As I now write about Francis Fukuyama, the famous American political scientist who once claimed Pax Americana was the end goal of human history, I am thinking of the great American economist Irving Fisher. “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” Fisher famously wrote soon before the crash of 1929 that started the Great Depression. He has been ridiculed ever since. A rich man before the crash, he died in poverty. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama, then a young scholar, published an essay and then a book that struck a chord with many people – and perhaps captured what his one-time philosophical hero Hegel might call “the spirit of the age” – by arguing Western democracy and free-market capitalism have triumphed after history has tried all the other political and economic systems and found them all to be failures. The United States is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to As each decade passes, though, more people mock him. The 9/11 terrorists attacks, Iraq, the US housing market collapse of 2007-08 and the subsequent global financial crisis , and now Afghanistan … what was Fukuyama thinking? I googled “the decline of America” and came up with 4,870,000 results. Fukuyama himself hasn’t talked about triumphal America for a long time; actually, rather its opposite. As he has just written in The Economist magazine: “The horrifying images of desperate Afghans trying to get out of Kabul this week after the United States-backed government collapsed have evoked a major juncture in world history, as America turned away from the world. The truth of the matter is that the end of the American era had come much earlier.” OK, it’s not quite the end of America, but it is the end of the unipolar moment for the US to be the sole hegemonic power. Over time, for the rest of this century, it will become just one of several great powers, as others gain ground. Fukuyama wrote: “The degree of unipolarity in this period has been relatively rare in history, and the world has been reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity ever since, with China, Russia, India, Europe and other centres gaining power relative to America. “The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to around the financial crisis in 2007-09 ... The country overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about fundamental political change, even as it underestimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. “The decade ended with its troops bogged down in two counter-insurgency wars, and an international financial crisis that accentuated the huge inequalities that American-led globalisation had brought about.” How the Western media hegemony operates And the prognosis? “The United States is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to,” he wrote. What a turnaround from three decades ago! But this time, he is very likely to be proven right. Unfortunately, people are more likely to remember your failures than achievements. Both Fisher and Fukuyama are serious thinkers. Among his achievements, Fisher came up with the “discounting” formula using the idea of compound interest to calculate the “intrinsic” worth of a company stock, a method that has been in use ever since. Without Fisher, there would probably have been no Graham and Dodd and their “value” investing school of thought that supposedly made Warren Buffett one of the world’s richest people. US must accept its hegemony is waning, says Chinese foreign vice-minister Fukuyama went on to write many challenging and original books that proved to be more substantial than the one that made him famous. But their myopia – about the American stock market and hegemony – was, unfortunately, a common phenomenon. Just as more punters often buy stocks when the market has peaked and is about to crash, so people think they have reached Nirvana – and are most confident or hubristic – just before the fall. In 1910, Norman Angell published his famous book The Great Illusion , arguing the high costs of war and economic interdependence had made war highly unlikely, if not impossible, between European nations. Four years later, the first world war started.