After the Fall

“Shapiro’s sharp examination shows how voters around the world ended up disillusioned, a disenchantment he direly calls ‘the stuff of which dictatorships are made.’ It’s a stark wake-up call.”—Publishers Weekly

“A searing indictment of post-Cold War errors ... An incisive analysis of Western policies that foreshadowed the rise of America Firstism.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Accessible, erudite and thought-provoking.”

“Those struggling to understand how this country and the world at large could fall from the crowning heights of 1989, a moment of ascendant prosperity under democratic capitalism, to the contemporary morass, corruption, and authoritarianism of new right populism need look no farther than Ian Shapiro’s After The Fall. Shapiro skillfully documents the lost opportunities, bad choices, and failures of commission and omission as the post-Cold War edifice came under the growing strains of the economically dispossessed, political entrepreneurs skilled at mobilizing discontent and voters increasingly willing to turn to autocratic leaders.”—Thomas Edsall, columnist, New York Times

“A compelling analysis—profoundly challenging to so many Western assumptions—with an admirable blend of realism, imagination, unflinching criticism, and generosity—effortlessly in command of geopolitics—showing how often confusion, conventional wisdoms, group-think, and lack of imagination squandered the opportunities of the 90s and accelerated the collapse of the global order.”—Rory Stewart, former Member of Parliament and author of The Places in Between

“Ian Shapiro’s powerful and arresting book explains just how and why the politics of Europe and North America have come to be so confused, so acrimonious, and so dangerous over the last few decades. Its focus is on a small number of fateful decisions, any of which could readily have been avoided. Since the damage they have inflicted now threatens everyone and those who have lost from it so drastically outnumber those who have gained, it shows something surprising, of immense political importance and the greatest urgency.”—John Dunn, University of Cambridge