Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’, which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century—the Evil Empire, Red China—had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.Surveying the Russian military rout of neighbouring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us. If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: the Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. This was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess. Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was the swagger of it. This was not about Georgia. This was existential payback.It turns out that if 1989 was an end—the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history—it was also a beginning. It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbours, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neo-conservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. Others argued that this was a crisis Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. And by last weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.The question now is how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies. This time it is not—or not yet—the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward its Eastern rivals. The Chinese are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, as it bleeds by serial economic crises.History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.
