After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, some defense analysts and international relations scholars believed that a new, peaceful era would emerge. One scholar, Francis Fukuyama, built his career on this idealistic hypothesis (which he now backed away from). He wrote a an article in 1989 entitled “The End of History?” which concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed over authoritarian forms of government. In an article yesterday, Robert Kagan examined the growing power of the authoritarian regimes of Moscow and Beijing and the “return of history”:

One wonders whether Russia’s invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world’s democracies after the close of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet…