If a new global order is forged from the ruins of a future war, it will resemble nothing we know today. It will be neither democracy nor classical dictatorship.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama mistakenly declared that history had ended and that liberal democracy had triumphed—not just as a political system, but as the final ideological form of human governance. The grand narratives had supposedly reached their conclusion, leaving only the fine-tuning of institutions. But history had other plans.
Today, as we witness the accelerating disintegration of the liberal international order, it is worth revisiting Fukuyama—not to mock, but to consider a darker possibility. What if history truly is nearing its end—not through the victory of ideology, but through the obliteration of all ideologies and values? Not in freedom, but in total control? Not with universal consensus, but with a single global monopoly of power, sustained by technologies we are only beginning to understand?
The tectonic plates of world order are shifting. The West's institutional self-confidence has shattered: intellectual and institutional fatigue, economic dependency, cultural polarization, and technological vulnerability dominate the global atmosphere. Wars once considered distant—over Taiwan, in Eastern Europe, or in cyberspace—no longer seem far-fetched. The chaos we see is not mere disorder—it is the moment before an explosion.
The myth of post-Cold War liberal peace—globalization, democracy, open societies—has collapsed, and that may not be a bad thing. "The center cannot hold," Yeats wrote in another age, but his words resonate darkly today. No ideology, no structure, no shared narrative binds humanity—or even the West. Only drift, distrust, rearmament, and rising digital walls. The conservative, sovereigntist revolt and the restoration of Western values has begun, but nothing guarantees the success of this experiment.
It is not hard to imagine that this spiral does not end in reform, but in catastrophe. A third world war, not sparked by ideology, but by a chain reaction of looming challenges: the militarization of new technologies, resource competition, automated escalation, and failed deterrence. This war would not be a clash of empires, but a collision of total systems. And what might follow would not be a post-war consensus, but a singularity of power.
This time, the victor would not merely rewrite history—they would end it.
We already see the outline of the arsenal: general artificial intelligence, real-time surveillance with behavioral prediction, quantum-secure communication, autonomous weapons, gene-editing programs, and comprehensive profiling—human existence converted into algorithm. The victor of such a war would not just possess these tools—they would embed them into governance. They would build a world not just of obedience, but of pre-emption, of anticipating and managing thoughts and behaviors.
In this vision of the future, ideology becomes obsolete. There is no need to persuade if narratives and thoughts can be pre-formed. No need to legislate if action can be pre-empted. The dream of liberal pluralism does not die by censorship—but by irrelevance. As Aldous Huxley warned: “The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy. A prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escape.”
This is not Orwell’s muddy boot on our faces—but something subtler, colder, more efficient. Control by code. History does not end here in tyranny, but in frictionless operation.
Such a world may represent the true endpoint of human political development—not because we reached agreement, but because we eliminated the possibility of disagreement. Fukuyama’s tragedy was not his premature timing, but that he imagined history’s end as a plateau of freedom. He failed to see that the true end might stem not from liberalism, but from unlimited power.
And it’s not hard to see how we got here. The West mistook comfort for permanence, replaced principle with position, outsourced production, and tried to export ideology.
If a new global order is forged from the ruins of a future war, it will resemble nothing we know today. It will be neither democracy nor classical dictatorship. It will be a post-political system: algorithmic and borderless. No need for walls—your phone is the wall. No need for oppression—your desires are already mapped. Freedom won’t be abolished—it will be redefined.
Perhaps we are already witnessing its emergence. The infrastructure of total control is not being built in secret bunkers—it lives in your pocket, in the cloud, in the consumer experience. It arrives wrapped in elegant interfaces and convenient predictions. It sells efficiency, not fear. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled,” wrote Baudelaire, “was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
So what remains for us? Perhaps only this: to recognize that history may indeed end—but not in the way idealists once hoped. The question is no longer whether democracy will survive the 21st century, but whether any meaningful ideological competition can. If power becomes unchallengeable—not with tanks, but with systems that shape life itself—then history will end not in victory, but in silence.
We don’t need to name the winner of a potential global conflict—whether China or the U.S. is more threatening in this context doesn’t yet matter. All major global poles are moving in a direction where an invisible dictatorship could easily emerge—not ideological, but technological, a matter of capability.
We’re not there yet, but we may be close. If we still have agency, it lies in refusing to accept this path as inevitable—in choosing friction over smoothness, contrast over consensus. That is why we must not let our roots and traditions be dissolved in the melting pot of globalism. It is now that values like family, community, nation, and faith gain new significance. These are the achievements that distinguish us not just from animals, but from machines.
If history must end—let it not end quietly. Let it not end in resignation, but in resistance. Though Interstellar dealt with another existential question, I still hear Michael Caine’s voice:
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."