The collapse of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War in 1991 marked the zenith of American global dominance and gave rise to the belief that liberal capitalism and American-style democracy constituted the “end of history.” Emboldened by this perceived victory, the United States pursued a post–Cold War globalization strategy centered on exporting its values, political system, and market model. Yet over the following three decades, this strategy produced a series of profound miscalculations: rigid domestic institutions, ideological overreach abroad, and hegemonic self-confidence. Value and democracy promotion repeatedly failed—from the Middle East to the post–Arab Spring world—while economic globalization succeeded in ways Washington neither anticipated nor controlled. The result was a paradoxical outcome: the United States accumulated debt, financialized its economy, and deepened internal divisions, while countries like China leveraged global markets, capital flows, and technological diffusion to strengthen state capacity and accelerate development.
China emerged as the greatest beneficiary of these American missteps. Rather than challenging the international order militarily or ideologically, China integrated into it, exploiting the very liberal economic system the United States championed. Meanwhile, Washington’s tendency to moralize competition, misread structural realities, and substitute values rhetoric for governance capacity weakened its ability to adapt. As the United States now frames China as its primary strategic rival in an effort to arrest its own decline, the central contest is no longer about whose model is “right,” but about which society can reform itself more effectively. In this sense, China’s rise is inseparable from America’s post–Cold War errors—and the outcome of their competition will be decided less by external confrontation than by internal renewal.
The Post–Cold War Fallacy: America’s Misreading of Its Own Victory
In the aftermath of the Cold War, a simplified and ultimately misleading narrative took hold in the United States. The prevailing logic ran as follows: America won the Cold War because it embodied democracy and freedom; therefore, the global export of these values would reliably reproduce similar victories elsewhere. This reasoning, appealing in its moral clarity and political utility, became the foundation of post–Cold War American grand strategy. Yet it rested on a fundamental analytical error—confusing the outcome of the Cold War with its underlying causes.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was driven primarily by structural economic failure, systemic rigidity, and the self-defeating behavior of its ruling elite. Ideology played a role, but it was neither sufficient nor decisive in explaining the timing, form, or inevitability of the Soviet breakdown. The notion that the Cold War ended because Soviet societies experienced a sudden collective “awakening” to democratic ideals does not withstand serious scrutiny. Rather, the system imploded under the weight of its own internal contradictions, long before ideological persuasion could plausibly claim credit.
This misinterpretation constituted an original strategic sin of the post–Cold War era. A complex, material, and historically contingent explanation was abandoned in favor of a morally flattering and easily replicable story—one better suited to political mobilization and elite self-justification. From that point forward, American strategic thinking increasingly substituted value projection for structural analysis. The result was not merely overconfidence, but a gradual erosion of analytical rigor, as success was attributed to virtue rather than to a specific and unrepeatable convergence of historical conditions.
Accuracy Without Acceptability: Truths That Power Refuses to Hear
The Iraq War illustrates a recurring pattern in modern political discourse: arguments can be substantively correct yet rejected because they are politically unacceptable. The claim that the war stemmed from a genuine intelligence failure regarding weapons of mass destruction is unconvincing. Iraq was selected less for what it possessed than for what it symbolized—a prospective “model” state through which U.S. power and ideology could be projected in the Middle East. In that framework, the factual question of whether Iraq had WMDs was secondary. What mattered was the utility of the intervention, not its evidentiary basis.
This context explains the popularity of Francis Fukuyama in that period. Works such as The End of History and the Last Man offered an intellectual justification for liberal interventionism, implicitly validating the belief that Western political systems could be exported and would ultimately prevail. When postwar Iraq descended into chaos, the dominant narrative avoided systemic self-critique. Responsibility was displaced onto internal Iraqi divisions, religious extremism, or external interference—anything but the original decision to invade. If outcomes contradicted theory, the solution was not to reassess the theory, but to minimize or ignore the contradiction. What went insufficiently reported was treated as though it did not meaningfully exist.
By contrast, John Mearsheimer’s realism was widely labeled objectionable not because it lacked analytical rigor, but because it directly challenged entrenched interests. His arguments against NATO’s eastward expansion and U.S. pursuit of global hegemony threatened the ideological and material foundations of political and military elites, including the military-industrial complex. Such positions, while coherent and empirically grounded, were politically inconvenient. This is why Mearsheimer could be correct yet unpopular: when truth collides with power, it is not accuracy that determines acceptance, but political comfort.
When Values Replaced Strategy: The Post–Cold War Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy
In the aftermath of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy took a decisive—and ultimately flawed—turn. The first wrong step was the elevation of “values” from one consideration among many into a universal strategic tool. During the 1990s, the assumption took hold that moral alignment could substitute for hard strategic analysis, and that shared values were not merely desirable but sufficient to guide long-term policy choices.
As a result, the core logic of decision-making shifted. Policymakers increasingly stopped asking concrete, structural questions—who controls the means of violence, whether fiscal systems are sustainable, or whether social and political institutions are resilient. Instead, the central question became whether an actor was perceived to be “on the right side.” Moral labeling replaced empirical assessment, flattening complex realities into binary judgments of legitimacy.
This shift had several direct consequences. First, it lowered the strategic threshold for action. Value judgments are easier to make than realistic assessments: they demand less institutional expertise, less time, and far less accountability when outcomes fail. Second, it led to an extreme simplification of policy tools. Sanctions, public alignment, information warfare, and democratic rhetoric came to be treated as universal remedies, applied with little regard for context or long-term effects.
Most damagingly, this approach fostered a systemic neglect of governance capacity. The ability to evaluate whether a state can function sustainably—maintain order, manage resources, and adapt socially—atrophied. Over time, U.S. policy became more adept at identifying who resembled itself in values, and less capable of judging whether a political system could endure. The consequence was not merely tactical miscalculation, but a structural weakening of strategic judgment itself.
The Middle East as a Strategic Stress Test: When Values Collided with Reality
The second major error in post–Cold War U.S. strategy emerged when the Middle East became a testing ground for value-driven intervention. Unlike abstract debates, this region provided repeated, real-world trials—and each time, reality negated the underlying assumptions. These failures were not accidents or isolated misjudgments; they represented a systematic breakdown of strategic logic rooted in the belief that political values could substitute for institutional capacity.
In Iraq, the assumption that elections would naturally produce stability proved deeply flawed. Instead of consolidating authority, the rapid introduction of electoral politics coincided with the collapse of centralized control over violence. Sectarian conflict was not only unleashed but politically legitimized, while the cost of maintaining national governance soared beyond sustainable limits. The procedural achievement of voting masked the erosion of the state’s basic coercive and administrative functions.
Afghanistan revealed a different but equally instructive failure. The state constructed there lacked fiscal independence and genuine social integration, remaining almost entirely dependent on external military and financial support. Without a self-sustaining revenue base or embedded legitimacy, the political structure collapsed with remarkable speed once foreign troops withdrew. What appeared stable under constant external pressure was, in fact, structurally hollow.
Libya completed the pattern. The removal of authoritarian rule was treated as a sufficient condition for social and political reconstruction. In practice, the state was dismantled before any durable order was established, leaving fragmented authority and persistent violence. Across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, governance capacity on the ground was consistently underestimated or ignored.
The core problem was never whether democracy itself is desirable. It was the mistaken belief that political procedures constitute political capability—that form could replace function. This miscalculation carried global consequences. The prolonged strategic distraction and resource drain of Middle Eastern failures bought China critical time to consolidate its economic growth, institutional strength, and geopolitical position. In this sense, the “value disaster” of the Middle East was not only a regional failure, but a decisive moment in the shifting balance of global power.
Two Sequential Strategic Errors in U.S. Judgments of China
For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States operated under a linear assumption about China’s development: that integration into the global market would inevitably produce political liberalization and eventual convergence with the Western political order. This belief rested on a chain of causality—marketization leading to a middle class, the middle class leading to liberal values, and liberal values leading to political assimilation. What this view failed to recognize was that state power can coexist with, and even direct, a market economy; that globalization can be selectively internalized; and that technology, capital, and industrial participation are not inherently liberalizing forces. The result was not political convergence, but China’s rise as the single largest technological and economic beneficiary of the liberal international system without becoming its ideological adherent.
When this expectation of “peaceful evolution” did not materialize, U.S. strategy pivoted sharply to a second misjudgment: reframing China as a functional equivalent of the Soviet Union. In this narrative, China was no longer a system expected to evolve, but an authoritarian ideological challenger that had to be contained. This analogy, however, was structurally flawed. The Soviet Union existed largely outside the Western-led economic system, separated into an opposing geopolitical and economic bloc. China, by contrast, emerged as a competitor from within the same globalized system, deeply embedded in international trade, finance, technology, and supply chains.
By applying Cold War instruments—ideological confrontation, technological blockades, and containment strategies—designed for a bifurcated world, the United States attempted to manage a fundamentally different kind of rival. The difficulty was not merely tactical but structural: tools built for separation were ill-suited to a reality of deep interdependence. Together, these two consecutive misjudgments—first overestimating inevitable political convergence, then mischaracterizing systemic competition—have shaped a strategic dilemma that continues to complicate U.S.–China relations today.
Choosing the Convenient Over the Necessary: A Strategic Miscalculation
The central challenge facing the United States is not a lack of awareness about what determines long-term national competitiveness, but a persistent tendency to avoid those determinants. The true drivers of strategic outcomes are well known: aging infrastructure, the hollowing out of manufacturing, the erosion of engineering and execution capacity, deepening social division, rising governance friction, and mounting debt and fiscal imbalance. These problems are structural in nature. They are difficult to solve, slow to show results, and extraordinarily costly in political terms. Precisely for these reasons, they demand sustained focus and disciplined reform.
Instead, political energy is increasingly directed toward tasks that are easier, faster, and more compatible with short electoral cycles. Labeling adversaries, imposing sanctions, forming alliances, and waging narrative or propaganda battles offer low barriers to entry and the appearance of decisive action. These measures can be executed quickly, generate immediate feedback, and lend themselves to moral framing. Yet they do little to address the underlying domestic weaknesses that ultimately shape national power. In effect, tactical convenience is being mistaken for strategic necessity.
The consequence of this substitution is a growing imbalance between rhetoric and governance. By prioritizing actions that are politically expedient over reforms that are genuinely required, the United States risks allowing internal decay to continue unchecked while projecting confidence abroad. At the strategic level, this creates the image of a nation that relies on moral narratives to obscure unresolved governance failures. Over time, such an approach undermines credibility, resilience, and competitiveness, leaving the most important work perpetually deferred in favor of what is merely easy.
How U.S. Strategy Has Indirectly Enabled China’s Rise
It is often said that the United States “benefits” China—not through deliberate assistance, but through the unintended consequences of its own grand strategy. This claim rests on a realist interpretation of international politics: that great-power competition is unavoidable, and that U.S. policy over the past three decades has repeatedly strengthened China’s strategic position by misallocating attention, resources, and credibility. In this view, America’s actions have created favorable spillover effects for China, even while Washington has sought to limit Beijing’s power.
At the structural level, China’s rise is unlikely to be peaceful. As its economy expands, China will inevitably translate economic strength into military capability and seek regional hegemony in Asia, much as the United States once did in the Western Hemisphere. The United States, in turn, is structurally compelled to resist this outcome by forming balancing coalitions with China’s neighbors. This security dilemma makes sustained rivalry—and potentially war—highly probable. The problem, critics argue, is not that this competition exists, but that U.S. strategy has made it harder to manage and easier for China to exploit.
Strategically, the United States could have pursued a different set of priorities to constrain China more effectively. These might have included limiting NATO expansion to avoid antagonizing Russia, integrating Russia more deeply into the U.S.-led economic order, and preventing a durable China–Russia alignment. A restrained foreign policy—eschewing large-scale wars after 9/11, minimizing ideological interventionism, and relying on limited, covert actions—could have preserved U.S. power and focus. At the same time, cultivating an image as a non-expansionist and pragmatic power might have sustained pro-American, liberal-leaning discourse within China itself.
Instead, U.S. policy largely moved in the opposite direction. NATO expansion, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and overt ideological engagement in places such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and parts of the Global South reinforced Chinese nationalism and discredited pro-American voices within China. These actions also alienated Russia and many nonaligned states, pushing them to view China as a useful counterweight to U.S. dominance. The result has been a more polarized international system in which China faces less isolation than it otherwise might have.
Ironically, liberal globalization—one of America’s signature projects—accelerated China’s economic rise while eroding U.S. credibility. The gap between liberal rhetoric and interventionist practice weakened faith in the U.S.-led order, encouraging many countries to seek a “second power” to balance American influence. In this sense, U.S. overreliance on liberal ideology did not constrain China; it empowered it. What emerges is a historical irony: liberalism, as practiced by the United States, became one of China’s greatest strategic assets, helping to legitimize its rise and expand its global appeal at America’s expense.
Summary & Implications
The core strategic error of the United States after the Cold War was not a lack of toughness toward China, but a misreading of its own victory—treating it as the inevitable triumph of values rather than a contingent outcome requiring continued institutional discipline and practical governance. Moral narratives displaced sober analysis, and external confrontation became a substitute for internal reform. China’s rise, in turn, was not the result of “defeating” the United States, but of patiently accumulating capacity while the United States repeatedly applied the wrong tools, fought on ill-chosen battlefields, and misjudged political and economic realities.