Source: Foreign Policy
by Stephen M Walt
“Scholars, pundits, and politicians make bad predictions all the time, and some of the mistakes are real doozies. For what it’s worth, my nominee for the worst geopolitical forecast of the past 50 years was the post-Cold War belief that the world was being inexorably swept toward a peaceful and increasingly prosperous liberal future. … If one looks back at the past quarter century, it’s clear that these optimistic forecasts were almost entirely wrong. China became more authoritarian, and Russia reverted to autocracy after a brief experiment with genuine electoral democracy. Indeed, democracy has been in steady decline around the world for nearly two decades, including in the United States itself. China, Russia, and the United States are converging, but it is the United States that is becoming more like these corrupt autocracies rather than the reverse.” (09/02/25)