At the end of the 20th century, most commentators foresaw peace and prosperity in the first quarter of the 21st.
Expecting peace was a projection of the recent past into the immediate future. America had won the Cold War, was confident of its dominant place in the world and of the solidity of its political liberalism and open markets capitalism, and the world was receptive to America’s expanding presence and messages.
Indeed, America as a political system and society was largely admired and many aspects of its socioeconomic and political characteristics imitated in large parts of the world.
The European Union was irrevocably moving towards a free markets model, inspired, at least in large parts of Central and Eastern Europe, by the American model as much as by European ideals.
China, especially after joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO), was expected to gradually come closer to the American economic system, and in the assessment of many in Washington this would slowly but surely nudge it towards more political openness and perhaps also a slow erosion of the ideology of the ruling Communist Party.
Even in Russia, the inheritor of the former Soviet Union, many in the West saw the potential emergence of an ally that would discard its Soviet garb and embrace Western political and cultural ideas.
As for the Global South, America was indeed largely admired, not just for winning the Cold War, but much more for its economic prowess, intellectual and artistic and technological creativity, and the positive energy that the years under former US president Bill Clinton in the 1990s seemed to exude.
Expecting peace gave rise to expecting prosperity. If no world war, cold let alone hot, was expected, if most parts of the world were prioritising economic reforms to catch the train of the American-flavoured globalisation, and if there were no competing political economy models to rival that of the United States, then the notion of strategic competition in the political and military spheres could be put aside.
There were crises, such as when the tech bubble burst in the early 2000s, leading to a serious crash in global equity markets. But these were interpreted as bumps in the road, consequences of capitalistic excesses that neither scarred the prevailing economic model, nor deviated from the trajectory that most of the world seemed to be on leading to further political liberalism.
How different the scene looks today. The failure to foresee what in fact has unfolded over the past 25 years transcends identifying geopolitical frictions and their consequences or discerning fault lines in the global financial system. The failure was in comprehending both the simmering problems in the political economy of systemically important countries and the agonies some cultures have been experiencing over the past few decades to near the point of explosion and the links between the two.
Perhaps the problem lay in methodology. Strategic foresight remains a nascent discipline largely anchored on economic models with a few borrowings from mathematics and a lot of pretence that makes for sparkling presentations but lacks real substance. It lacks the practical application of the imagination that other disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, have come to embrace. A serious reading of history and observations from the present, together with a willingness to deviate from herd mentality, could have developed scenarios that do not extrapolate linearly from the past.
Today, as we move into the second quarter of the 21st century, we can look back on the past 25 years and see the beginnings of a new cold war that will almost certainly be more acute than the first one was in the middle decades of the last century.
China is in many ways much stronger than the former Soviet Union was even at the height of its power. We are also seeing the rise of radical sociopolitical forces across almost the entire world, many of which have already come to power in a number of the most influential countries. We see revolutions that have gripped systemically important countries whose effects continue to reverberate in them and in the regions to which they belong.
We see the shaping of a multi-faceted cultural war, whose protagonists draw on religious identities, most of which are constructed out of their imaginations rather than from serious readings of history. And, of course, we also see technological innovations that promise as well as threaten the introduction of dramatic changes that will likely alter human life.
This series will look at the key geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural changes that have begun over the past 25 years. The objective is more reflection than prediction. Today anyone serious and not intellectually and egoistically consumed by the sensationalism gripping all forms of the media would refrain from making confident assertions about the future. The hope is that by reflecting on the characteristics of these key trends of the past quarter of a century – to be informed by the past but not beholden to its constructs – we can stir thinking about how to identify the constructive and destructive elements that will help shape the foreseeable future.
The series will look at the international situation but will apply its analyses most to the Middle East and especially the Arab world. Although almost all parts of the world are facing major challenges, we in the Arab world are facing a particularly difficult situation and one largely of our own making.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: