We are living in an age of backlash to three decades of revolutions in different realms. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world saw the liberalization of markets, the democratization of politics and the explosion of information technology. Each of these trends seemed to reinforce the other, creating a world that was overall more open, dynamic and interconnected. For many Americans, these forces seemed natural and self-sustaining. But they were not. The ideas that spread across the globe during this era of openness were American, or at least Western, ideas, undergirded by U.S. power. Over the past decade, as that power began to be contested, those trends began to reverse. These days, politics around the world is riddled with anxiety, a cultural reaction to years of acceleration.

Excerpted from “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present” by Fareed Zakaria. Copyright (c) 2024 by Phelps Berkeley LLC. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company.

The opposition to American power is easily visible in the geopolitical realm. After three decades of unquestioned American hegemony, the rise of China and the return of Russia have brought us back to an age of great power competition. These nations, as well as some regional powers such as Iran, all seek to disrupt and erode the Western-dominated international system that has ordered the world in recent decades.

But this is not simply a response to the United States’ hard power; it is also a reaction to the broad spread of Western liberal ideas. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are allied in one crucial respect: They believe that Western values are alien to their societies and undermine their rule. Far more worrying: There has developed within the Western world itself a negative reaction to many of these same values.

The democracies of the West all face a rising tide of illiberal populism that is skeptical of openness, globalization, trade, immigration and diversity. The result has been that across the world we are living through a democratic recession, rising tariffs and trade barriers, growing hostility to immigration and immigrants, ever-expanding limits on technology and information access — and even skepticism about liberal democracy itself.

Liberal ideas have transformed societies and how they interact. Look around. Since 1945, the birth of the “liberal international order,” the world has experienced what John Lewis Gaddis has called the “long peace,” the longest stretch with no great power conflict in modern history. Since then, most nations have usually behaved abroad according to a set of shared rules, norms and values. There are now thousands of international agreements that govern the behavior of countries and many international organizations that create forums for discussion, debate and joint action.

Trade among these countries has exploded. Trade as a share of world economic output stood at about 30 percent in 1913, an era often thought of as a high point of peace and cooperation. Today it is about 60 percent. Since 1945, the annexation of territory by force, once a common occurrence, has become vanishingly rare — which is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stands out as a stark anomaly.

As the backlash to U.S. power and ideas forges ahead, the question is whether the existing international order will be sustained, with great power peace, global trade and some measure of international cooperation still in place — or whether we will return to the jungle of realpolitik.

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The world of rivalry and realpolitik has been with us since time immemorial. The world of a rules-based international order is relatively new. Like so many liberal ideas, it emerged from the European enlightenment. Thinkers such as Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant began arguing for conceptions of national interest that veered away from war and toward “perpetual peace.” In the 19th century, British liberals adopted some of these ideas, and Britain at times began to act abroad to uphold its values and not simply its interests. For example, it not only abolished the slave trade, but also used its navy to block foreign slave ships. Yet it was only out of the ashes of World War II that an utterly dominant United States was able to conceive of a genuinely new international system and make it a reality.

That system — the United Nations, Bretton Woods, free trade, cooperation — emerged in the mid-1940s but was largely rejected by the Soviet Union, and so grew within a Western bubble. Until 1991, when Soviet Communism fell and the liberal order saw a fast and furious expansion to include dozens of countries from Eastern Europe to Latin America to Asia. President George H.W. Bush called it “a new world order.” But it was really the expansion of the existing Western order to encompass most of the world.

Why is it now imperiled? Was the geopolitical backlash inevitable? Were the two main forces — the rise of China and the return of Russia — products of structural shifts in power? Or were individual decisions, particularly those of the West, to blame?

Many realists have argued that Russia’s revisionist aggression was provoked by the steady growth in the number of NATO members after the Cold War. During the debate over NATO expansion in the 1990s, I was a cautious voice on the issue: I was in favor of admitting the major Eastern European countries — Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — but then for pausing to consider Russian interests and sensibilities. And I believed in 2008, as I do now, that President George W. Bush’s decision at that year’s Bucharest summit to open up the possibility that Ukraine might join NATO but not make a formal offer to it was the worst of both worlds — enraging Russia without giving Ukraine a path to security.

But even without NATO expansion, Russia might have invaded Ukraine. (Some think it might have done so even sooner.) Ukraine had long loomed large in the Russian consciousness; the crown jewel of the czarist empire. Russia traces its history to the medieval state known as Kievan Rus, whose capital was Kyiv, and much of Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule for more than 300 years.

When Putin famously called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he went on to explain why. It was because millions of “Russians” were no longer part of Mother Russia — a view that sees Ukrainians as Russians (albeit second-class ones) and Ukraine as a subordinate region of Russia. After a period of weakness in the 1990s, when Russia began waging two bloody wars to keep Chechnya from seceding, Putin set himself the goal of restoring Russian power, especially in its “near-abroad.” This put him on the path toward reversing Ukraine’s independence.

The Soviet Union was the world’s last great multinational empire, and a quick glance at history teaches us what usually happens when such empires collapse: The imperial power undertakes bloody efforts to hold on to its former territories. The French waged a savage war to keep Algeria, which they saw as a core part of France. They tried to hold on to their colony in Vietnam, as did the Dutch in Indonesia. The British killed more than 10,000 people in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. Putin’s foray into Ukraine can be similarly understood as a war of imperial restoration.

Still, many realist analysts do not point the finger at Russia. Instead, they criticize the United States for having been too strong and assertive in its Russia policy, with NATO expansion seen as improperly encroaching on Moscow’s “backyard.”

When it comes to China, the consensus goes the other way — that Washington was too weak and submissive. The United States welcomed China into the international system and opened the floodgates of trade and investment without regard to China’s exploitative economic practices and authoritarian tendencies. This was done in the belief that China would moderate and become a responsible democracy. The new Cold Warriors, who want total confrontation with China, claim that this decades-long policy of “engagement” was naive and failed. After all, China did not turn into a liberal democracy.

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In reality, Washington’s policy toward China was never purely one of engagement, and its core aim was not to turn China into Denmark. The policy was always a combination of engagement and deterrence, sometimes described as “hedging.” Since the 1970s, U.S. officials concluded that bringing China into the global economic and political system was better than having China sit outside it, resentful and disruptive. But Washington coupled these efforts to integrate China with consistent support for other Asian powers as a balancing mechanism. It kept troops in Japan and South Korea, deepened ties with India, expanded military cooperation with Australia and the Philippines, and sold arms to Taiwan.

To a large extent, this balancing act worked. Before President Richard M. Nixon’s overtures to Beijing, China was the world’s greatest rogue state, funding and giving political support to insurgencies and guerrilla movements across the globe, from Latin America to Southeast Asia. Mao Zedong was obsessed with the idea that he stood at the vanguard of a revolutionary movement that would destroy Western capitalism. There was no measure too extreme for the cause — not even nuclear apocalypse. “If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died,” Mao explained in a speech in Moscow in 1957, “the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist.” By comparison, China since the time of Deng Xiaoping has been a remarkably restrained nation on the international stage, neither going to war nor funding armed insurgents anywhere in the world since the 1980s.

But Xi has initiated a much more assertive foreign policy. He has overturned much of the Chinese consensus that fueled his country’s success, scrapping Deng’s diktat “hide your strength and bide your time” and Hu Jintao’s promise of a “peaceful rise.” There is little hidden or peaceful about Chinese clashes with Indian troops in the Himalayas, pressure on South Korea to remove a U.S. missile defense system, and naval exercises menacing Taiwan. Perhaps it was inevitable that this day would come after China had bided its time long enough and was ready to flex its muscles. China feels it deserves to be treated as the global great power that it is.

We cannot be sure what the world would have looked like had Washington pursued very different policies toward both China and Russia. The alternative scenarios are tempting. Would Russia ever have been democratized and integrated into the liberal order like postwar Germany? If Washington had gotten tough with Beijing, would China have become a version of Japan in the 1980s, economically threatening but benign geopolitically?

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In truth, the peaceful rise of Germany and Japan was an anomaly for specific historical reasons. China and Russia were bound to flex their muscles eventually. And it is ironic that some of the high priests of realpolitik, who would usually argue that clashes between great powers are the inevitable result of competing national ambitions, still blame U.S. actions — in one case for being too tough, in the other for being too weak.

Changes in the global balance of power were arguably more crucial in stirring Russia and China into action, though in both countries domestic leadership made fateful decisions. After bouncing back from its ’90s-era weakness, a revived Russia was likely to try to regain some of its glory. For its part, China was never going to meekly accept a modest status after having risen meteorically to become the world’s........

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