Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’, which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century—the Evil Empire, Red China—had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

Surveying the Russian military rout of neighbouring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: the Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. This was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess. Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew

Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had

filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was the swagger of it. This was not about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end—the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history—it was also a beginning. It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbours, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

... contd.