In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, as mass protests in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought on the collapse of a Communist order that had seemed invincible. Some experts are saying that 2026 may prove just as consequential.
Matt Pottinger, deputy national security advisor in Trump’s first term, and foreign affairs analyst Roy Eakin have written an article for the Free Press entitled Why 2026 Could Prove as Important as 1989 with the deck, “The year the Berlin Wall came down marked the end of one epoch and the start of another. This year could do the same.”
They see similarities between the popular uprising in Iran against the Islamic theocracy and the popular uprising behind the Iron Curtain against Communism. In their analysis, what’s happening in Iran, plus Trump’s decapitation of the radical regime in Venezuela, in conjunction with other developments, could weaken Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. They think this new “epoch” will be good for America, though they also see a different possibility. I want to discuss the optimistic developments today, then treat the pessimistic possibilities tomorrow.
As we suggested yesterday, the mass uprisings in Iran might be crushed, but they still suggest a wide-spread popular reaction among Muslims against the jihadist Islam that has led to wars, terrorism, and oppression for all of the 21st century. Perhaps more significant than the protests in Iran is what we could call a “vibe shift” that is happening throughout the Islamic world.
Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, has written an important article for that publication entitled Why Jihadism Is in Retreat. He describes the context of the ideology:
The ideology of modern political Islam, which emerged with the Muslim Brotherhood’s founding in 1928, was influenced by two other 20th-century ideologies, communism and fascism. Like them, it sought a utopian new world—aspiring to overthrow the global order, or at a minimum the contemporary Muslim nation-states, by erasing unnatural borders drawn by Western colonizers.
As more and more radical Islamist leaders gained prominence, from Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the dream of a pan-Islamic caliphate fueled transnational jihadist networks that stretched from housing projects in the suburbs of Paris to the jungles of southern Philippines. Jihadism’s multi-generational conflict with the West pulled America into lengthy wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Now, this wave is receding, maybe permanently. Global jihad is no longer en vogue. While regional insurgencies continue, especially in parts of Africa, the Islamists that have managed to gain power, be it Sharaa’s movement in Syria or the Taliban in Afghanistan, proclaim their desire to go local. Instead of worldwide holy war, they want to focus on national affairs, building friendly relations with all countries, including non-Muslim powers like the U.S., India, China and Russia. To them, the nation-state is something to be developed, not erased.
Former jihadists are changing their tune. In Syria, long a hot-bed of Islamic radicalism, the new president Ahmed al-Sharaa, himself one of those radicals who overthrew the Iranian-supported dictator Bashar al-Assad, now hobnobs with Trump, promises that Syria will not be a problem for Israel or any other country, fights ISIS and al-Qaeda, allows alcohol sales and Western dress for women, and says of Syria, “We have gone from being a country that exported crises to one that has a hope of delivering stability.”
While the Taliban have imposed a harsh, repressive Islamic law in Afghanistan, they too have been battling ISIS and are refusing to let their country be a haven for other international terrorist groups.
Trofimov quotes Hemin Hawrami, a Kurdish Iraqi politician: “Jihadism and radicalism are in demise. And that’s because they have never had a successful model to present to society, not once in the past 100 years.”
Part of the shift too comes from widespread revulsion against just how extreme and cruel the jihadists became. As former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Jonathan Cohen, observes,
“Political Islam has failed to deliver better life for its populations; it has also led to rather catastrophic collateral damage when you see the rise of movements like ISIS.”
Indeed, Islamic State’s rule over large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014-2019 was so brutal and grim that many initial supporters—including Sharaa—turned against it. In [Turkish scholar Mustafa] Akyol’s words, this was political Islam’s “Khmer Rouge” moment, “the bottom of the darkness” that spurred a counter-reaction.
The war in Gaza, in which Hamas was utterly defeated and Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah was decimated, was the low point for jihadism. Syrian journalist Hassan Hassan observed that the Islamic world voiced support for Hamas and opposition to Israel. “But deep down, they know that Hamas has messed up, the same way that ISIS messed up in Syria and Iraq,” he said. “Hamas is no longer appealing: People know that it set back the clock for the Palestinians by many years.”
In the meantime, the Gulf States, wallowing in their oil wealth, have been seeking Western legitimacy and have stopped funding radical groups. Saudi Arabia used to fund arch-conservative mosques around the world, which became seed-beds for the jihadist movement. No more under Saudi’s new ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has also shut down Islamic proselytizing programs, disbanded the rule-enforcing Islamic police, and curbed the power and influence of the clergy. Now, when Muslims come on their obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, says Trofimov, “they encounter modern societies where women work, drive and attend university.”
This is not to say that jihadist terrorism and political Islam are no more. Terrorist attacks, such as the massacre at Australia’s Bondi Beach, continue, just as the Marxist terrorism in Europe continued after the fall of the Soviet Union. Former Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu sees a parallel between what is happening in the Islamic movement and the conflict between Trotsky, who advocated an international Communist revolution, and Stalin, who focused on forming Communist nations.
Then again, as Nader Nadery, who served in the Afghan government deposed by the Taliban, observes, Stalin never abandoned Communism’s global agenda. After making the Soviet Union strong, he promoted Marxist revolutions in other nations and undermined the West in the Cold War. Nadery warns, the same could happen with radical Islam.
Still, the Cold War ended in 1989, and we can hope that the War on Terrorism can finally conclude in 2026. There is, however, another, hopefully less likely, possibility, that we will discuss tomorrow.
Photo: President Ahmed al-Sharaa (November 2025) by Lula Oficial – 06.11.2025 – Recepção Oficial dos Chefes de Delegação da Cúpula do Clima, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=178111638
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