THE SQUANDERED MOMENT: American Hegemony, the Erosion of the International Order, and the Rise of Global Authoritarianism

Abstract

This article argues that the defining geopolitical story of the post-Cold War era is not the triumph of liberal democracy, as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1992, nor the primordial clash of civilisations that Samuel Huntington announced in 1993, but the systematic squandering by the United States of the extraordinary hegemonic legitimacy conferred on it by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Beginning from the Gramscian distinction between consent and coercion as instruments of hegemonic order, the article traces a chronological arc from the unipolar moment of 1989 to the present: from the missed opportunities of the 1990s, through the catastrophic military interventions of the 2000s, to the double standards of the 2010s and 2020s most starkly exposed by Gaza and the Iran confrontation. The central argument is that the United States progressively abandoned soft power in favour of economic and military coercion, treating a globalised world economy—which its own hegemony had constructed—as a threat to be managed rather than a commons to be governed. The consequences have been the weakening of the multilateral institutions designed to sustain international order and the empowerment of authoritarian actors who have exploited the gap between Western rhetoric and Western practice. Fukuyama and Huntington figure in this analysis not as the principal subjects of critique but as a case study in the intellectual decline of the hegemon: organic intellectuals whose credibility collapsed in direct proportion to the collapse of the political project they theorised. Drawing on Gramsci, Joseph Nye, Wallerstein, Chomsky and Herman, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and C. B. Macpherson, the article concludes with the question Ernesto Che Guevara posed as the deepest challenge of any transformative project: whether a genuinely new human subject—beyond the possessive individualism that liberal order presupposes—is possible, and what the answer means for the political horizon of the twenty-first century.

1. Introduction: The Inflection Point

On the night of 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The images—crowds with hammers, border guards stepping aside, strangers embracing across a barrier that had defined the geopolitical imagination of four decades—were transmitted instantly across the world. They constituted what Antonio Gramsci would have recognised as a hegemonic event of the first order: a moment in which the legitimacy of one political order was publicly destroyed and the legitimacy of another simultaneously, if provisionally, affirmed. The Soviet model collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The United States, and the broader Western liberal order it led, received the political credit.

What followed was an inflection point of a kind that history offers rarely. The United States found itself in possession of a quantum of international legitimacy—of consensual authority, of the capacity to lead through attraction rather than compulsion—that no deliberate policy could have manufactured and that no previous power in the modern era had accumulated at comparable scale. The question that the subsequent three decades answer, in ways that are simultaneously clear and deeply uncomfortable, is: what was done with it?

The answer this article proposes is not flattering. The United States systematically squandered the political capital of 1989 through a series of strategic choices that substituted coercion for consent, military force for multilateral legitimacy, and economic nationalism for the globalised rules-based order it had itself constructed. The consequences have been precisely the opposite of those that both Fukuyama’s optimism and Huntington’s managerial pessimism predicted: not the consolidation of liberal democracy as the terminal form of political organisation, but the global recession of democratic governance; not the containment of civilisational conflict through Western leadership, but the empowerment of authoritarian actors—within and beyond Western societies—who have exploited the widening gap between liberal rhetoric and liberal practice.

The argument proceeds chronologically. Section 2 examines the Gramscian structure of the unipolar moment and the nature of the political resource it represented. Section 3 analyses the role of Fukuyama and Huntington not as theorists to be refuted in detail but as a case study in the intellectual architecture of hegemony and its decline. Section 4 traces the chronological arc of squandering: the missed opportunities of the 1990s, the catastrophic interventions of the 2000s, the systemic contradictions exposed by the financial crisis and the Snowden revelations, and the double standards of the 2010s and 2020s laid bare by Gaza and Iran. Section 5 examines the structural dimension of hegemonic decline through Wallerstein’s world-systems framework. Section 6 analyses the authoritarian dividend—how each strategic failure by the hegemon empowered the forces it claimed to be containing. Section 7 asks the deepest question: what human subject is capable of building something beyond the order that is failing, and what the experiences of participatory democracy and revolutionary Cuba can contribute to that question.

2. The Gramscian Windfall: Legitimacy as Political Capital

In his Prison Notebooks, written under Mussolini’s fascist incarceration, Antonio Gramsci identified two instruments of political rule: domination, which operates through coercion and the state’s monopoly of violence, and direction, which operates through the production of cultural and ideological frameworks that make existing social relations appear natural, necessary, and legitimate. A hegemonic order—whether within a national society or, by extension, in the international system—governs primarily through direction, reserving coercion for moments of acute crisis when the machinery of consent has broken down. The stability and durability of hegemony are directly proportional to the degree to which it operates through consent rather than through force.

By this measure, the United States in 1989 achieved, for one historical moment, something close to perfect hegemonic efficiency. The populations of Eastern Europe had not merely abandoned the Soviet model; many had embraced, often passionately, the image of the West as the bearer of freedom, prosperity, and civilised order. This was not propaganda in any simple sense—it was the product of decades of genuine contrast between the material and political conditions of life on either side of the Iron Curtain. The result was an extraordinary accumulation of consensual authority: the capacity to lead the international system not through the threat of force but through the genuine attraction of an alternative.

Charles Krauthammer, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1990, described the resulting configuration as “the unipolar moment”—but his analysis, focused on military preponderance, missed the more important dimension. The moment was unipolar not primarily in the currency of force—the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal had not disappeared—but in the currency of legitimacy. And legitimacy, as any student of Machiavelli understands, is the prince’s most valuable and most fragile resource. The fox governs through it; the lion destroys it in the act of exercising force. The art of power is the art of preserving the conditions under which the fox’s instruments remain effective.

The strategic question facing American leadership in 1990 was therefore not primarily military or economic but political in the deepest sense: how to institutionalise, extend, and consolidate the consensual authority that history had unexpectedly conferred. The answer given—not in any single decision but in the accumulation of choices over three decades—was to spend it.

3. The Organic Intellectuals of the Unipolar Moment: Fukuyama and Huntington as Case Study

Every hegemonic order requires what Gramsci called organic intellectuals: not propagandists, but thinkers whose theoretical production is structurally integrated into the production and reproduction of hegemonic consent. The organic intellectual does not simply celebrate the existing order; he provides it with the intellectual frameworks that make it appear natural, inevitable, and universal—that pre-empt the questions that would otherwise threaten it. The sophistication of the intellectual work is real; its ideological function is equally real.

Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” (1989) and its subsequent elaboration served precisely this function. By declaring liberal capitalism the terminal form of human political organisation—the point at which the fundamental normative questions of political life had been definitively resolved—Fukuyama performed a specific and necessary ideological service: he naturalised the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production by declaring the question of alternatives closed. The “last man” of his subtitle—comfortable, recognised, embedded in liberal institutions—was not a description of existing humanity but a normative projection designed to foreclose the political imagination. If history has ended, there is nothing to struggle for; the task is management, not transformation.

Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993) performed the complementary function. Where Fukuyama’s thesis disabled internal critique of the liberal order by declaring no alternative possible, Huntington’s thesis disabled external critique by declaring those who rejected liberal modernity to be representatives of civilisational formations that had failed to achieve the requisite moral and cognitive progress. Together, the two theses constituted a closed ideological system: capitalism’s internal critics were historically finished (Fukuyama); its external resisters were culturally unreachable (Huntington). The permissible range of mainstream intellectual debate was thereby defined—one could disagree about the details of either thesis while sharing the premise that the American-led liberal order was the legitimate reference point of international politics.

What is analytically significant is not that both theses were wrong—though they were—but that their discrediting followed the curve of the hegemon’s own discrediting with remarkable precision. Fukuyama’s end of history required a United States genuinely committed to the institutions and values it publicly professed; Huntington’s civilisational management required a West possessed of the moral authority that comes from practising what it preaches. Neither condition survived the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the financial crisis, or the Gaza catastrophe. The organic intellectuals lost their function when the hegemon abandoned hegemony for domination. Fukuyama himself has spent three decades progressively retreating from his 1992 positions—acknowledging inequality as a systemic threat, endorsing social-democratic institutional remedies, conceding the precariousness of democratic stability—in a trajectory that is the intellectual autobiography of a theory overtaken by the very history it declared finished.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988) provides the structural complement to Gramsci’s framework. The five filters of the propaganda model—ownership, advertising dependence, official sourcing, disciplinary “flak,” and the ideological framework of legitimising enemies—do not explain the production of Fukuyama and Huntington but explain the conditions of their extraordinary reception: why their theses achieved the circulation they did, why alternative frameworks received systematically less serious attention, and why the collapse of their credibility has been so politically consequential. When the digital revolution—WikiLeaks, Snowden, the documentation of torture, the real-time circulation of images from Gaza—made the machinery of consent manufacture visible to audiences that no previous generation could reach, the consensus that Fukuyama and Huntington helped produce began to unravel not because truth had triumphed but because the conditions of manufactured credulity had been irreversibly disrupted.

4. The Chronology of Squandering

4.1 The 1990s: The Decade of Missed Opportunities

The 1990s presented the United States with a strategic conjuncture it has not faced before or since: the combination of overwhelming military preponderance, extraordinary economic dynamism, genuine consensual legitimacy, and the absence of any credible competitor for international leadership. The geopolitical conditions for the construction of a durable, legitimate, and genuinely multilateral international order were, arguably, more favourable than at any point in the modern era.

The opportunities were not seized. The expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia—in contradiction of the assurances given to Soviet leadership during German reunification negotiations—prioritised short-term strategic advantage over the construction of a stable post-Cold War European security architecture. The decision was rational from a narrow realist perspective; it was strategically catastrophic from a hegemonic one. It signalled to Moscow—and to every other power observing the interaction—that American commitments were conditional on American interests, and that the multilateral language of post-Cold War order was a rhetorical instrument rather than a genuine constraint on American behaviour.

The imposition of the Washington Consensus through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank compounded the damage in the developing world. Structural adjustment programmes—fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatisation, trade liberalisation imposed as conditions of access to credit—were presented as the technical requirements of sound economic management but functioned as instruments of economic coercion that subordinated national development strategies to the interests of international financial capital. The social costs were enormous and well documented. The political consequences were equally significant: across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the “Washington Consensus” became synonymous not with prosperity but with inequality, dispossession, and the subordination of sovereignty to external financial diktat. The soft power reserves accumulated over decades of Cold War competition were systematically consumed in exchange for financial returns that accrued primarily to the creditor institutions and the domestic elites who managed the adjustment programmes.

The American refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, to join the International Criminal Court, or to submit to the jurisdiction of international legal mechanisms it endorsed in principle completed the pattern. Joseph Nye, whose concept of soft power had identified the capacity to attract and co-opt as a resource of international influence at least as important as military force, watched the institutional foundations of that influence being dismantled by the power whose interests he was theorising. Soft power operates through the appeal of a country’s policies when they appear legitimate and morally authoritative to others; a power that claims to lead a rules-based international order while exempting itself from its rules is not exercising soft power but consuming it.

4.2 2001–2011: The Lion Displaces the Fox

Machiavelli’s Prince identifies two modes of power—the lion and the fox—and counsels the wise ruler to employ both while preferring the fox wherever possible, because force generates the resistance it seeks to overcome while persuasion generates voluntary compliance. Clausewitz’s corollary is that war is the continuation of politics by other means—presupposing that politics has priority and that force is the last resort when political means are exhausted. The inversion of this priority—the treatment of military force as the first instrument of policy—is the defining strategic pathology of the post-2001 period.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 represented a genuine test of American hegemonic intelligence: whether the United States would respond to an act of mass murder by a non-state actor in ways that consolidated or consumed its legitimacy. The initial response—the coalition assembled to dismantle Al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan—was largely coherent with the logic of consensual leadership: multilaterally authorised, strategically focused, and capable of sustaining broad international support. The subsequent trajectory was not.

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 marked the decisive rupture. Launched without Security Council authorisation, on the basis of intelligence that key decision-makers knew to be fabricated or manipulated, and with a strategic objective—the export of liberal democracy through military force—that contradicted the most elementary lessons of political science, the Iraq War consumed in three years the soft power reserves that the United States had accumulated over five decades. The specific claim—that societies freed from authoritarian constraint would naturally tend toward liberal-democratic self-organisation—was the applied version of Fukuyama’s thesis, and its falsification was equally comprehensive. A decade of sectarian violence followed the destruction of the secular state apparatus, and the principal political beneficiary of the Western intervention was the Islamic State organisation, whose emergence in the power vacuum created by the invasion demonstrated with savage clarity the difference between the destruction of an authoritarian order and the construction of a democratic one.

The detention policies of the post-2001 period—Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, the systematic use of torture against detainees who had not been charged with any offence—completed the inversion of the liberal legitimating narrative. The United States had presented itself as the guarantor of the rule of law against authoritarian arbitrariness; it now maintained a network of extrajudicial detention facilities in which the rule of law was explicitly suspended. The images from Abu Ghraib circulated globally within hours of their emergence. No subsequent public diplomacy campaign could restore what they had destroyed. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model identified the disciplinary function of “flak” in maintaining the boundaries of acceptable media coverage; the digital environment of the 2000s had made the flak mechanism structurally ineffective. The images could not be suppressed, and the legitimating narrative could not survive them.

The Libya intervention of 2011 reproduced the pattern in abbreviated form. A state that had suppressed Islamist militancy was destroyed in the name of civilian protection, under a UN Security Council resolution whose terms were exceeded within days of its passage. The result was a territory fragmented between competing armed factions, several of them with explicitly jihadist orientations, and a governance vacuum that has persisted for a decade and a half. Russia and China drew the lesson—explicitly and publicly—that Security Council authorisation for humanitarian intervention was a mechanism for regime change in states that had fallen out of favour with the hegemon, and adjusted their voting behaviour accordingly. The multilateral institutions that Nye identified as the infrastructure of soft power were being systematically discredited by the power that most depended on them.

4.3 2008–2016: Contradictions Made Visible

The global financial crisis of 2008 was, from the perspective of hegemonic legitimacy, as consequential as the Iraq War. The institutions of American financial supremacy—the investment banks, the rating agencies, the regulatory structures of the world’s reserve currency—nearly destroyed the world economy they were supposed to regulate. The Washington Consensus that had been imposed on developing economies for two decades as the condition of access to credit had, at the same moment, been systematically violated by the financial system of the power that enforced it. Deregulation, the unconstrained operation of financial markets, the primacy of private over public investment—these prescriptions had produced not prosperity but the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and the costs had been socialised while the gains remained private.

Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis had predicted precisely this trajectory. Hegemonic powers in the descending phase of their cycle, having lost the productive supremacy that initially underpinned their dominance, shift to financial instruments—the control of credit, the leverage of reserve currency status, the management of debt relationships—as the primary mechanism of hegemonic extraction. Financial dominance is inherently more volatile than productive dominance; it depends on confidence, and confidence, once destroyed, is not easily rebuilt. The 2008 crisis was the visible threshold of the hegemon’s financial phase of decline.

Edward Snowden’s revelations of 2013 completed the exposure. The United States had constructed, in complete secrecy and without democratic authorisation, a global surveillance infrastructure that monitored the electronic communications of virtually every person on earth—including the heads of government of its closest allies. The stated justification—the prevention of terrorism—was impossible to assess because the programme’s legal basis, operational parameters, and effectiveness were classified. What was unambiguous was the scale of the violation: the liberal-democratic order whose universality Fukuyama had proclaimed as history’s terminus was simultaneously conducting the most comprehensive invasion of personal privacy in human history. Angela Merkel’s phone had been tapped. The Brazilian president cancelled a state visit. The institutional relationships that constituted the soft power infrastructure of American leadership were damaged in ways that no subsequent reassurance could fully repair.

The judicial persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning—both individuals who had exposed documented war crimes—crystallised the pattern into a paradigm. The liberal order does not merely fail to protect those who challenge it; it criminalises their challenge. Assange spent more than a decade in effective imprisonment before a 2024 plea agreement allowed his return to Australia. Manning served years of a thirty-five-year sentence before a presidential commutation—issued by the same administration that had prosecuted her. The message conveyed to every potential whistleblower, journalist, and democratic activist was unambiguous: the institutions of liberal democracy protect the state from accountability, not the citizen from the state. The “last man” of Fukuyama’s comfortable stasis does not resist injustice; he prosecutes those who expose it.

The rise of authoritarian populism in this period—Trump’s election in 2016, Brexit, the consolidation of Orbán’s illiberal state in Hungary, the erosion of democratic norms across the Global South—was not coincidental with the preceding sequence of events but structurally connected to it. The legitimating narrative of liberal democracy had been undermined not by its enemies but by its self-declared champion. The populations that turned toward authoritarian alternatives were not simply deceived by demagogues; they were responding, however distortedly, to a genuine perception that the liberal institutions of the post-Cold War order had failed them and were not reformable from within.

4.4 2016–2026: The Operating Logic Exposed

The period from 2016 to the present has completed the exposure of what Section 3 identified as the operating logic of the rules-based international order: that its rules apply with consistency inversely proportional to the strategic value of the rule-breaker to the hegemon. No episode has demonstrated this more comprehensively than the war in Gaza.

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the Israeli military response that followed produced, by 2025, a death toll exceeding fifty thousand Palestinians, the physical destruction of the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, and a famine that multiple international agencies characterised as deliberately induced. The International Court of Justice, in January 2024, ruled that South Africa’s case alleging genocide was plausible and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent genocidal acts. The United States, self-declared guardian of the rules-based international order, responded by vetoing the Security Council resolutions that would have given that ruling practical effect.

The contrast with the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could not be more instructive. Both involved the large-scale killing of civilians, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the violation of foundational norms of international humanitarian law. The Western response to Ukraine was immediate, sustained, and material: weapons, intelligence, financial support, sanctions. The response to Gaza was diplomatic hedging, selective condemnation, and the continued supply of the weapons used to carry out the killing. The variable that explains the difference is not the gravity of the violation—by any objective measure, the Gaza operation produced civilian casualties at a rate that dwarfs the Ukrainian conflict—but the identity of the perpetrator. Israel is a strategic partner; Russia is a strategic rival. The rules-based order applies its rules accordingly.

Huntington’s civilisational framework was immediately mobilised in the Anglo-American political and media sphere to frame the Gaza conflict as a confrontation between Western civilisation and Islamic terror. The framing serves its familiar ideological function: it culturalises what is in reality a colonial conflict rooted in seven decades of dispossession, territorial occupation, and the systematic denial of political rights. The Palestinian authority most systematically dismantled by Israel—through settlement expansion, blockade, and the deliberate political weakening of the secular Palestinian Authority in favour of Hamas—was nationalist and secular, not Islamist. The Huntingtonian lens does not illuminate this conflict; it obscures its structural causes while providing intellectual cover for the double standard.

The confrontation between the United States and Iran in this period adds the final dimension. The maximum pressure strategy resumed and intensified after 2025—sweeping economic sanctions, threats of military action, documented sabotage of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure—was presented simultaneously as the defence of non-proliferation norms. A power that maintains the largest nuclear arsenal in history, provides unconditional military assistance to a nuclear-armed regional ally that has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and threatens war against a signatory state for its potential development of a nuclear capability cannot invoke international law as the foundation of its legitimacy without generating the contempt it has increasingly earned. The Global South registers this contradiction with clarity. The authority of international institutions—the very infrastructure of the soft power that Nye identified as America’s principal strategic asset—is consumed with each exercise of the double standard, and the authoritarian actors who have always dismissed that authority as hypocritical are provided with the evidence they need to sustain that dismissal.

5. The Structural Dimension: Wallerstein and the Logic of Hegemonic Decline

The chronological arc traced in Section 4 might be read as a sequence of strategic errors—bad decisions made by fallible leaders in difficult circumstances. Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis suggests a more fundamental reading: that the trajectory reflects not individual failures of judgment but the structural dynamics of hegemonic decline in the capitalist world-economy.

In Wallerstein’s framework, hegemonic powers achieve dominance through a sequence of productive, commercial, and financial supremacy. As productive supremacy is generalised through technology transfer and the development of competitors, commercial and financial dominance become the primary instruments of hegemonic power. Financial dominance is inherently more volatile—it depends on confidence rather than productive capacity—and the shift toward financial instruments of hegemony is itself a symptom of productive decline. The United States followed this trajectory with uncomfortable precision: from the productive dominance of the postwar decades to the financialisation of the economy from the 1970s onward, and the progressive deindustrialisation that accompanied it.

The globalised world economy that American hegemony constructed as the instrument of its commercial and financial supremacy has generated precisely the outcome that a declining hegemon finds most threatening: multiple centres of accumulation that extract developmental advantages from the system’s rules while remaining resistant to political subordination. China has used the rules of globalisation to become the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity—a trajectory that represents the most dramatic reduction of poverty in human history and the most comprehensive falsification of the claim that productive development requires liberal-democratic political institutions. The BRICS economies, the broader Global South, and regional hegemons from Iran to Turkey have all found ways to operate within the globalised system while refusing the political compliance that the hegemon once expected as the price of access.

A declining hegemon facing this configuration is structurally compelled to rely increasingly on coercion: on the weaponisation of financial infrastructure—dollar dominance, SWIFT exclusions, technology export controls—on military force and the threat of it, and on economic nationalism that contradicts the rules of the system it designed. The turn from soft power to coercion is not primarily a choice; it is the expression of structural decline. The fox is abandoned not because the lion is preferred but because the conditions under which the fox’s instruments are effective have been eroded. And the lion’s instruments, as Machiavelli understood, generate precisely the resistance they seek to overcome.

6. The Authoritarian Dividend

Each stage of the squandering traced in Section 4 produced a specific authoritarian dividend: the empowerment, legitimation, or creation of authoritarian actors who have exploited the gap between Western rhetoric and Western practice.

NATO’s eastward expansion and the managed humiliation of Russia in the 1990s created the conditions for Putin’s political project. A power whose legitimate security concerns had been publicly dismissed and whose attempts at partnership with Western institutions had been received with strategic indifference was available for mobilisation by a nationalist leadership that offered the narrative of civilisational dignity and external threat. Huntington’s framework—ironically, given that Huntington opposed the Iraq War and counselled Western restraint—was appropriated by precisely the actors he most feared: Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine, the defence of Slavic-Orthodox civilisation against Western decadence, is Huntington without the academic qualification, translated into military doctrine.

The Iraq War and the Libya intervention created the conditions for the Islamic State and for the wave of forced displacement that provided the political raw material for the European far right’s electoral surge. The destruction of secular state structures in Iraq, Syria, and Libya—whether directly or through the chain of consequences set off by Western intervention—produced the governance vacuums in which jihadist organisations could recruit, organise, and govern. The refugee flows produced by those conflicts provided the empirical basis for the civilisational alarm that Huntington’s intellectual heirs—Orbán, Le Pen, the Alternative für Deutschland, the Sweden Democrats—converted into electoral capital. The West created the conditions for the humanitarian catastrophe and then empowered the political forces that mobilised against the victims of that catastrophe.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the decade of austerity that followed in Europe destroyed the material foundation of the political centre that liberal democracy requires. The shrinkage of the middle class, the erosion of public services, and the transfer of financial crisis costs from the institutions that produced them to the populations that did not produced a legitimacy crisis of the democratic centre that authoritarian populisms on right and left have exploited systematically. Yascha Mounk’s “democratic recession” is not a cultural or political accident; it is the political expression of an economic model that has failed the populations it claimed to serve.

The double standards of Gaza and Iran have produced an authoritarian dividend of a different kind: the accelerated erosion of the multilateral institutions that, whatever their limitations, provided some framework for the management of international conflict. When the United States uses its Security Council veto to shield an ally from accountability for documented violations of international humanitarian law, it does not merely fail to apply the rules; it demonstrates to every authoritarian actor that the rules exist to be ignored by those with sufficient power to ignore them. Russia, China, and every other government that has been sanctioned or threatened for violations that Washington’s allies commit with impunity learns the same lesson: the international order is not a set of principles but a set of instruments, and the question is simply whose instruments they are.

7. Beyond the Last Man: Macpherson, Guevara, and the Question of the Subject

The analysis of hegemonic decline and authoritarian empowerment leads to the deepest question: what human subject is capable of constructing something beyond the failing order, and what alternative anthropology can ground that construction?

The liberal anthropology that underlies both the “last man” of Fukuyama’s terminal liberalism and the broader intellectual architecture of the order this article has examined rests on a premise that C. B. Macpherson subjected to systematic critique across his two major works. In The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), Macpherson traced the foundations of liberal thought—from Hobbes and Locke through to the classical economists—to what he termed possessive individualism: the assumption that the individual is essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society, and that political relations are therefore relations between proprietors rather than between members of a community. This is not a peripheral feature of liberalism but its anthropological core. 

Fukuyama’s “last man” is the philosophical culmination of possessive individualism: a self-owning market agent before he is a citizen, a neighbour, or a member of any collective project—comfortable, recognised, and constitutively incapable of the solidarity that historical agency requires.

In The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (1977), Macpherson developed the positive corollary: a genuinely participatory democracy is not achievable within a framework of possessive individualism, because the latter systematically reproduces the material inequalities that make equal participation fictitious. The conditions for developmental, participatory democracy—equal access to the means of a fully human life, reduction of economic inequality to the point where it ceases to translate into political power—are precisely the conditions that the capitalist organisation of production structurally prevents. Macpherson’s argument does not require socialism in any doctrinaire sense; it requires only the recognition that the democratic equality professed by liberalism is incompatible with the possessive inequalities that liberalism simultaneously naturalises. This contradiction—which Fukuyama dissolves by fiat and the “rules-based international order” perpetuates by design—is the central unresolved problem of the political theory of modernity.

The figure of the new human subject capable of surpassing the possessive individualism of liberal order was anticipated, from a radically different tradition, by Ernesto Che Guevara. In his 1965 essay Socialism and Man in Cuba, Guevara argued that socialist construction required not only the transformation of economic relations but the simultaneous formation of a new human consciousness—a subject defined by solidarity, collective commitment, and the subordination of individual material interest to the common good. The new man, on Guevara’s account, was not a spontaneous product of revolutionary change but its most difficult and most essential task: the clay, as he put it, that the revolution must give form to, even as it is the clay from which the revolution itself is made. The metaphor is precise: clay is not inert raw material but a substance with its own properties, resistances, and possibilities, which only collective and sustained labour can shape.

The candour of Guevara’s formulation is worth preserving. He did not claim that the new man had arrived; he identified his emergence as the open question on which the success of the Cuban revolutionary project ultimately depended. More than six decades later, that question remains genuinely open. The Cuban experience has generated extraordinary collective achievements—in healthcare, education, and international solidarity that includes the deployment of medical missions to more than sixty countries—alongside persistent contradictions: the tension between moral and material incentives that Guevara himself analysed, the corrosive effects of the Special Period economic crisis of the 1990s, and the complex relationship between a political culture of collective sacrifice and the individual aspirations that no society has succeeded in suppressing entirely. The new man in Cuba is not a failure and not an achievement; he is an unfinished argument about what human beings are capable of becoming under conditions of genuine equality—an argument whose resolution remains the deepest challenge of the Cuban political project. That the argument remains unresolved is not a refutation of Guevara’s project but a measure of its difficulty—and of the difficulty of any project that refuses the comfortable anthropological pessimism of terminal liberalism.

The convergence between Macpherson’s participatory subject and Guevara’s new man, across their very different idioms and traditions, points toward a shared recognition: the possessive individual of liberal anthropology is not human nature but a historical product. It is the product of specific economic relations—the private appropriation of socially produced wealth—that liberal theory naturalises as the expression of an original human condition. Historical products can be changed. The evidence that the human motivational repertoire extends well beyond material self-interest is not confined to Cuba or to socialist experiments: Wikipedia and free software are collective productions of extraordinary quality and utility, generated without the profit motive, by millions of individuals who chose cooperation over competition and the public good over private accumulation. They demonstrate empirically that the “last man” is not the endpoint of human development but one possible social product of a specific set of historical conditions—conditions that are visibly failing.

8. Conclusions

The argument of this article can be stated simply. The United States received, in 1989, an extraordinary political inheritance: the consensual legitimacy that flows from being perceived as the representative of universal interests rather than merely particular ones. It spent that inheritance systematically over three decades, substituting coercion for consent at each decisive moment: NATO expansion rather than European security architecture; Washington Consensus rather than genuine development partnership; invasion rather than international law; torture rather than accountability; veto rather than justice in Gaza. The consequence is not merely American decline—though that is real and proceeding along the trajectory Wallerstein’s framework would predict. The consequence is the weakening of the international institutions whose authority depended on the credibility of the power that sponsored them, and the empowerment of the authoritarian actors who have always insisted that the liberal international order was merely the legitimating ideology of the most powerful.

Fukuyama and Huntington were not wrong by accident. They were wrong in the specific ways that the organic intellectuals of a declining hegemony are wrong: they naturalised the contradictions of the existing order at precisely the moment when those contradictions were about to become impossible to naturalise. History did not end in 1989; it accelerated. Civilisations are not the primary unit of political conflict; interests, classes, and the distribution of power within and across societies are. But the deeper reason for their failure was that the power whose legitimacy their theses presupposed proceeded, systematically and publicly, to destroy the conditions under which its legitimacy could be sustained.

What remains is the question that Macpherson and Guevara, from different traditions and different historical moments, both posed: whether a human subject is possible who is capable of building something beyond the possessive individualism that the existing order presupposes and reproduces. The ecological crisis, the biodiversity collapse, the pandemic vulnerability revealed by COVID-19, and the concentration of artificial intelligence in the hands of an extraordinarily small number of corporations all require, for their resolution, precisely the combination of collective commitment and institutional coordination that neither Fukuyama’s last man nor the double-standard international order can provide. The clay, as Guevara understood, exists. Whether the collective labour capable of giving it form will emerge in time is the political question of the century.

History has not ended. But the order that declared it over is ending. What comes next will be determined not by the logic of any single hegemony but by the conscious choices of the social subjects that the productive forces of the twenty-first century are calling into existence—in Cuba’s unfinished argument, in Gaza’s testimony, in the horizontal solidarities of digital commons, in every human being who has chosen cooperation over competition. That emergence cannot be suppressed indefinitely. Whether it will arrive in time is a different question, and an open one.

Notes

1 Fukuyama’s original essay appeared as “The End of History?” in The National Interest, No. 16, Summer 1989, pp. 3–18. The book-length treatment is The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992).

2 Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer 1993, pp. 22–49. The expanded book is The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

3 On organic intellectuals, see Gramsci, A. (1929–1935/1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, especially “The Intellectuals.”

4 Nye’s soft power concept was introduced in Bound to Lead (1990) and developed in Soft Power (2004). For its post-Iraq decline, see Nye, J. S. (2011). The Future of Power.

5 The International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in South Africa v. Israel on 26 January 2024, finding that South Africa’s genocide claim was plausible under the Genocide Convention.

6 Assange reached a plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2024, pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy under the Espionage Act.

7 On the concept of “democratic recession,” see Diamond, L. (2015). “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession.” Journal of Democracy, 26(1), 141–155.

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