The United States and its western allies may have won the cold war but they lost the peace. Western leaders promised a world of peace, democracy and individual rights. Instead, the world is rife with war, authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
As tempting as it may be to blame this all on Donald Trump and his ilk, the failures of an earlier generation of leaders laid the groundwork. In After the Fall, Ian Shapiro offers an autopsy of the missteps and missed opportunities that led us to where we are today.
The distinguished Yale University political scientist has written a book that is accessible, erudite and thought-provoking even though its laser focus on the poor choices of political leaders eschews necessary structural explanations.
Shapiro believes the US got off to a good start in 1990 with George HW Bush’s war on Iraq to reverse its occupation of Kuwait. To Shapiro, Bush upheld a rules-based international order by doing the things his son notably failed to do during his later war on Iraq: assembling a broad coalition, working through the United Nations and exercising restraint in not extending the war to Baghdad.
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Shapiro’s account of the second Bush’s catastrophic “war on terror” does more than just rehearse the destructive effects of the second US war on Iraq. Shapiro focuses instead on the comparatively overlooked disaster of the US war on Afghanistan, which, he points out, was “the longest and most expensive war in American history” (with a price tag of more than $2 trillion).
Instead of a targeted operation to attack the bases of al-Qaeda, the group solely responsible for the 9/11 attacks, the US waged war against the Taliban. Its effort to build one of the world’s poorest nations into a modern democracy was doomed to failure. Moreover, as Shapiro caustically remarks, “the scale of their ambition was matched only by the extent to which they under-resourced it”.
Despite its massive price tag, American policymakers attempted nation-building on the cheap. When US forces finally withdrew from Afghanistan — 20 years after they had entered — the Taliban quickly swept back into power.
The war on terror was a colossal own goal, but the second Bush wasn’t the only leader to make fateful errors. Several successive American presidents failed to head off the danger that Russia would become the militarist, authoritarian state that it is today. The first Bush failed to recognise the importance of ensuring that a stable, democratic Russia emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union. He refused to forgive Soviet-era debt or to invest significant resources in rebuilding the Russian economy as it transitioned away from socialism.
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One wonders what might have happened had the US invested more than the 0.15 per cent (according to Shapiro’s calculations) of what it would later spend on the global war on terror. Bush also began the expansion of Nato into eastern Europe that was continued by his successors despite distinguished American diplomat George Kennan’s prescient warning that it would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era”.
Comparing the US approach to Russia unfavourably with the post-second World War Marshall Plan to rebuild western Europe, Shapiro quips: “It was as if Marshall had proposed eking out financial assistance to Germany in dribs and drabs after 1945 while hemming it in with a powerful military alliance.”
Given the costs of this mistake — in purely financial term the US has spent more than $100 billion in defending Ukraine alone — this was the geopolitical equivalent of governments failing to invest in child welfare and in the long-term paying multiple times over to combat the resultant social ills such as increased crime.
Shapiro believes that western leaders similarly missed an opportunity to establish the legal basis for humanitarian interventionism to prevent gross human rights abuses. He sees Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia to protect the gross mistreatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as offering a promising precedent. The Responsibility to Protect framework — unanimously adopted by the UN in 2005 — provided a basis in international law for future interventions.
But Shapiro believes humanitarian interventionism was undermined by Nato’s intervention in Libya in 2011. Western leaders accepted without scrutiny the exaggerated claims of rebel leaders that civilians were being killed in large numbers by the Libyan government. They also exceeded the authority given to them by the UN by going beyond civilian protection to seek regime change.
In the second half of After the Fall, Shapiro turns from foreign policy to economics. Here his analysis is more predictable but no less convincing. Since the 1990s centre-left parties in the US and Europe pursued a “triangulation” strategy of moving rightward to counter the threat of conservative parties. In the long term this meant the whole political spectrum shifted rightward. Pursuing market-driven policies instead of egalitarian ones, they alienated their working-class base. When Barack Obama took office during the economic crisis of 2008, he could have broken with this “neoliberal orthodoxy” and yet chose not to. He bailed out the banks but not ordinary Americans who lost their homes.
There is little doubt that decades of neoliberal policies exacerbated inequalities and provided the basis on which a right-wing politics of resentment could fester. Nevertheless, Shapiro misses the extent to which right-wing populism is driven by shoring up racial and gender hierarchies. He also omits that the class base for right-wing populism, at least in the US, is less working class than petty bourgeois.
Shapiro’s account of how right-wing populist parties have grown throughout the western world also ignores Ireland, which bucked the anti-establishment trend of 2024 by keeping its main government parties in power. Still, even if right-wing populism lacks the same institutional political presence here that it has elsewhere, there are signs that we might be catching up on the rest of the West.
It is chilling when reading Shapiro to realise that if right-wing populism does gain a greater foothold here, it will be due to our leaders making some of the same mistakes right now, such as their failure to adequately address the housing crisis.
After The Fall is a story of paths not taken. Shapiro rightly highlights these missed opportunities. Things didn’t need to turn out as badly as they did but for the “disastrous choices made by multiple leaders”. And yet Shapiro’s analysis overdoes contingency.
For surely if leaders make the same mistakes over and over again, there is more at work than just individuals making poor choices. The betrayal of humanitarian interventionism in Libya could be seen not as a singular instance where things went wrong but as just one in a very long string of hypocritical violations of international law by western governments.
Even the decision that Shapiro highlights as wise — the first Bush’s war on Iraq, which he sees as an effort “to stop the bully without becoming one” — actually fits a larger pattern of the US employing military intervention to protect its own geopolitical interests. As Bush officials at times frankly admitted, the war was really about oil, not about enforcing some rules-based international order.
Politicians, moreover, operate within constraints. They need to win votes to stay in power so it is appropriate that citizens share some of the blame for their leaders’ bad decisions. Yet political power is hardly distributed equally in western societies. Politicians need to keep economic elites happy to stay in power — especially in the US case, as the influence of big money in politics grew exponentially during the time period Shapiro covers.
Business elites have little interest in international peace or domestic social spending. That is true even with policies that would be in the long-term interests of capitalism. The “shareholder revolution” of the 1970s and 1980s led companies to seek short-term profits above all else. And the lack of a powerful trade union movement means there is no powerful counter-weight to check business power.
The one structural feature Shapiro does consider is the low birth rates in advanced nations. Accordingly, nations are reliant on a shrinking base of taxpayers to support an expanding elderly population in need of government services. As Shapiro points out, the only real solution to this problem is immigration. As such, populist right-wing policies will only make things worse.
And yet Shapiro’s focus on this demographic challenge in his final chapter reveals a glaring absence in his analysis: the climate emergency. Surely in the long run the most consequential failure of world leaders since the cold war has been their inaction on global warming. By not acting when they could have, they created a far bigger problem for this and future generations.
Shapiro seems to have a naive hope that politicians would choose more wisely if only they were better informed. To be sure, one might wish that books such as After the Fall were required reading for world leaders. But if our leaders keep failing us so badly, then what we really need is a whole new class of leaders altogether.
Further reading
Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein’s A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism complicates the simple narrative of Democrats adopting neoliberal policies. In its early years the Clinton administration experimented with industrial policy and healthcare expansion. Only when these failed did it triangulate to the right.
Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism traces some of the developments Shapiro examines back to the late cold war years. The rise of neoliberalism responded to the economic crisis of the 1970s. Eastern European governments were left indebted to western bankers in ways that hampered their transitions from communism.
Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life examines the wide-ranging and catastrophic effects of George W. Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks. It traces the rise of Trump back to the consequences of the war on terror.
