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End of Dreams, Return of History
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The
world has become normal again. The years immediately following the end of the
Cold War offered a tantalizing glimpse at a new kind of international order,
with nations growing together or disappearing altogether, ideological conflicts
melting away, cultures intermingling through increasingly free commerce and
communications. But that was a mirage, the hopeful anticipation of a liberal,
democratic world that wanted to believe the end of the Cold War did not end just
one strategic and ideological conflict but all strategic and ideological
conflict. People and their leaders longed for "a world transformed." 1 Today the
nations of the West still cling to that vision. Evidence to the contrary -- the
turn toward autocracy in Russia or the growing military ambitions of China -- is
either dismissed as a temporary aberration or denied entirely. -
Ideologically, it is a time not of convergence but of divergence. The
competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of
the world increasingly lining up, as in the past, along ideological lines.
Finally, there is the fault line between modernity and tradition, the violent
struggle of Islamic fundamentalists against the modern powers and the secular
cultures that, in their view, have penetrated and polluted their Islamic world.
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