Holiday From History · Part One · The Myth of Order · Chapter 1
“Behind this was moral vanity. Elites believed history bent inevitably toward peace. Anyone warning otherwise was mocked as paranoid or warmongering. Vigilance was treated as a vice. In Jewish terms, tikkun olam — repairing the world — was pursued without shmirah, without guardianship.”
Uri Zehavi’s new book continues. It’s not the end of history. In fact, the story of Western blindness is only just beginning…- Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)
About the book. On October 7, 2023, Israel paid the bill for thirty years of Western complacency in a single morning. Holiday From History is the forensic account: how the post-Cold War West convinced itself history had ended, why the warnings did not break the spell, and what the collapse now reveals about the institutions meant to defend free nations.
Read the serial from the start: Holiday From History on Guerre & Shalom
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About the author. Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute and publisher of Israel Brief. He is the author of Rooted Truth, serialised here on Guerre & Shalom, Rooted in Judea, and Letters Across the Table.
Chapter 1: Fukuyama’s Folly
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire cracked, and the West told itself a story. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Communism was finished. Peace was at hand.
Francis Fukuyama gave the mood its slogan: “the end of history.”1 He meant the end of mankind’s great ideological struggles. Liberal democracy and free markets had won. Everyone else, sooner or later, would converge. There might be quarrels, but no more civilizational clashes.
Elites embraced this as gospel. The Cold War was over, therefore war itself was over. They acted as if the hard work of defense, vigilance, and memory could be abandoned. It was a seductive delusion. I have read enough history to know what comes next when a comfortable class declares the game won. History had not ended. It had only paused, waiting for the West to look away.
Fukuyama’s thesis, first an essay in 1989 and then a 1992 book, argued that liberal democracy was the final stage of political development. Future wars, he suggested, would be peripheral, manageable. That claim leapt from seminar rooms to statecraft. In the 1990s, “End of History” became shorthand for the new normal. Leaders cashed in a “peace dividend.” Defense budgets shrank.
The cuts were real. Germany went from 2.6 percent of GDP on defense in 1990 to about 1.2 percent a decade later. Canada slid to barely 1 percent. Britain slashed its army by a quarter and retired ships early. A reunified Germany cut its forces from roughly 600,000 to under 350,000. The United States joined in. Active-duty troops fell by a third, from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. Army divisions dropped from 18 to 10. Spending sank to 3 percent of GDP by 2000. Republicans and Democrats alike called this responsibility. In truth, it was a holiday.
The spirit went beyond budgets. Globalization was hailed as the new security architecture. Pundits mocked old geopolitics and cheered a “flat world” where markets trumped armies. NATO expanded, the EU deepened, and Russia was labeled a “strategic partner.” China entered the global trade system. Davos panels and State Department briefings sounded the same: history’s conflicts were over, institutions and commerce had secured peace. Even pop culture joined in with the “Golden Arches Theory” — no two countries with McDonald’s would fight each other.
Reality disagreed. In 1994 Rwanda’s genocide killed 800,000 in three months. Across the same decade, jihadist networks bombed American targets at home and abroad — and each outrage was treated as an aberration. Policymakers still insisted the default setting was peace.
Into this atmosphere walked a heretic. If Fukuyama’s “End of History” was gospel, he argued the opposite. History was gathering. His name was Samuel P. Huntington.
