I predict that like Afghanistan and Iraq, people will only understand and accept that they’ve been hornswoggled yet again with the passage of time. Three to five years from now, someone will write the definitive book or long form article on how the American empire threw Ukraine under the bus in the name of overextending and unbalancing Russia. Who will it be? I’m hoping, someone with enough of a mainstream reputation that it’s taken seriously.
The End of the End of History is a good summary of that era, and how “the left” moved towards identity issues, anti-consumerism and so forth. I enjoyed it a lot.
Vivek Chibber’s book The Class Matrix also discusses this and is on my reading list.
(both of these are on libgen)
Oh yes!
Actually, in my mind, I always call the 1990s/2000s/2010s the “End of History era” because it seems that nobody was thinking historically.
Like, compare it to the Cold War or the era between World War I and World War II (everyone knew damn well that they were living in a historical time-frame and that things were happening and changing).
Compare and contrast that with the era from the 1990s onward.