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Posted: Mar 02, 2022 12:01 AM

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After the end of the Cold War, foreign policy experts across the spectrum assured us that things had changed. Wars of pure border conquest were over. Wars over oil would soon be a thing of the past. Instead, the increasingly intertwined world would move toward peace. Thomas Friedman suggested in his massive 1999 bestseller “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” that no two countries with McDonald’s would go to war with each other; Francis Fukuyama stated in “The End of History and the Last Man” that we had reached the “end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.“The West set about proving these dubious theses by embracing what could be termed an ostrich foreign policy: a willingness to place security considerations last, and to pursue utopian goals with alacrity. Germany spent decades making itself more dependent on Russian natural gas and oil in order to pursue the dream of green energy, meanwhile slashing its defense budget as a percentage of GDP. France acted similarly. So did the United Kingdom.The West banked instead on more economic interdependence via the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, more diplomacy at Davos and the United …

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