What does the war in Ukraine tell us about how well the US "unipolar moment" worked out?

"All wars are popular for the first thirty days," the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. famously observed.

We have a few days before we reach that point with the war in Ukraine. The resistance of the Ukrainians to the Russia invasion is very popular in the US and Europe. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being celebrated like a rock star. This is just one example, from the Austrian news weekly Profil two weeks ago: "The Hero of the West."

But the ugly reality of the war in Ukraine is that Russia has begun the process of leveling cities as it previously did in Chechnya and Syria.

🇺🇦 mariupol - destruction of a city https://t.co/zTDjPGj2Ui

— Gerald Knaus (@rumeliobserver) March 20, 2022

Refugees are leaving Ukraine at the rate of a million per week. The UN figures as of March 19:

There's nothing glamourous about being a refugee. (Perhaps an oligarch here or there excepted.) And it's tragically predictable that the same news magazines now celebrating the real heroism of Ukrainians will all too soon be featuring stories about ugly problems in dealing with the large number of refugees in the EU.

I would very much like to be proved wrong about the latter, and there are some encouraging signs that EU leaders have learned some constructive lessons about their failures in the 2015-16 refugee crisis. But the current number of Ukrainian refugees in the EU is well more than twice the number for all of 2015 and 2016. And the very real "welcome culture" and its willingness to provide massive help to refugees in 2015-16 was also accompanied by a xenophobic opposition, to which the center-right and center-left too often cowered instead of countered.

In the larger picture, the "unipolar moment" of the US as the overwhelming "hyperpower" of the world, the era now mockingly but once seriously referred to as the End of History, is over. And what did the US accomplish with its 30-year "unipolar moment"?

Have we achieved big and continuing rollbacks in nuclear arsenals and major process in nuclear nonproliferation? No. In fact, we are currently discussing how close the US should be willing to come to risk nuclear war with Russia over the Ukraine war.

Have we dramatically slowed the atmospheric warming due to fossil fuel consumption? Well, no. From NBC/AP 03/19/2022:

Has the US had more wars or fewer since the End of History? More.

We could go on. After some base closures and adjustment of the defense budget in the wake of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union, the US Congress now routinely increases the defense budget year after year. And year after year by more than the Pentagon even requests.

And the growth of Western-style liberal democracy that the End of History was expected to bring? Well, let's say that it has been far from an unqualified success. According to the widely cited standards of Freedom House, "A total of 60 countries suffered declines in political rights and civil liberties over the past year, while only 25 improved." (01/24/2022) "As of today, some 38 percent of the world’s people live in countries rated Not Free, the highest proportion since 1997. Only two in 10 people live in Free countries. ... The largest 10-year score declines among democracies were in Hungary (Partly Free, −19), Nauru (Free, −16), Poland (Free, −12), India (Partly Free, −11), and the United States (Free, −10)."

And far from bringing about a situation where the political system in the US where the two major parties compete over which can do the better job of protecting health care and increasing wages and job security or defending individual rights, we have a Democratic Party stuck in Clintonian duck-and-cover "moderation" (often indistinguishable from "conservatism") and a Republican Party howling at the moon, more loudly year after year.

Partisan hostility and distrust is similar in both US parties. But the asymmetric polarization in tactics and willingness to obstruct even basic governance is worse than ever, with the Republicans in a seemingly endless state of radicalization and the Democrats lamely promising "bipartisanship" with a stunningly intransigent Republican Party.

What we need now that the End of History is clearly over is a world with fewer nuclear weapons, much less war, and much less fossil fuel consumption. Those issues don't send a thrill up the legs of corporate media reporters like hectoring Biden Administration officials as to why they aren't escalating faster into a potential nuclear war with Russia does. But those things are what the world needs. A world nuclear war, we definitely do not need.

For the US and the world, the drug of Cold War Triumphalism turned out to be more like oxycontin abuse. Or maybe horse dewormer used for things for which it was never intended.