic and you need to just accept it.

• 27:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Before I ask you any other question, I'm curious what the perspective is of your students who all now at this point were born after this period. When they're learning about this past, first of all, how well do they already know it? You know, are they largely ignorant about it? And what is their reaction when you tell them about what the 1990s was like? Because we haven't even really talked about that here. We've talked about some of the facts and the key events, but we haven't really tried to capture the optimism that pervaded capitals around the Western world and the sense of safety that persisted within these countries around the future, the possibility of nuclear war. Yeah, there was conversation of loose nukes and material leaving the Soviet Union, but

• 27:50Demetri Kofinas?

  so many of the anxieties and concerns that pervaded talk about international relations were dissipating during this time. And the talk was all about the United Nations, internationalism, international rules and laws, et cetera. So how, I'm curious what that conversation is like when you have it with them.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  So that's a great question, and it gets into what got me into writing this book in the first place, because in 2019, the Yale president asked me to give something called the Devane Lectures at Yale. And the Devane Lectures are unusual in being both a regular Yale course for undergraduates and a course that's open to the general public. And so I did them on, I called it Power and Politics in Today's World. And, you know, I walked into the first class and there were about a hundred and sixty Yale undergraduates, you know, people, you know, in their late teens. And then about a hundred people with gray hair from the community who had, you know, clearly lived through all of this.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And so I sort of said, challenge on the front that you're exactly what you're talking about. And so what I did, and I know you've watched some of these lectures on YouTube. I created these lectures and, and I think they're an hour and a quarter lecture. There's twenty-six of them, so more than most people would probably want at this point. But at least a third of them consisted of video that I put together from the time. So for the elderly people, it was a trip down memory lane. But for the young people, it was a way to try and make it vivid. And fortunately for me, they filmed all of all twenty-six of those lectures and put them up on YouTube and they went viral. I think they've had like over eight million hits now.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  And so that was how I tried to square that circle pedagogically was to, to use a huge amount of contemporaneous video of what was, how things were being perceived at the time by the players, both to remind the people my age for who, you know, we lived through it all, as you said, but also to make it real for the students. And when I teach it now, I still, I mean, I, you know, have all this video now. So I always use the video because otherwise, yeah, you know, nineteen eighty-nine, for somebody who was born, you know, in two thousand and four, nineteen eighty-nine is no different than the Civil War. I mean, it's all in the history books, right?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  So that was the way in which I tried to make it vivid and present for the students.

• 30:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Do you find, I mean, this is the other thing, not to belabor this point, and we'll move on. But as I was saying to you, I think I said this to you before we turn on the microphone, that, or maybe I mentioned it during the recording as well, that in 2000, when I went to college, the analogous period, had I read a book at this time, would have been the period from the early 1960s through to that day, to 2000. And I remember what it was like when I would think about or watch movies referencing the counterculture or the 1960s, or the Vietnam era protests, or the, you know, gas lines in the 1970s. And it seemed not only like a distant history, but also unrelatable. Like, the 1960s and protesting the Vietnam War, like, the idea of a draft just seemed

• 31:08Demetri Kofinas?

  unrelatable. And I wonder, and this might not be a fair question or one that you can answer, but I wonder, is there a similar reaction among your students, that they find this history unrelatable? How different, really, is this history that we've lived through to the history of today from a feeling standpoint for people?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I think it's huge, and it, you know, relates to the second half of my book, which deals with domestic politics. Because I think that the people who, basically, in the new century, I mean, if you take the median age of a millennial voter, you know, they were, or the Gen Z voter, let's say, they were born in 2004. And they have grown up in an era of much slower growth, much greater economic insecurity. You know, when they were four years old, probably one or both of their parents were under extreme stress from the financial crisis. When COVID hit, they were in high school, probably another parent lost a job.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  When 2004 comes along, they are still 18 years from being the median age of a first-time home buyer. So they've grown up in a much more constrained world than the period of very high economic growth, where, you know, everybody in these countries was, large numbers of people were upwardly mobile, people were getting, you know, more secure, and, you know, so it's been a... A much more challenging era for the generation that have come of age in the last two decades than the generation who grew up in the post-war period. And I think, as I argue in the book,

• 32:45Speaker 01

  that's one of the reasons that they're much more susceptible to seeing the world in zero-sum terms. You know, I think part of the appeal of somebody like Trump is that he's got a relentlessly zero-sum view of the world. You know, if we are supporting European security, we're being ripped off. If there's a trade deficit with China, we're being ripped off. If we're spending money in Ukraine, unless they're giving us minerals, we're being ripped off. If a Mexican comes into America and gets a job, it's a job that an American is losing. This is a zero-sum worldview that resonates with people who have lived through a lot of economic contraction and stress.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  That was a very different world in the decades after the Second World War, where economic growth was high, opportunities were expanding, people were doing better than their parents' generation. And so, you know, we're dealing with a very different reality. And I think that, you know, you bring up one sort of imaginative deficit that this generation can't perceive what it was like for the previous generation. But I think there's another imaginative deficit, which is that my generation has failed to perceive what it's like experientially for this generation, for the Gen Z generation. And I think that's why many in my generation have been so flummoxed and blindsided

• 34:11Speaker 01

  by the rise of this hard-right, anti-immigrant populism that plays into a zero-sum worldview. So we will have our own imaginative deficits as well.

• 34:23Demetri Kofinas?

  So Putin takes power at the turn of the millennium. And not long after that, the 9/11 attacks happened. And the world changes in some ways forever. I mean, they told us this in real time. This was the narrative that Washington pushed. In some ways, it was a disservice because not everything had really changed all that much, and it was used as a way to push forward new programs and take away civil liberties, understandably, in some cases, as a reaction to the attacks, the insecurity people felt, the political incentives of politicians. But then those attacks were used to justify a preemptive, or what they called then a

• 35:01Demetri Kofinas?

  preventive invasion of Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the supposed institution of democratic norms and institutions that would take hold, and which never did, obviously. And in my popular telling, it's really the invasion of Iraq that broke the international system. Your point about NATO, the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia is important, but there were ways that you could justify that. It was in NATO's backyard, it was in Europe, it was a humanitarian disaster. We were just getting our legs underneath us, we're still trying to figure out what was going on, the Soviet Union had just fallen. But Iraq was a different world, and it was in a different part of the world. And we went ahead in any way, despite the fact that the United Nations Security Council didn't authorize it.

• 35:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Talk to me a little bit about that history at the turn of the millennium.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Well, it was one data point in the global war on terror. I mean, as I argue in the book, this kind of unilateralism really gets started in our response to 9/11 itself, because the path not taken there was, as generals on the ground were arguing at the time, we didn't need to topple the Taliban. We could have gone after Al Qaeda and ignored the regime in Kabul, which, in fact, at that time, was had considerable disagreements with the Taliban. And Omar had been trying to kick them out of his country for the preceding year and a half, precisely because they were running terrorist operations in Africa out of his

• 36:30Speaker 01

  country, and he was trying to get recognition for his country internationally. Only three countries in the world had recognition. Recognized his regime, one of which was Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia was, you know, the main target of Bin Laden. He wanted to topple the Saudi regime. So they were not locked at the hip at all. And there were people on the ground, generals on the ground saying, just ignore the regime in Kabul and we will go after Al Qaeda. We didn't do that. We toppled the regime, created a failed state, didn't manage to go after Al Qaeda. And then, you know, they escaped to Pakistan and start reconstituting themselves.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And then you get the alliance between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which becomes, you know, central to the resurgence. So it's kind of the gang that couldn't shoot straight and everything we did made it worse. But it was, that's when Bush announces in 2002, his global war on terror, we're going to act unilaterally, we're going to have colonizations of the willing, never mind alliances, never mind the UN. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists. And then they take that agenda into Iraq. And so we have, you know, these two disastrously expensive wars that drag on in Afghanistan and Iraq, create a failed state in Iraq as well.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  You know, two years after we leave Iraq, ISIS is controlling 40% of the country. And likewise, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. It takes 20 years for us to get out of there. And it's a war that achieves basically nothing. And that, you know, those two wars alone cost more than 4.3 trillion. The global war on terror by 2020 had cost about $8 trillion. So this is, you know, I think you're right to say, you know, Kosovo was chump change compared to these things. But it sort of reminds me of Hemingway's line about how he went bankrupt, you know, first gradually, then suddenly.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Because I think Kosovo is the thin end of the wedge where you start saying for us to act unilaterally is okay. And then we, you know, the wedge goes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then even even more extreme way by the time we get to Trump.

• 38:54Demetri Kofinas?

  Now, did you look back at all at your writings, what you were writing and saying at that time? Do you remember what your position was, what your thoughts were?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, in 2004, I was asked to give a talk at the Yale Club of Japan. And I sent some topics to them and they said, we don't like any of these topics. This was September of 2004. We want you to talk about what this Kerry administration's foreign policy is going to be. I end up giving a talk about why there wasn't going to be a Kerry administration because you can't beat something with nothing. And there was no democratic alternative to the Bush doctrine and I subsequently published that in a book called Containment. And I was certainly not alone. There were other people saying, you know, this unilateralism is really going to come back to bite us as it subsequently had.

• 39:48Demetri Kofinas?

  I remember that at that time, if anyone dared mention, I mean, it was such a difficult time to be outspoken against US foreign policy. Remember, everyone was wearing lapel pin, you know, flags, American flags, you know, the journalists on on the news networks. If you even suggested that America was an empire, that was just not really conceivable to people.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  I mean, all you needed to say was, who attacked us? Al Qaeda attacked us. Let's go get Al Qaeda. You know, what we ended up doing was the ambition that we had in Afghanistan was matched only by the extent to which we under-resourced it. Because we decided instead of, you know, the generals on the ground at the time said, you know, it would take about three to 5,000 special forces, which were in the region at the time, and that there would be sufficient to go after Al Qaeda. And instead, what did we do? We said, no, we want to topple the Taliban regime. And how did we do it? We did it by getting behind what had been the losing side in a civil war.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Namely, the Northern Alliance people who had been in the government before and were hugely corrupt and didn't have much legitimacy. You know, if you're going to get behind the losing side in a civil war, you might want to ask yourself, why are they losing? And we didn't do that. And so we basically created a puppet regime that was never going to have legitimacy. And so it was just so kind of ham-fisted. But, you know, I don't think anyone needed to criticize American foreign policy to the extent of saying we shouldn't be going after the people who did the nine eleven attacks. On the contrary,

• 41:36Speaker 01

  we should really have gone after them instead of getting into this kind of panic, scattershot, you know, attacking regime after regime. To just make it a little bit more granular for a minute. When Bush comes in in two thousand, George W. Bush, his, the foreign policy in the Bush administration is really actually divided. Because there are the, you know, he himself ran on saying, I'm not interested in nation building. He was kind of an isolationist. I'm not interested in nation building. We've got plenty of problems at home to deal with. He had this big tax cutting agenda, all of that, you know. And there were neocons, people like Wolfowitz and the Vice President Cheney and his administration, but they were

• 42:21Speaker 01

  on the fringes. And that, you know, he wasn't listening to them. And after nine eleven, they seize the moment and they they completely take over the foreign policy of the administration. And that's when, you know, I think he panics. And they see their moment because that group had been pushing, you know, they had pushed the Congress to adopt the Iraq Liberation Act in nineteen ninety eight, which was, you know, advocating the toppling of Iraq, the Saddam Hussein regime. And they get into the driver's seat and they don't let go. That's why I think it's really was a path not taken. Somebody with more critical acumen

• 43:03Speaker 01

  and spine than George W. Bush could have stood up to those people and said, no, you know, we're going after the Taliban. Could have said, no, you haven't shown us that Iraq has anything to do with nine eleven. They made up all these furious connections, not, you know, or none of which turned out to be accurate. And, and the head leadership of the CIA was saying at the time, this is nonsense. So it's not, you know, it's not like you had to take on the proposition that the US had to respond.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  And by the way, nobody was opposing us doing that. Putin was supportive, the Chinese were supportive, even Gaddafi was offering to share intelligence on al Qaeda. Wasn't like it was going to be heavy lifting to do that.

• 43:49Demetri Kofinas?

  Many of those members of that administration, from Rumsfeld to Cheney to Wolfowitz to Richard Pearl, were signatories. I think Pearl was also a signatory of the project for a new American century. So they were, I mean, I think that what was certainly lost the time, and I think still lost or not framed this way, is that that administration was what we saw in Iraq and what we saw in Afghanistan and the war on terror was a framework for empire building. It was, I think, they saw lost opportunities in the Clinton administration and they wanted to use the fall of the Soviet Union to actualize a form of American empire. Would you agree with that?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the neoconservative agenda. You know, they backed Clinton into, you know, signing the Iraq Liberation Act after the Monica Shtetlinsky scandal when he was on his, you know, on the defensive. But he never funded it, he never did anything, you know. I mean, it wasn't his agenda, and you did right, but you know, what was the neoconservative agenda? It was the belief that you could, first of all, you could create democracies at the point of a gun and that the democracies you create will be pro-American. Both those assumptions turn out to be false. It's much harder to create democracies than they thought. I go through the political science of that in some depth in the book.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  You know, what is required to really create a democracy in a defeated country is very hard and very expensive. We did it in Germany and Japan after World War II. It's almost never been done anywhere else. And we spent, you know, in by today's dollars, trillions doing it. So it's really hard and you also don't have any guarantee once you create a democracy that it's going to be a pro-American. So the neocon agenda, that was the neocon agenda. And as I said, they were, you're dead right, they thought, you know, the Clinton administration was throwing sand in the wheels of it. And George Herbert Walker Bush hadn't been interested

• 45:53Speaker 01

  in it. And when his son comes in, you know, they're largely fringe players in his administration until nine eleven. And that's when they, they take over the administration and they completely run the show, at least until two thousand six, when the Iraq war is just turning into an absolute catastrophe. And, and finally, Condi Rice and others say, you've just got to get Rumsfeld out of there and totally rethink all of this, and which he does.

• 46:24Demetri Kofinas?

  So the next round of NATO enlargement was two thousand and four, when we had Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltic states join. And then shortly after that, am I wrong?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  So the first, the very first is East Germany, obviously. Ninety-nine, you get

• 46:45Demetri Kofinas?

  Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  And then in two thousand and four, they add seven countries, including the Baltics. And that was basically a quid pro quo because they, six of those countries signed on to his, his invasion of Iraq, the previous year, at least nominally. And it was kind of comments that they included Slovenia because they thought that it had signed on and then it turned out they didn't. So, but they thought they were rewarding all of these countries. So those were the next, those seven. And that's when the Baltics were included. And then none were included for a while, but in two thousand six and seven, they start talking about Georgia and Ukraine. And that's when Putin says, absolutely not.

• 47:31Demetri Kofinas?

  And he delivers that famous speech at the Munich Security Conference.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  In two thousand and seven.

• 47:37Demetri Kofinas?

  How important was that speech?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Well, it was his saying, you know, you cannot, this will be seen in Russia as a hostile act against us, and there's just no way we're going to be able to accept it. And the Bush administration steams on regardless. Bush goes to Kiev and makes a speech in early 2008, saying, no, you know, we think Georgia and Ukraine should join NATO. Then you have the Bucharest summit a few months later, where they announced that Ukraine and Georgia are going to be given membership application, action plans, membership application plan, which is a sort of, you know, the logistical, providing the logistical basis for NATO. And that, and, you know, four months later, Putin goes into Georgia.

• 48:24Demetri Kofinas?

  And then we have the, well, and Georgia was August of 2009, wasn't it, if I remember correctly? And there was that famous video footage of Slav Khashvili eating his own tie on national television. He looked like he was in pure disbelief and in panic.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, you know, they had been told, you know, nobody who studied the region was in the least surprise.

• 48:44Demetri Kofinas?

  So then we had the, and this, again, this is August, so the financial crisis was literally, it had already begun, but it showed up dramatically in financial markets. And so talk to me a little bit about the role of the global financial crisis, because again, in my, in my popular retelling, it's the Iraq war is the first real collapse of the rules-based international order, which broke the international consensus that undergirded American empire, and then the global financial crisis collapsed it from the inside.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Huge inflection point, I think, both in geopolitics and in domestic politics. In geopolitics, it's an inflection point because the bloom is off the rose for the proposition, you know, that the Washington consensus is the only, the only game in town, and the Americans know how to run the world economy and all of that. Suddenly, you know, the Western financial elites are completely blindsided by this, you know, even a month before the collapse, you have Greenspan and others saying, or US Economies in fine shape and so forth. Yeah, and then there's this giant catastrophe. None of their tools work.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Greenspan goes before a committee in the Senate says, I stand before you in stunned disbelief. And what do they do? They reach for the Keynesian tools they've been denouncing for decades. They, you know, pour trillions into recapitalizing the banks, bailing out the elites and so forth. And that that has domestic implications, which we can get to. But in terms of geopolitics, which is where we are now. I think it's the end of the perception that the US is running the global economy. That's when we start to see, you know, real assertion of the Belt and Road Initiative. We start hearing about the Beijing consensus.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  The Chinese are starting to see these Confucian institutes all over the developing world. And developing countries don't think they don't have to accept the American rules of economic engagement anymore. So I think it really is an inflection point there. And then I think also in domestic politics, because for decades, people have been told this neoliberal troika of deregulation, free trade and privatization is the only thing. You know, as Margaret Thatcher said, Tina, there is no alternative. And suddenly their legitimacy to claim this is suspect.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And I think that's when you, particularly when they respond in this way, that subsequently is revealed to be very hypocritical in that. They bail out the banks, they bail out their friends, they pay bonuses for AIG. Then they pay, you know, all the credit default swaps to Goldman. And yet they continue imposing austerity on everyone else. And so there's a kind of shifting tectonic plate in democratic politics that a lot of those elites don't realize is happening. Eventually comes back to bite.

• 51:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, so two things there that you said that I want to emphasize, then I'll move us to the second hour. Ian, the first is I'm so glad you mentioned the hypocrisy. Because I think it's that hypocrisy. Both in the case of Iraq and the attitude of we're building multilateralism, where we support international institutions, international laws, except when they don't sue us, in which case we don't care, they don't exist. And the same thing happened in the 2008 crisis. Supposedly, there were all these rules, regulations, laws, but none of those things mattered when it came to the people in positions of power. When the banks collapsed, Goldman still had a chance to give out, what was it, something

• 52:33Demetri Kofinas?

  like an average of $600,000 per employee in bonuses in the midst of the crisis.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Oh, it was in the millions. It was in the millions. It was flat more than 600,000.

• 52:42Demetri Kofinas?

  No, I mean, per, on average, per employee, I think it was 600,000. Obviously, there were people that were getting millions of, millions of bonuses. And we learned about John Thane's golden toilet and everything else. But I think it was that hypocrisy that shattered, again, we went from shattering the international consensus. So basically, are we actually building international institutions? Do we believe, are we trying to build international norms and international rules and laws? Or in fact, do they not really exist because the strongest player in the system doesn't abide by them? And the same thing was revealed to be true during the financial crisis, which is we have laws and rules and norms of behavior, but none of those things matter if someone

• 53:23Demetri Kofinas?

  in power is in a position to suffer under them, in which case we just disregard them entirely. And I think those two events were seminal in breaching trust and also effectively creating a cleaving within American society that left certain people feeling like they could no longer trust or believe in the system. And it feels like that cynicism has been building up, and it's ultimately what led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. So I want to spend the second hour of the conversation, filling out some of the rest of this timeline, including the important intervention in Libya, which is often lost, but also very, very important. And then we'll have a chance to get into the election of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, the second invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing war in Iran and the Middle East, and the

• 54:06Demetri Kofinas?

  closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and kind of where we find ourselves today. For anyone new To the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Ian, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Ian, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed.

• 54:47Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.