It was abject Russian weakness, and the fact that China’s great navy would not really emerge for another decade, that allowed Western journalists and intellectuals in the last decade of the 20th century to believe that liberal democracy was in the process of taking over the world, shepherded by an America unchallenged by any real competitor. Military power thus became subsumed by humanitarian concerns, as the moral compromises necessitated by great-power politics had vanished with the end of the Cold War, or so it seemed. Thus, the 1990s were a break from rather than the end of history, so to
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