Just over a decade ago, following the almost total collapse of communism, it seemed to many observers to be the dawn of a new age, an age in which Western ideas of freedom, democracy, individual rights, and capitalism finally would come to dominate, spreading their beneficent effects to the many blighted parts of the globe that had previously rejected them in the name of Marxism, or traditional values, or anti-Westernism, or some other self-defeating ideal. “The End of History” had arrived. Peace and prosperity were about to reign worldwide.

How quickly have things turned. There has since been a bewildering array of nationalist, ethnic, religious, and political conflict, of genocide and other unthinkable atrocities, of economic crises that have threatened global financial stability, of terrorism and war, all at levels exceeding what occurred during the hottest moments of the half-century-long Cold War. New global fault lines, previously sublimated beneath the overarching confrontation between communist systems and the West, have emerged and deepened, between rich and poor countries, between North and South or East and West, between Islamic and non-Islamic countries, between liberal and non-liberal societies, between mercantilist (state-run) capitalism and free trade capitalism, between dominance by global corporations and the preservation of local autonomy, between US military, economic, political, and cultural influence and the rest of the world, at once bitterly resistant while guiltily complicit. For all but the most sanguine observers, the triumphalist confidence of the 1990s has dissolved.