Post‑Cold‑War Triumphalism

In the 1990s U.S. policy elites adopted a routinized belief that liberal democracy had decisively prevailed, turning diplomacy into performative 'tidying up' rather than hard institutional statecraft. That mood — symbolized by the Clinton‑brokered Rabin–Arafat handshake and Fukuyama's thesis — shaped choices that produced long‑run strategic and political blowback. — Recognizing that triumphalist cultural frames drove 1990s policy helps explain subsequent intervention fatigue and suggests caution about exporting normative certainty today.