Drawing upon a career's worth of both theoretical and empirical research, according to the Italian school of political science, the author provides a holistic assessment of contemporary world politics in this volume. The book commences by defining some concepts like "world order", namely a governance process with fixed values: during the post-1989 era those of market, democracy and peace. Foreign policies are then classified into four models of political cultures: the "interests-intensive" conservative, the "ideologies-intensive" liberal, leftist constructivist and leftist Manichaean. The author shows how multipolar and bipolar systems have been relatively stable, with each main power defending its own interests yet ultimately not promoting ideas and order. Change periods are unstable. Between 1915 and 1945, Nazi-fascist and communist ideologies emerged, but after Yalta the West did not effectively export market, democracy and peace to the Third World. After 1989, the ideas of liberalism (in economic globalization and EU enlargement), neo-conservatism (in the Iraq war), and multi-cultural leftism (in pluri-national conflict resolution processes) began to be applied to achieve a "near" world order. Since 2001, Islamic fundamentalism’s threat has prevented both stability (with the failure of the concert of powers of the 1990s) and order (with minimal improvements in democracy and peace). Following the Arab Spring, Obama also abandoned the “interests-intensive” conservative diplomacy. He no longer supported "lesser evils" (military or personalist regimes) against "absolute evils" (e.g., the Islamic State), and waged only "low intensity" wars in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
