After the Fall: Reckoning with the End of History | Ian Shapiro

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Ian Shapiro, Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University, whose new book, After the Fall, explores how and why the widespread optimism of the post-Cold War era gave way so quickly to the fractured and combative politics of today.
We begin the first hour of this conversation exploring how the United States, throughout key moments in the 1990s and early 2000s, chose to act alone, repeatedly, and in defiance of the very international institutions that it claimed to support, while simultaneously expanding the scope of its military alliances and operations in the face of a collapsing post-Soviet empire. We focus in particular on the decision to enlarge NATO eastward, the failure to invest in Russia's transition, the decision that helped give rise to gangster capitalism and the oligarchs, and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the first major unilateral military action taken without Security Council authorization. We then turn to the 9-11 attacks and the unilateral invasion of Iraq as the seminal moment in which the consensus supporting the international rules-based order was shattered, followed by the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which are the same for the legitimacy of the elite consensus that had governed countries throughout the Western world since the onset of the Cold War.
The second hour begins with the 2011 intervention in Libya and the doctrine known as the responsibility to protect, which Ian argues was cynically invoked to topple Gaddafi and the West's own economic interests, leaving behind a failed state and further discrediting the very international norms and institutions it was meant to advance. From there, we trace the fallout across the Middle East and Europe, including in Syria and Ukraine, that has led us to the present moment. We spend the balance of that hour laying out the nature of the world that we now inhabit and why Ian believes that the most consequential choices facing the democratic world and the global economy lie in whether mainstream parties can deliver an industrial policy and a model of inclusive growth capable of addressing the grievances and economic insecurities of the populist era. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation, become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our Demit Dinners and Weekend Retreats. You can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this historical retrospective about one of the most consequential periods in global history. What we learn from the failures of its leaders to seize the moment, and where we go from here with my guest, Ian Shapiro.
Ian Shapiro, welcome to Hidden Forces.

**Ian Shapiro** (3:36)
Thanks for having me.

**Demetri Kofinas** (3:38)
It's awesome having you on the show. I don't remember how I came across your book. It was sent to me either by your publisher or by someone who read it.
And once I started reading through maybe probably just the very beginning of it, I knew it was a book I wanted to review and to have you on the podcast because the book is largely a historical treatise on what went wrong. Well what happened, and then there's a subjective interpretation that what happened didn't need to happen. And I think that's also an important observation of the book with respect to the end of the Cold War, the 1990s and the early 2000s, a subject that we have explored on this podcast on many episodes and I've talked about it many times. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Before we get into that conversation, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. I know you were born in Johannesburg, South Africa.
You studied in London and in the United States. So tell me a little bit about you. And what your background is and what you teach at Yale.

**Ian Shapiro** (4:41)
Sure. I was born in South Africa, as you said. I left South Africa in 1972 and went to the UK, where I lived for most of the 70s at the run up to the Thatcher era. And then I left the UK in 78 and came to the US. Did a PhD and a JD at Yale, PhD in political science.