Discussion: Optimism?

Triumphalism more like. That shiester Yank economist with the Japanese moniker (Francis Fujiyama?) is very quiet now. Back then he talked about the end of history. I think the triumphalists who sold shock treatment to that drumken sod Yeltsin are close to war criminal status. Joe Stieglitz is quite repentent now.
No, I think the 6 months after Obama was elected were more innocent optimism.

There was a brief window of opportunity between the optimism and the triumphalism, and late 1989/early 1990 was it. (From memory I think the Fukuyama book came out about the end of 1990?). I don't think it's an accident that most of the countries that have ended up as mafiocracies (Russia being the most prominent) are the ones whose revolutions didn't happen until some time after 1989. Certainly, if nothing else, the receding of the prospect of nuclear war was something well worth celebrating. (I also seem to recall reading somewhere at the time that 1989 was the first time in many, many years that no two countries were at war, at least not formally).

I was never as optimistic about the period after last year's election, although that's probably a product of being older and more cynical; I didn't expect the forces of reaction would be neutralised merely by losing an election.

North and South Korea were still officially at war.

stnadep fo lluf si gnireetneiro

Presumably only wars where there was actual shooting were counted (although in the case of North and South Korea that distinction can sometimes be a bit blurred). Russia and Japan haven't signed a WW2 peace treaty yet either.

I suppose the recent cannon fusilade across the Yellow Sea was pedantry?