World politics is facing a new defining moment. Are we still in Cold War 2.0, or are we in the phase of what diplomat and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard N. Haass calls “post-post-Cold War”? As he argued, 9/11 ended America’s innocence, and “we entered the post-post-Cold War world”, a period when increasingly potent transnational challenges intersect with still important traditional concerns.

In today’s globalised world, wars between states are not so common, the Israel-Hamas war notwithstanding, but conflict is endemic. British political scientist Mark Leonard describes it as the Age of Unpeace. The forces which were meant to bring the world together are pushing it towards conflict. The world is trapped somehow between war and peace.

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, in their book, The Light That Failed, offer a fascinating analysis of the post-Cold War period. Much of the unpredictability about the shape of the world was the assumption in the Western political and ideological quarters that the world was going to change but the Western world would remain the same.

As Krastev and Holmes argue, Eastern Europe’s former Communist states’ movement “in space became movement in time”. They turned increasingly right and authoritarian, even xenophobic. Liberalism became a victim instead of the victor. Liberal democracy, touted as the victor in the ideological war, was replaced by the oppressive influence of Moscow.

Francis Fukuyama’s supposed end of history marked the beginning of what Krastev and Holmes call an “Age of Imitation”. The irony is too stark to be missed. The Trump revolution hoped the nations exiting the communist........

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