Ukraine war finally awakens a sleeping free world

Perhaps what will confound future historians the most is how dramatically the alarm bells have been ringing these past three decades. After five centuries of growing self-confidence and rising prosperity across the West, built upon a steady accretion of norms and values suffused by liberty and law, and then the great leap forward of the Industrial Revolution, we became lost in our own dream world.

This has happened before, of course. In Rome, in Egypt, and the other great empires of the past, success led to complacency, then decadence, then an inability to notice the danger until it was too late. “It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption,” Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His point is simple: insiders are typically the worst at spotting the rot.

This is perhaps why so many failed to notice the indicators blinking red in recent years. Democracy — the system of government that supposedly represented the end of history — has been in retreat. At the time of the French Revolution, only 4% of the world’s nations were engaged in the experiment of representative government, a number that rose through various waves, not least after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then there was a turning point with a steady decline in the percentage of the world’s population living in what we like to call the free world.