As the Soviet Union collapsed in the winter of 1991, Francis Fukuyama subsequently published his most seminal book The End of History and the Last Man that deemed Western liberal democracy and its neoliberal, free trade economic paradigm as the final and inevitable form of government.⁵ The post-WWII liberal international order was never really a treaty system. Treaties were its scaffolding: Bretton Woods, the UN Charter, GATT, the NPT, but its actual load-bearing assumption was anthropological; that there existed a stable, universal human subject whose rights, dignity, and rational self-interest could be encoded into institutions and then defended by those institutions regardless of which government happened to be signing the paperwork. Human rights law, the very concept of a “rules-based order,” the idea that a Korean, a Kenyan, and a Norwegian shared a legal personhood dense enough to be adjudicated by the same Geneva bureaucracy; all of it rested on a quiet, largely unexamined premise that Francis Fukuyama would later name explicitly: that human nature is a fixed point, a “Factor X” stable enough to ground a universal politics, as described in his book Our Posthuman Future.⁶

The September 11 attacks shattered the myth of American unipolar invincibility, and following the rise of China via the Belt and Road Initiative as well as Trumpist populism, the “end of history” and heyday of 90s optimism has indeed heralded a new era of great superpowers and their spheres of influence. The world is drifting toward competing spheres (American, Chinese, Russian, with swing states like India and the Gulf bargaining in between.) However, in this second decade of the 21st century, this new Cold War of sorts has and will continue to be defined by not just by military might and ICBMs, but by compute, chips, energy, robotics, and increasingly the human body itself, through gene editing, embryo selection, and brain-computer interfaces.

The advent of the American war on terror, the Russo-Ukrainian War, and Chinese expansionism in the Asia-Pacific region have ended the unipolar/liberal-international moment that once seemed so totalizing around the turn of the century. Global, unilateral institutions like the WTO, IMF, and UN have given way to regional blocs once again like they did in the 20th century’s Cold War by way of the G7, NATO, BRICS+, etc. Just as the Cold War forced states to pick a bloc, AI/biotech infrastructure (chip supply chains, foundation models, gene-editing regulation) is forcing a similar alignment, but the “nonaligned” option barely exists this time because the infrastructure itself is dual-use and totalizing. Nuclear weapons originally defined a country to truly be able to defend its sovereignty through mutually assured destruction, a country’s ability to govern and control its own genetic and AI/biotech infrastructure will come to also define how well a nation-state can assert its sovereignty and global influence. The three emergent poles of this new order are not just contesting territory, trade routes, and currency dominance. They are contesting what a human being is, and doing so at exactly the moment biotechnology and neurotechnology have made that question technically actionable rather than merely philosophical. The Cold War was fought over which economic system would organize matter. This one will be fought over which political system gets to organize cognition and genome.

Fukuyama wrote Our Posthuman Future in 2002, in the flattest part of the unipolar moment, worried almost entirely about a domestic and intra-Western problem: that biotechnology (psychopharmacology, genetic engineering, life extension but recently also by the advent of omniscient brain-computer interfaces and nascent technologies like large language models, robotics world models, biological substrate computing) would erode the shared human nature that liberal democracy needs as its foundation.⁶ His fear was that we would engineer away the very characteristics (suffering, mortality, unpredictability, the leveling fact that even the powerful die) that make political equality plausible in the first place. His answer was regulatory: an international body with teeth, modeled loosely on nuclear nonproliferation, that could globally govern the pace of biotechnological change before it fractured the human template into incommensurable sub-species, the enhanced and the unenhanced.

Read in 2026, the book is almost quaint in one specific way: it assumed a regulator. It assumed that whatever body eventually got built to govern germline editing or cognitive enhancement would be something like the IAEA, a single, if imperfect, node that rogue actors would have to route around. That assumption was downstream of the unipolar order itself. You can only propose a global regulatory body for posthuman technology if you still believe in a “global” that has a center of gravity capable of enforcing it.

What’s happened instead is that the three poles cohering out of the liberal order’s wreckage are each constructing a separate answer to Fukuyama’s question, with no referee positioned above them to adjudicate, and with an incentive structure that punishes restraint. A regulatory body needs a hegemon or a genuine multipolar consensus willing to enforce compliance. What we have instead is competitive multipolarity, which is the one condition under which biotechnological and cognitive races are structurally guaranteed to run at the fastest common denominator rather than the safest one. Fukuyama feared humanity would fracture into enhanced and unenhanced individuals. The more immediate fracture is geopolitical: enhanced and unenhanced blocs, each exporting its own posthuman template as a form of soft power, the way the US and USSR once exported development models.

The useful move here is to stop treating “AI and biotech” as a single undifferentiated technological wave that all states are racing toward equally, and instead read each bloc’s posthuman project as an extension of its existing political theology.

The American bloc is pursuing what might be called libertarian accelerationism with a national-greatness gloss. Neuralink is the paradigm case precisely because it is privately owned, venture-funded, and explicitly framed by its founder as an individual-sovereignty project; augmentation as personal choice, marketed in the language of consumer opt-in and civilizational competition simultaneously (”we need this or China will get there first”).² This is where Jacob Heilbrunn’s “illiberal imagination,” as described in his 2024 book America Last becomes the essential domestic hinge: the American political mood has curdled against liberal universalism at home (skepticism of multilateral institutions, a turn toward civilizational and national-greatness rhetoric across a surprising span of the political spectrum) even as its posthuman export product remains, structurally, libertarian and market-driven.⁴ The illiberal turn doesn’t reject transhumanism; it re-nationalizes it. Enhancement becomes a competitive asset of the nation-state, pursued through private capital, which lets American posthumanism claim the language of freedom while functioning geopolitically as a bloc project.

The Chinese bloc is pursuing state-directed biopolitical engineering, as it dictates all economic, technological, and social programming, and the He Jiankui affair (the 2018 CRISPR-babies scandal) is less an aberration than an insight of what’s to come; research that proceeds under an authoritarian state’s capacity to coordinate and, crucially, to eventually normalize what other regimes ban.¹ China’s posthumanism doesn’t need to solve for individual consent because it doesn’t organize itself around the individual as the basic political unit. Biometric surveillance infrastructure, social-credit-adjacent scoring, and state genomics research aren’t separate initiatives, they’re expressions of the same underlying commitment: population-level optimization administered from the center. Where the American product is sold as augmentation of the self, the Chinese product is administration of the population, and both are posthuman in Fukuyama’s sense; both propose to move past a fixed human nature, but they propose to do it through opposite political architectures.

The Russian bloc differs from the others, and worth taking seriously precisely because it looks like a rejection of posthumanism while functioning as a third variant of it. Russian state rhetoric positions itself as the defender of “traditional” human nature against Western (and implicitly Chinese) technological overreach, a civilizational-conservative bulwark against gender fluidity, genetic engineering, transhumanist ideology, all coded as decadent Western biopolitics. But this is posthumanism by other means, Russia pursues aggressive military AI development, disinformation-optimized machine learning, and battlefield cognitive-electronic warfare while explicitly disclaiming the individual enhancement projects of its rivals. Its posthuman theology is defensive and civilizational rather than augmentative, the human as something to be preserved through information war rather than upgraded through biotech, but it still treats “the human” as a contested, engineerable political category rather than a fixed one. It has just chosen the battlefield of narrative and cognition (info-war, algorithmic influence operations) over the battlefield of the genome.

During the original Cold War, nonalignment was a real option — India, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia could plausibly refuse to pick a bloc because the infrastructure of mid-century industrial modernity (steel, oil, conventional arms) was divisible and could be sourced piecemeal from either side.

The infrastructure of the posthuman Cold War is not divisible in the same way. Foundation models require chips; chips require a supply chain concentrated in Taiwan, the Netherlands, and a handful of American design firms, all of which are now explicitly weaponized as points of leverage (export controls on advanced semiconductors are the clearest existing proof-of-concept for this whole essay’s thesis)³. Genetic engineering and biocomputing require research infrastructure, IRB-equivalent regulatory environments, and capital markets willing to fund decade-long bets; all of which cluster in exactly three or four places on Earth. There is no nonaligned genome. There is no neutral chip fab. A state, or an individual research group, or arguably an individual person seeking cognitive enhancement, will increasingly have to choose a stack: American, Chinese, or (in the more limited, defensive sense) Russian. The way one might once have chosen a currency peg. Citizenship in the emerging order is starting to mean something closer to enrollment in a biotechnical supply chain than in a legal jurisdiction.

This is the piece that most sharply updates Fukuyama. He worried about a global regulatory vacuum allowing enhancement technology to run ahead of consensus. What’s actually happening is worse than a vacuum, it’s a positive-sum race dynamic between blocs, where each pole’s domestic legitimacy narrative (American individual sovereignty, Chinese population optimization, Russian civilizational defense) actively requires it to keep pace with or exceed the others’ posthuman development, because falling behind isn’t just a strategic loss, it’s an ideological refutation. The absence of a hegemon doesn’t produce caution. It produces three separate arms races running in parallel, each justified by the existence of the other two.

The crux of this argument isn’t “AI and biotech will determine who wins the new Cold War,” which is a fairly banal great-power-competition claim already having been made. The more precise and more Fukuyama-adjacent claim is that the object of competition itself is being redefined downward, from territory and ideology to the literal substrate of the human, and that this happens precisely because the liberal international order’s collapse removes the one thing that might have kept “human nature” a shared referent rather than a contested resource. The UN Charter’s human rights language and the Bretton Woods architecture’s implicit universal subject depended on there being enough of a “we” to write rules for. Once the order dissolves into blocs, “the human” stops being a stable universal and becomes, like currency or rare earth minerals, a strategic asset that each pole defines, engineers, and exports on its own terms. Cognitive liberty, genetic privacy, and bodily autonomy, framed for decades as individual rights to be defended against the state, may end up being decided instead as bloc-level policy variables, optimized not for the individual’s flourishing but for the bloc’s competitive position against its two rivals. Fukuyama wanted a global regulator to prevent humanity from fracturing into genetic haves and have-nots. What we may get instead is three regulators, none of them global, each producing a different sanctioned human template, with the individual increasingly unable to opt out of whichever template their bloc has settled on.

Citations

¹ He Jiankui announced the births of the gene-edited twins "Lulu" and "Nana" in a YouTube video and an MIT Technology Review report on November 25–26, 2018. He was sentenced by a Shenzhen court on December 30, 2019, to three years' imprisonment and a 3 million yuan fine, and was released in April 2022. See MIT Technology Review, Wikipedia, "He Jiankui."

² Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and a team of eight scientists and engineers, and first publicly reported by the Wall Street Journal in March 2017. Musk has described the company's goal as achieving a "symbiosis" between human and artificial intelligence partly to mitigate AI existential risk. See Wikipedia, "Neuralink"; Wall Street Journal, March 2017.

³ On October 7, 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security issued export controls restricting China's access to advanced computing chips, chipmaking equipment, and supercomputing technology, explicitly aimed at curbing Chinese military AI development. A follow-up rule on October 17, 2023 closed loopholes exploited via China-specific chips such as Nvidia's A800/H800. See BIS press releases, Oct 2022 and Oct 2023.

⁴ Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (New York: W.W. Norton, 2024).

⁵ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

⁶ Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).