COMPETING VISIONS OF THE FUTURE INTERNATIONAL ORDER REASSESSMENT OF MEARSHEIMER, FUKUYAMA, HUNTINGTON, BARNETT, AND ZAKARIA’S WORLDVIEW IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Abstract

The end of the Cold War generated an unprecedented wave of theoretical reflection on the future trajectory of international politics. Among the most influential interpretations were Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Thomas P. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map – Peace and Security in the 21st Century, Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, and John J. Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Although these scholars advanced distinct and, in some respects, competing visions of the post-Cold War international order, their arguments identified the capability of different forces in shaping global politics in the twenty-first century. This paper comparatively reassesses the five perspectives of these scholars against major geopolitical developments between 2000 and 2025, including the resurgence of great-power rivalry, China's rise, the diffusion of economic and political power beyond the West, the persistence of civilizational and identity-based conflicts, regional instability, state fragility, globalization, and the renewed salience of geopolitics. Rather than treating these theories as mutually exclusive predictions, the paper examines their points of convergence, divergence, and complementarity, and evaluates the extent to which subsequent developments have validated, challenged, or modified their original propositions. It argues that no single theoretical vision adequately explains the complexity of the contemporary international system. Instead, the emerging order reflects the simultaneous interaction of several dynamics anticipated by these scholars: ideological competition, civilizational identities, globalization and connectivity, state fragmentation, power diffusion, and great-power rivalry. The paper therefore proposes a multidimensional synthesis of these perspectives as a more comprehensive framework for understanding the transition from the post-Cold War order toward an increasingly contested, fragmented, and multipolar international system.