Francis Fukuyama got quite a bit wrong in his 1992 essay “The End of History,” but he also got a lot right, especially in regard to the roughly 25-year period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Donald Trump. A neoliberal world order led by the United States did emerge in the 1990s to become, if not a hegemonic power, at the least the dominant one. Capitalism was not only on the rise but promised to liberalize nations like Russian, and especially China.

With the election of Trump and the success of socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the future of the American-led, bipartisan, neoliberal world order is in considerable doubt. In fact, breaking with this world order was central to Trump’s appeal and victory. On trade, military actions, and foreign aid, Trump challenged basic assumptions held by the leaderships of both parties for decades.

Not everyone was on board back in the early 1990s. Ross Perot’s historic performance as the Reform Party candidate in the 1992 general election was rooted almost exclusively in the fact that he was the candidate who opposed the globalism and trade deals that both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton tacitly supported. That voting base never really went away, and a quarter-century later it did the heavy lifting in putting Trump in the White House.

The central theme of Trump’s ideology towards the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world is that we are being taken advantage of. In the post-Cold War era the United States took on an enormous burden in exchange for dominant influence. It was the patriarchal nation not just of the free world, but of almost the entire world. It was a generous parent, often providing extravagant allowances to its client states.

In some ways, this paradigm was wildly successful. Poverty rates globally declined dramatically. Here in the United States commercial goods became remarkably cheap, giving the middle class, and even the poor in some cases, access to material wealth that would have seemed extravagant in the Cold War period, like flat-screen TVs and cell phones. And for a time, it did appear that a relaxed approach to nations like Russia and China would inevitably lead to their liberalization.