The End of the End of History? Grand Strategy with Emma Sky

October 19, 2022·58 min·4 clips

Emma Sky argues 9/11 itself didn't end the liberal world order — America's response did.

The episode opens at Yale's World Fellows 20-year reunion, which brought together roughly 170 alumni from every continent. Emma Sky reflects on the emotional power of the gathering, particularly the moment when empty chairs were placed for three fellows who are prisoners of conscience: Alexei Navalny, Hakan Altinay, and Felix from Nicaragua. The reunion, she says, demonstrated that shared experience can build genuine global solidarity that transcends identity and nationality. Host Belabes Benkreder then pivots to the episode's central intellectual theme: Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' thesis, which held that liberal democracy and capitalism had definitively won the competition of political systems after the Cold War. Sky traces the optimism of the 1990s — the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mandela's release, the Oslo Accords, NATO expansion, the Good Friday Agreement, and the creation of the International Criminal Court — as a period when the trajectory genuinely seemed positive. She identifies the first Gulf War and George H.W. Bush's 'new world order' rhetoric as the high-water mark of that vision. Sky then argues that 9/11 was not itself the turning point, but that America's response — particularly the Iraq War — was. She details how the invasion lacked UN legitimacy, how the dissolution of Iraq's security forces collapsed the state, and how the country descended into civil war, drawing in international jihadis. She describes the neoconservative belief that America should be 'the armed wing of Amnesty International,' spreading democracy by force, and notes Tony Blair's Chicago speech as a parallel European articulation of humanitarian interventionism. Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, and civilian casualties are identified as moments when America violated the very values it claimed to champion. Sky then turns to the 2008 financial crisis as a second blow to the Washington Consensus, eroding faith in liberal economic models. She describes the Arab Spring of 2011 as a moment of renewed hope, before detailing how the Libya intervention — pushed by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power over Obama's reluctance — quickly expanded from civilian protection to regime change, ending in Gaddafi's brutal murder and state collapse. She argues this intervention poisoned the well for any UN resolution on Syria, allowing Assad to continue killing with impunity. Putin's brokering of the chemical weapons deal in Syria is presented as his geopolitical comeback, followed almost immediately by the annexation of Crimea. Sky describes Putin's worldview as one in which Western democracy promotion is a cover for regime destabilization, and argues he deliberately engineered a refugee crisis from Syria to fuel anti-immigration sentiment and far-right parties in Europe, contributing to Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. On Russia's broader impact, Sky and Benkreder note that Russia — with a pre-war economy the size of Spain — achieved outsized disruption by exploiting pre-existing Western contradictions rather than creating them, using the metaphor of an arsonist versus a firefighter. The conversation then turns to China, with both speakers questioning whether a G2 world is emerging. Sky argues China lacks the universalizing ideology that defined US-Soviet competition, making it more insidious but less galvanizing as a rival. She expresses concern about Xi Jinping's third term, the crackdown on tech innovators, and the demographic time bomb created by the one-child policy. Benkreder introduces the concept of an 'authoritarianism dividend' — the economic prosperity that justified authoritarian rule in China — and argues it is now eroding as growth stalls and a real estate crisis deepens. Sky closes by observing that the entire post-WWII international order is an analog operating system ill-suited to transnational challenges like pandemics and climate change, and asks how humanity will build a new one.

As heard by us

A sober foreign-policy conversation that turns hindsight into a case for agency.

This conversation treats foreign policy as a lived argument, beginning with the World Fellows reunion and then following Emma Sky through the 1990s and the post-9/11 years, when Western confidence hardened into intervention, overreach, and moral strain.

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You want a serious foreign-policy conversation that actually builds toward something.

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