Fukuyama, Huntingdon, Friedman

We are only a decade in to the twenty-first century, and anyone who hopes to analyze long-term geopolitical trends for America and its place in the world must begin by conceding that change is happening fast. Large scale ideological shifts that began taking place at the end of the twentieth century -- most particularly the end of the Cold War, that tense and heavily-armed standoff between rival ideologies which concluded not with a bang but a whimper as Gorbachev's Soviet Union devolved into Yeltsin's and then Putin's Russia -- have been occurring for long enough now that Francis Fukuyama's prematurely triumphalist announcement of "the end of history" seems closer to the end of twentieth century history, the end of an era. But the dawn of a new era is tempting for prognosticators, and I would like to address the varying overviews that three of the most influential...
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