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

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 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.

0:59Demetri Kofinas:We focus in particular on the decision to enlarge NATO eastward, the failure to invest in Russia's transition, a 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 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.

1:41Demetri Kofinas: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 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.

2:31Demetri Kofinas:If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io slash 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 Community, which includes Q &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 info at hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

3:14Demetri Kofinas:And with that, please enjoy this historical retrospective about one of the most consequential periods in global history, what we learn from the failures of its leaders to seize the moment, and where we go from here with my guest, Ian Shapiro.

3:32Demetri Kofinas:Ian Shapiro, welcome to Hidden Forces. Thanks for having me. 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 on many episodes, and I've talked about it many times.

4:24Demetri Kofinas: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. 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 70s, 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.

5:09So I've been teaching at Yale now for 42 years, terrifying thought. And I'm a professor of political science and global affairs there. 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? 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. What is it that led you to the field of political science in the first place?

6:09Well, I grew up at the height of apartheid in South Africa. When I left in 72, it looked like the country was heading for a civil war or a military coup or something. 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 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'd like, to get me into the study of politics, 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 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 Zach Morris's dad in Saved by the Bell came back to visit him with a piece of the wall in his hand.

7:46Demetri Kofinas:And I'd heard 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 tight. 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.

8:25Demetri Kofinas:And you begin with 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.

9:06Demetri Kofinas:The United Nations had authorized a multinational force to expel Iraq from Kuwait, signaling the advent of a new global order. 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, who were adopting capitalism with the zeal of converts and angling for membership in the World Trade Organization and other international bodies.

9:42Demetri Kofinas: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, everything from the shock therapy visited on the former Soviet Union, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the 9-11 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.

10:30Demetri Kofinas:And then you end this germatic opening by asking, how did we get from there to here? 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 paths not taken?

11:14Demetri Kofinas:Those questions are what motivates this book. Let's start with the first question, Ian. how did we get from there to here? 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. So I appreciate that summation of the book's agenda. It is, I'd say, it's how did we get from there to here?

11:54What 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? If I were to reduce the argument of the book to one word, it would be unilateralism, by which I I mean somewhat different things in international affairs and in domestic affairs.

12:39In 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-Cult War. Most obviously, there were arguments that NATO should be radically rethought and perhaps even replaced from people as different as Francois Mitterrand, Hans-George Genscher, Germany, and many people also within the US who were strongly, George Kennan, Sam Nunn, many others who were strongly opposed to growing NATO into Eastern Europe, rather than focusing on the big prize, which was refashioning relationships with Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

13:40Even as unlikely a figure as Richard Nixon said, the lesson he had to learn is what we did after World War II with Germany and Japan. When we created a Marshall Plan, we folded them into the new international security structures. We incorporated 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 widely blamed, or Tsai settlement was widely blamed for making the rise of Hitler so much more likely.

14:23They said, let's not do that. 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. Never mind the East Europeans, they can wait. They're not in 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.

15:05And indeed, although Yeltsin's relationship with the Clinton administration deteriorated in the second hump of the 1990s, throughout which we eked out dribbles of aid to Russia. They staggered from, they were a basket case for the whole 90s, till in 98, they eventually went to the IMF to get bailed out. 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, and people as different as, you know, But Rusconi was former Prime Minister John Major. In addition, it wasn't just Richard Nixon. They were all saying this is the way to go.

15:48And instead, we, as I detail, 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, that completed the alienation of Putin. And he went in a very different direction. He may have done that anyway, but we made it more or less inevitable that 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.

16:27Demetri Kofinas:And I think he was spot on. 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?

17:05Well, 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 debate. 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 into Eastern Europe as threatening them.

17:50And so there was a kind of a fork in the road. And so actually General Shalakosvili came up with a great temporizing device to head that off, where 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. 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. And Yeltsin said, great, you know, and the Eastern Europeans were kind of grumbling because they said, no, we want to join NATO now.

18:37But it was working. And this was a way of sort of kicking the can down the road and just waiting to see how things develop. And then what happened was Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to the first takeover of Congress in 40 years in 1994, 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. and so he jumped off the fence and got behind that. And you can see why he would have done that. He was very spooked.

19:21It was very important for him for the 96 re-election. But the big mistake was after he was re-elected in 96, and that issue essentially was off the table, that he carried on regardless. And so in 97 is when the big invitations are being issued, and eventually those three countries are added in 1999. So that was the one piece of it, dealing with the - Poland. Hungary and the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic in Hungary. Yeah. Joined in 99. 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.

20:03Instead, they dribble out aid to him. And the key moment is in 1996, 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 a resurgency. And it looks very likely that they'll actually beat him in the 1996 Duma elections. And so he's desperately trying to get the Americans to stop talking about NATO enlargement and to invest in the Russian economy, and they do neither. And so what does he end up doing? He goes to the oligarchs. And this massively accelerates Russ's transition into 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, state enterprises, which when he can't repay them, they then take.

21:10And they grease the skids of all kinds of corrupt privatizations. And so it's kind of off to the races in producing this economy that becomes completely dominated by the oligarchs until shell actually until Putin takes them on in 2000. He wants to get rid of Yeltsin's oligarchs and put in his own, but 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 1945, 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 2004, when George W.

21:58Bush adds 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 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?

22:56Well, I think 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 of our era 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, he felt very vulnerable because it wasn't just the swing voters. He had Madeleine Albright, who's a Czech American, pushing for the Czech Republic.

23:41He 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 become 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, the principal reason they went down this path was because they could. They knew the Russians couldn't stop them. But it was only going to be a question of time before the Russians would eventually get back on their feet, which they do off about 2003, when Putin has prepaid most of their debt, built up a$160 billion rainy day fund.

24:32And 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? 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. You know, we're giving these East Europeans, you know, suspenders and 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-1999, was twofold.

25:45One, 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 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 Yeltsin, who's 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, regardless of the fact that we're not threatened here, and regardless of the fact that there's no international authorization for it.

26:39So 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 still in the future, the war on terror, George Bush's invasion of Iraq, what we did in Libya. And so these are all unilateral, the West essentially behaving as though we are hegemonic and you need to just accept it. Before I ask you any other question, I'm curious what the perspective is of your students who all

27:11Demetri Kofinas: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? 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 so many of the anxieties and concerns that pervaded talk about international relations were dissipating during this time.

27:57Demetri Kofinas:And the talk was all about the United Nations, internationalism, international rules and laws, et cetera. So I'm curious what that conversation is like when you have it with them. 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 160 Yale undergraduates, you know, people, you know, in their late teens.