As a Russian invasion of Ukraine looms, it isn’t just the fate of one nation that hangs in the balance. It’s that of the entire West. After communism’s defeat in the Cold War, the American scholar Francis Fukuyama notoriously predicted the “end of history”, with the world peacefully aligning with the liberal democratic values of the victorious powers. At the time, few questioned whether this might have been hubris. He was merely bringing into the mainstream the ideas of the Russian-French thinker Alexandre Kojève, who helped found the EU, to be built in America’s image.

We’ve known for some time that Fukuyama was disastrously wrong, but it is quite something that it is now the enemies of the free world who are making the predictions. According to Vladimir Putin, we are witnessing the “end of liberalism”: the West has become “obsolete”, he claims, as the EU fragments and American confidence collapses. Unable to live up to its values – or tell a new galvanising story of freedom adapted to modern realities – it is hard to escape the conclusion that the US and Europe risk tipping into a death spiral of humiliation and decline.

Amid the theatre and chaos  – as the US evacuates its embassy and London accuses Putin of plotting a coup to install a puppet in Kyiv – one thing is clear: America has once and for all abandoned the evangelical liberalism that it espoused as the world hegemon for much of the last 30 years.

Since the Cold War, it championed the view that the values of freedom, democracy and human rights are not just cultural particulars but universal goods that ought to be exported. That the West would be on hand to help liberate plucky Davids from autocratic Goliaths. And that as unfree countries are integrated into the global economy, democratisation would organically follow. Underpinning all this was an ardent faith that democratic liberalism marks mankind’s evolutionary end-point, precisely as Fukuyama argued.

Such ideological self-confidence propelled the Clinton administration to expand Nato up to Russia’s borders. It spurred on the EU’s bid to assimilate Ukraine. Yet resolve began to falter following the disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the global financial crisis. And now, in the face of Putin’s threats, it is crumbling.

Even if the Russian President does not invade his neighbour, in some senses he has already won. Ukraine’s allies have betrayed their reluctance to defend it. While Joe Biden all but permitted Moscow to make a “minor incursion”, Germany has blocked Nato allies from sending weapons to Ukraine.

And with this, the poverty of Western leadership has been exposed. Recent events have brought home Germany’s moral hollowness – not just its squalid reliance on Russian gas, but its blinkered pacifism. Regardless of the stakes, Europe’s largest power runs scared of thorny existential confrontations. Meanwhile, an increasingly bipolar America does not know whether to ditch or cling to its erstwhile worldview, in which the globe is divided between the free and unfree. It is beginning to nod to the idea that Ukraine is part of Russia’s turf, reverting to the old “spheres of influence” policy that it championed from the 19th century through to the Cold War. Yet at the same time many US officials clutch fancifully to the notion that Russia can still be assimilated into the existing world order – and thus be prevented from forming an unholy alliance with China.

Such naivete shows just how desperate and muddled the West has become. Russian foreign policy’s overarching aim is not merely to erect defensive buffers on its vast land borders at the expense of countries like Ukraine, but to ensure the survival of the Putin regime. The idea that Russia can be absorbed into the western order against China is ludicrous. However much he is indulged, Putin will continue to keep the West at arm’s length, while deepening links with Beijing. If Western powers allow him to secure victory in Ukraine, they will not be averting a much greater crisis, but setting a precedent. China will be emboldened in its potential plans to invade Taiwan.

This is not to argue that the more self-assured West of the past was perfect. I have long had serious concerns about the over-confidence of its foreign policy. Zealous attempts to not just defend its values abroad but to actively impose them have often proved counter-productive, giving ammunition to autocrats who falsely claim that freedom is a foreign concept. This impression has become particularly poisonous in the Middle East. The same kind of top-down evangelism has triggered populist backlashes against the EU, closer to home. But the consequences of an absence of Western power and boldness are perhaps just as concerning. The grand narrative of freedom may have carried deep flaws. But Ukraine exposes the dangers of a world in which the West no longer stands for anything.

After all, the big question right now is not simply whether the West is capable of sticking up for its principles abroad – but whether it is capable of doing so at home. America and Europe are becoming an importer – rather than an exporter – of values. Take the now mainstream belief that, in certain circumstances, extreme, “precautionary” health security must override liberty itself. This has become entrenched since Western countries sought to emulate China’s Covid lockdown, an unprecedented public health tool inspired by the CCP’s chilling fangkong (“prevent and control”) crisis management system, deployed against the Uyghurs. As surveillance technology progresses and the AI arms race heats up, meanwhile, the attitude that Westerners will have to become “more Asian” about privacy is also gaining traction.

A new brand of liberalism is sorely needed. One that stands up for the sanctity of the nation state, rather than undermines it – and supports countries like Ukraine when needed. One that recognises that liberal democracy is far from inevitable and must constantly be defended both at home and, in specific circumstances, abroad. One that resists the self-loathing metropolitan impulse that the West may longer be worth fighting for.

If not, a horrible twist on Fukuyama’s “end of history” may come to pass. Far from marching towards liberal enlightenment, the world may be converging on soft totalitarianism.