Q&A: Ian Shapiro’s new book explores the roots of today's angry populist politics

Political scientist Ian Shapiro says that the decline from optimism at the end of the Cold war to today’s democratic backsliding and renewed geopolitical tension was avoidable.

In his reckoning, “there were paths not taken, choices that were made and foregone by political leaders” that closed off better possibilities and made our current circumstances — if not inevitable — much more likely.

Through decades of research, Shapiro has tried to make sense of how political systems succeed or fail at delivering stability and fairness in rapidly changing economic and geopolitical environments, drawing on both historical analysis and contemporary policy debates. In his latest book, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World, he trains his microscope on a seminal moment in recent world history: the end of the Cold War. The book examines the spirit of global cooperation and optimism of the 1990s and how that shifted to rising populism and conflict today — as well as ideas for charting a path forward.

Shapiro, the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs, discussed ideas from the book in an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you see the Cold War as a tipping point for today’s political atmosphere?

There was a lot of euphoria and optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet it all seems so distant from what we’re living with today — both in geopolitics and international relations and in domestic politics of almost all the older democracies and many of the newer ones, as well. What I do in this book is zero in on decisions that were made and understand the reasons for them. This is not a 20-20 hindsight book; I show that serious people inside and outside government argued for doing things differently in ways that could have led the world to a better place.  Nor is it a right-wing or left-wing book. There is plenty of blame to go around for the poor choices that were made and the opportunities that were squandered.

Why were there so many mistakes?

I think that to really understand what has happened, we have to go back to the 1980s and the rise of so-called neoliberalism — the troika of deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Neoliberalism came into its own because the Keynesian orthodoxies had appeared unable to deal with the stagflation of the 1970s. These neoliberal ideas had been hanging around in think tanks for decades, but Reagan and Thatcher mainstreamed them in the ’80s, putting center-left parties on the defensive and forcing them to climb aboard. Thatcher famously called it TINA: “There is No Alternative.”

Center-left parties began clambering aboard this consensus — in the U.S. with Jimmy Carter, Paul Tsongas, and eventually Bill Clinton; New Labour in the UK; François Mitterrand’s “about turn” in France in the early 1980s followed by other left-of center parties. The collapse of communism thrust these changes into overdrive. Once capitalism was the only game in town, everyone would have to get with the program.  Even the political systems that remained communist, like China and Vietnam, adopted capitalist economics. This is why people like Francis Fukuyama declared that “the end of history had arrived.”

The big problem with all this is that the benefits of neoliberal growth flow disproportionately to the top. Instead of trickle down, starting in the 1980s, we had decades of growing job insecurity and wage stagnation while the huge bulk of the gains from incredible increases in productivity flowed to the top 10%, 1%, and even 0.1%. As a result, the capitalist democracies all have millions of alienated voters who are living with employment insecurity, downward mobility, and facing even worse prospects for their children.

So, the mistakes were mostly economic?

I would put it differently: It was the response of political elites to the economic changes. I think you can point to their management of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath as a prime example of how populists have gained power over the mainstream parties. When the housing bubble burst and the world economy began collapsing, they grabbed for the Keynesian tools that they had been declaring obsolete for decades. They borrowed hundreds of billions to recapitalize the banks, to bail out the financial sector, and avoid another Great Depression. But they continued imposing neoliberal policies on everybody else. It was Keynesianism for the elites and austerity for the rest. The elites recovered, the stock market came back, 401ks were replenished, and tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money was shelled out to pay bonuses to the executives who had caused the crisis.

Populist entrepreneurs seized on the opportunity this created. They discovered that they could mobilize the angry, anxious, alienated voters against the mainstream parties, as their path to power. What Donald Trump argues isn’t much different than what Pat Buchannan or Ross Perot have said in the past. The difference is that the financial crisis — which blew away mainstream politicians’ reputation for competence — and their hypocritical response to it made them much more vulnerable to the populist assault. Trump’s anti-globalization agenda, economic nationalism, and assault on elites enabled him to hijack the Republican Party and turn it into a working-class nationalist one.

The title of your book says politicians broke our world. That seems very intentional. Was our current climate created more by individuals than political systems?

In part. Lots of the time, individuals don’t make much difference in politics because structural forces are so overdetermining that there’s just very little scope for action that makes a difference. But there are moments when these structural forces loosen up. That was what was so interesting and important about the end of the Cold War, because the prevailing institutions, ideologies, and constellations of interests were suddenly all up for grabs.

What kind of international governance was there going to be? Did we still need NATO? The standoff between capitalism and communism was over. In this situation, there was so much more room for agency than usual and many arguments by serious people inside and outside government about what the way forward should be. This is why I focus on paths not taken. What politicians did — or failed to do — was much more consequential than it often is.

In the book, you also use past armed conflicts to frame the U.S.’s recent military action against Iran: Clinton in Kosovo, George W. Bush in Iraq, Obama in Libya. What parallels did you draw?

This is another reason the book focuses on the end of the Cold War. At that time, many people were asking, “How is the international community going to respond to these new circumstances, particularly when there is international aggression?” The new order was first put to the test when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. To his credit, George H.W. Bush handled it deftly; he secured a resolution from the UN Security Council, put together a huge multinational coalition, and mounted a decisive campaign to push Hussein out of Kuwait. Importantly, he resisted pressure from neoconservatives and others who were urging him to “finish the job” — go to Baghdad, topple of the regime, and try to bring democracy to the Middle East at the point of a gun.  In this, he exemplified the dictum: “Stop the bully without becoming one.”

If that had become the template for responding to international aggression, we might indeed have built up a rules-based international order — but it was not to be. President Clinton led a NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo without Security Council authorization in 1999 even though no NATO member nation was threatened, and President Obama engineered a NATO campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya 12 years later, again when no NATO country was threatened, in defiance of the Security Council and regional organizations, leaving another Middle Eastern failed state behind as the U.S. had done in Iraq. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations expanded NATO into Eastern Europe and the former USSR, brushing aside arguments to replace it with pan-European security arrangements and ignoring the lobbying first by Boris Yeltsin and then by Vladimir Putin for Russia to join NATO and integrate economically with the West. They also ignored calls to invest in Russia after the Cold War, similar to how Japan and Germany were treated after World War II. The final straw was NATO’s decision in 2007 to invite Georgia and Ukraine to join the alliance, making a revival of the Cold War all but inevitable.

Is it possible to rectify the mistakes that have been made?

Domestically, we have to focus on inclusive economic growth. If most people are not benefiting or don’t feel that they’re benefiting from the existing economic and political order, they don’t have incentives to support it. It’s not rocket science. Obviously, we’re not going to have the industrial policies of the 1970s because we face a different set of challenges and opportunities now. So, it’s pointless to look backward in that regard. It’s no surprise that, in the first Trump administration, he brought no industrial jobs back from China — and that the U.S. has continued losing industrial jobs since he returned to office in 2025. Those jobs are not coming back. The challenges now are thinking about investing in the present and future economies, training a workforce that’s flexible and can change jobs in a rapidly changing economy.

In the book, I detail policies for workforce retraining and transformation for the 21^st century, as well as ways to incentivize business to get behind the needed changes. The Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act was a good pilot because we need to invest in applied AI and other new technologies, but it was too small bore because senators Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema — whose votes were needed — opposed anything bigger.