Ali Omar Forozish
When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history” in 1989, he did so with the conviction that liberal democracy had triumphed as the ultimate form of governance. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the seemingly unstoppable march of globalization painted a picture of a world where ideological struggles were over. However, history did not end—it simply took a different turn. Instead of a universal order dominated by liberal democracy, we have entered an era that Samuel Huntington foresaw in his seminal work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
The current global conflicts, from Ukraine to Gaza, from the South China Sea to tensions in the Mediterranean, are not merely geopolitical disputes. They are manifestations of deeper civilizational fault lines. The West’s long-standing dominance is being challenged, not just by rival states but by alternative worldviews, historical grievances, and divergent cultural identities. The so-called “Second Cold War” framework oversimplifies these tensions as merely a revival of U.S.-Soviet-style rivalry. In reality, what we are witnessing is not Cold War 2.0 but a multipolar clash of civilizations, in which Western Judeo-Christian civilization, Chinese Confucianism, Islamic resurgence, and Russian Eurasianism are competing to shape the future.
To frame the present era as a Second Cold War is to impose a misleading historical analogy on a world that has fundamentally changed. The original Cold War was defined by a clear ideological divide between two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. The current global order is far more fragmented. While the U.S. and its allies remain dominant in many respects, they are not facing a singular ideological rival but rather a constellation of competing powers. Russia is not the Soviet Union, nor is China a communist revolutionary state seeking to spread an alternative economic model globally.
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