At history’s edge

SOME time ago, it was quite a bit of fun to trash Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama, we all know, had declared the end of history: the Berlin Wall had fallen, Germany’s once-genocidal halves had united, and the West had grown dizzy with success. Perhaps, he wrote, “centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again”.

At least he didn’t have to wait centuries, this writer said in 2016: “Donald Trump has been elected president. And history’s returned as nightmare.” Reading those words now, they seem misplaced: both too late and too early. Too late because history never left the scene: when Fukuyama was checking its pulse in 1989, Afghanistan’s mujahideen were about to turn their guns on themselves (courtesy Gen Aslam Beg); Iran’s young theocracy had spat on the West by calling for Salman Rushdie’s head, and then elevated a weeping Ali Khamenei to the top job; and defence secretary Dick Cheney was about to quote Isaiah while sending his first crusaders to attack the Middle East.

But those words were also too early, because of all that was yet to happen after 2016: Kabul would fall again. Pakistan’s Supreme Court, the one that had held Gen Beg responsible for rigging elections to return Nawaz Sharif’s party to power, would be made constitutionally redundant. And the West’s crusaders would re-attack the Middle East, this time with Khamenei in their sights.

What, then, has changed?

Perhaps, the nature of history itself has changed.

The nature of history itself, perhaps. The Cold War at least had the decency of symmetry; its terrors balanced by fear.

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