In the hopeful summer of 1989, history itself laid in limbo. 

As the Soviet Union’s overexpansion placed yet another tombstone in Afghanistan’s ‘graveyard of empires,’ her occupied Eastern Bloc later sought arms against its Russian imperialist elders in ‘autumn of nations’ and Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika diminished the last flares of hope for the centennial Marxist-Leninist ideology his policy intended to reinvigorate, the international community, for decades at apocalyptic odds, stood on the cusp of reinvention. 

Accompanying the regime divide was a metaphorical and physical line which divided a slumbering totalitarian East from the alleged bastion of freedom across the Atlantic. The Berlin Wall, or “Iron Curtain,” was by 1990, on the cusp of collapse. Once it did, men and women of the free world welcomed — with half-vacuous, McCarthyist pride — the weathered nations that rejected outright idealist ideologies and maimed nation and man in equal measure. And the counterrevolutionaries, breaking from the scourge, scurried to the deceptive, yet warm teat of ‘capital-C’ capitalism and its scaffolding: democracy.

Like academics so often do, naive and reclused in cloisters of their own invention, they scrambled to either justify or dismiss the events unfolding at warp speed. One man who shares with me a first name and undergraduate stomping grounds, opted for the former. Francis Fukuyama, scholar of international relations and neoconservative-turned-classical liberal, a Reaganist who later transcended to neoliberal icon status, believed the fallen curtain marked a literal finale in the course of history. 

That pesky yet symbolic wall, to Fukuyama, signified an end not limited to Communism’s reign across Eurasia. In nationalist hotspots like Chile and Cuba, agents of the Global South aided by USSR ministries loyal to a Stalinist strand implicated the capitalist ‘world-system’........

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