Maggie's Farm

Robert Kagan says that the post-Cold War mirage of international harmony is gone, and normal world history has resumed. He begins:

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.

Read the whole thing.