“Russia did it” – the last stand of neoconservatism

GEFIRA



In 1992, at the end of the Cold War, an American political scientist infamously proclaimed “the end of history:” liberal democracy and the capitalist system has won, the rest of the world will eventually embrace western ideas as superior to theirs because only they are able to provide peace and prosperity.


This line of reasoning has since become the West’s dogma in international relations, and so under the pretext of spreading human rights and parliamentary democracy all over the world the West perceives itself to be on a mission. For a while, it worked. Most of Eastern Europe readily embraced Western democracy and capitalism and even Russia seemed to follow.


Some intellectuals brought it to a new level: the rest of the world will have to embrace capitalism and liberal democracy voluntarily or else they will be forced to. It was the birth of neoconservatism in the United States and it would spread across the Atlantic. The Neocon vision had other implications, listed in the likewise infamous “Wolfowitz Doctrine”1), and these are:



Cont....