In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. Appearing in the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse, the thesis captured the intoxicated triumphalism of an era. Few works of modern political philosophy have aged into such thorough, embarrassing obsolescence.
I remember the fall of the Iron Curtain with crystalline clarity. The prevailing mood was not merely relief; it was a near-religious euphoria. The great totalitarian colossus of the East had broken apart, and the assumption followed that its captive nations would simply assimilate into the liberal democratic fold for an era of borderless concord.
I admit my own complicity in the illusion. I was in my early twenties, pliable enough to mistake a dramatic geopolitical realignment for the permanent victory of human reason. I believed we were witnessing the final triumph of freedom. It was an indulgence in pure naivety—a sentiment that youth perpetually awards itself, and the precise reason why today I regard any movement reliant upon the impassioned herds of the young with cold, unyielding distrust.
With the sobriety of decades, a darker truth comes into focus: the world under the Cold War was measurably more stable, coherent, and disciplined than the unraveling order we inhabit today.
During that prolonged standoff, our senses were sharpened by an existential reality. We understood that mortal danger stood at the perimeter, cold-eyed and heavily armed. We responded to that presence with seriousness. We directed capital, intellect, and civic willpower toward the preservation of our societies. We built deterrence, enforced internal rigor, and maintained civilizational boundaries because the cost of failure was absolute extinction.
More fundamentally, the domestic freedoms the West took for granted were not an inevitable birthright; they were a direct geopolitical byproduct of the Soviet menace. In an irony history rarely admits, Joseph Stalin and his heirs rendered the free world an unintended service. The external presence of the Bolshevik threat forced Western elites to treat their own populations with caution and concession. The working and middle classes had to be offered tangible prosperity, dignity, and personal liberty—if only to inoculate them against the ideological toxins emanating from Moscow.
The moment that external counterweight dissolved, the discipline dissolved with it.
Deprived of an adversary across the frontier, our leadership turned inward. The unearned complacency that set in after 1991 did not usher in universal fraternity; it merely freed the ruling classes from the need to respect their citizens. In our indolence, we surrendered the vigilance that kept our own domestic structures in check. We mistook the collapse of the foreign Leviathan for our own enduring virtue, entirely blind to the reality that in putting down the monster in the East, we had merely cleared a path for the emergence of the totalitarian impulse within our midst.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/01/net-zero-is-leaving-britain-defenceless/