History surprises

Bruce Cumings notes that the architects of the American Century could not have anticipated its most important events: “Never could the Achesons and Stimsons have imagined the fierce energy of aroused colonial peoples in the 1940s, for whom classical imperialism and a recent feudal past were hated realities and the promises of liberal modernism, an utter chimera. Nor could the theory of totalitarianism that long ruled the minds of American planners conceive of the possibility that courageous people in myriad civil-society groups (beginning with Poland’s Solidarity) would bring down Eastern European communism from within.”