"Democracies are rising to the moment,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address, as Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his vicious war on Ukraine.
Francis Fukuyama leads a band of commentators claiming that the "spirit of 1989” is back and we are about to witness globally a "new birth of freedom.”
Such rhetoric, usually intoned by men who lived through the heady last days of the Cold War, is dangerous. It could yet again make Western countries misread the world and their own power to shape it.