Thats why people wrote books like ..
The End of History and the Last Man is a book of political philosophy written in 1992 by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
There certainly was a lot of navel-gazing and patting of backs with the dissolution of the USSR…
Truth is while the govt model and Union failed, the people who made it up didn’t vanish into thin air. You can draw a pretty straight line from 1991 to how Putin acts against the US and Europe.
The 90s were definitely a different beast. Beginning of a unipolar geopolitical push from the US. Seems after 30yr we’re starting to finally get some real push back, which is simultaneously concerning and nice to see.