Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, traces how the post-Cold War optimism of the early 1990s curdled into the disillusionment that followed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Part of his DeVane Lecture series course Power and Politics in Today's World, taught at Yale in fall 2019, the lecture gives background on Iraq since 1991, including the Gulf War and the sanctions regime, before turning to the case for invasion in 2003, the neoconservative belief that democracy could be exported by force, and the war's mounting human and financial costs. Shapiro treats the Iraq war as the moment the End of History thesis, the idea that liberal democracy had won for good, stopped holding up. The lecture connects this foreign policy failure to the wider erosion of American confidence and the rise of resentment politics at home.