After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world seemed to stand at the dawn of a new era: democracy, prosperity, a liberal order. It turned out differently.

This book tells how, from the hopeful new beginning after 1991, American foreign policy first contributed to state collapse and ultimately to the destabilization of entire regions.

The analysis begins in Somalia, where the trauma of Mogadishu led the West to look away just as genocide unfolded in Rwanda. It continues through the Yugoslav wars, where geopolitical calculation replaced the rule of law, and to Iraq, where America reduced the blueprint of its own democracy to rubble-along with the stability of the entire Middle East.

From the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine to the Arab Spring, from Venezuela to the sanctions regimes against Iran, the same pattern emerges everywhere. Regimes stabilize themselves through three pillars-legitimacy, co-optation, and repression. Western powers learned to target precisely these pillars: through sanctions, the support of political opposition, and ultimately regime change by design.

Stable democracy rarely followed. More often, the result was intensified repression, state collapse, and growing resentment toward the West. The chronicles of global disorder reveal how the export of democracy became an instrument of power, why revolutions failed-and what truly lies behind the moral façade of Western foreign policy.

Yet while these conflicts continue to smolder, a new systemic conflict is emerging on the horizon-one that calls all previous certainties into question and places equal pressure on states and societies alike.