As the West was lost by the President of the United States, a predator on his own allies

Of the stream of words written on American foreign policy under Donald Trump, none are more revealing than the six than his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, recently pronounced the presenter of Fox News Megyn Kelly: “We live in a multipolar world”. These are words that any secretary of state would never have pronounced – not to mention a president – in the last 80 years.

For the first half of that period, the distinctive feature of global politics was the division of the world in the two rival camps of the Cold War. The wars they fought were conflicts by prosecutor in third world countries. Non -aligned nations counted, in particular in global forums such as the United Nations, but when it was a large strategy, essentially, it was a bipolar world.

After America won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed, the world entered a new period in which, in a pleased and erroneously, many western politicians hypothesized that the rise of the West – with its democratic and pluralist values ​​- was more or less a fact. The collapse of communism was seen by many as a proof of the concept that democratic capitalism was the optimal form of governance to which human development had naturally evolved. A well -known Harvard scholar, Francis Fukuyama, even published a book with the provocative title The end of the story. (While Fukuyama’s thesis began to fray the events of the events, the subsequent editions added a question mark to the title.)

The thesis was not unchallenged: two years later, the rival of Fukuyama, Samuel p Huntington, has published an alternative prognosis of the world of post-sequenced war, The clash of civilizationwhich provided for the rise of militant islamism. However,-in particular during the years that eat the lotus of the presidency of Clinton-the pre-eminence of the West, led by a United States involved globally, was the prevalent expectation.

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Scholars spoke of the 90s and early 2000s as a “unipolar moment”. They underestimated China’s rise and erroneously assumed that the economic liberalization started under Deng Xiaoping would inevitably evolve even in political liberalization.

For a short period after the beginning of the new century, there was even the hope that post-communist Russia could be integrated into the democratic world. The new presidents who both took on the assignment in 2000 – George Bush and Vladimir Putin – briefly enjoyed something bromance, who reached his peak with Bush’s visit to Russia in 2002.

AS THE New York Times The journalist David Sanger writes in his recent book New cold wars: “The meaning … it was not simply that the Cold War was over, but with the effort it could almost be canceled by history … Russia would join the World Trade Organization, just as China had done. So perhaps the European Union. And perhaps – only perhaps – the NATO itself … many disputes of beer remained, many of which concerning the western drift of the former Soviet States. But the idea that Russia could follow (nations of Eastern Europe) in NATO did not seem crazy. “

There was even an office set up at the NATO headquarters in Brussels to plan the future belonging to the Russian.