The first entry in Sid Meier’s Civilization series was released in 1991, the final year of the Cold War. With the onset of America’s unipolar moment, Civilization—or as it is known to players and fans, simply “Civ”—came at just the right time. As American hegemony covered the world and Western thought leaders were proclaiming an end of history, players could take to their screens to build entirely new world orders overnight.
Playing as a historical empire, the game proceeds in turns, with players making decisions simultaneously: founding cities and exploring the world map, most of which is shrouded in darkness—the “fog of war”—until it is properly explored. They go about declaring war, producing units, from archers to tanks to nuclear weapons, building world wonders, and ensuring access to key resources. The game’s manual, a 125-page tome, told players they “have great flexibility in your plans and strategies but, to survive, you must successfully respond to the forces that historically shaped the past.”
Thirty-five years later, and seven games in—with a plethora of spinoffs—tens of millions of copies have been sold. Tens of thousands play daily. More than a generation has passed, and many players who grew up moving their small, pixelated scouts around the edges of Civ’s world map have now surely entered the real-world halls of power themselves. Whereas past generations learned of war and strategy from actual war, today’s learned it from Civilization.
While the teaching method is rather different, the lessons are the same: soft power is a comforting myth, hard power is what truly determines international winners and losers, peace is obtained by a balance of that hard power, and to access hard power, states require resources.
It is a simple message which flies in the face of modern international relations scholars and the thinking which has, until recently, dominated Western foreign policymaking. It also clearly has unnerved the game designers themselves, who over successive iterations of the Civilization games have sought to obfuscate that reality by changing the rules and trying, and failing, to artificially induce players to seek soft power. In a sense, they have inadvertently created a perfect metaphor for those in Washington and Brussels who have desperately sought to uphold the crumbling myths of the liberal international order.
From Hard Power to Soft Power
The first Civilization was relatively simple. There were a handful of playable empires, including England, France, Russia, America, China, and Egypt. Victory could only be achieved in two ways. The first was surviving until a player builds a ship which reaches Alpha Centauri, wherein a point system determines the winner.
The second was when one player has wiped out everyone else. The manual seeks to warn players that this is difficult—but this warning did not stop untold world wars from breaking out amongst players, with smaller players working together to stop the stronger from reaching certain goals. Even if multiple civilizations survive long enough for a space race to begin, the closer one gets to building a spacecraft, the harder the other civilizations seek, through the use of force, to stop them from being successful. Players discovered the balance of power in real-time.
Before releasing Civilization II, Sid Meier’s team released Colonization. Inspired by the American Revolution, players build a colony and seek, over time, to gain independence from the European motherland, the sole condition for victory. There is one religion, Christianity, and one of the goals is spreading it to the Indian population.
Civilization II made small updates to the original, but it was the third which made the largest leap forward until that point, introducing “culture” and two new victory conditions: Diplomatic, which meant being elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, or Cultural, by spreading one’s culture around the globe; Civilization IV and V kept these same victory conditions. But they were almost impossible to reach while playing with other people: as players would not vote themselves the loser, a Diplomatic victory was only capable with pliant AI or by having the power to have wiped everyone else out.
Civilization VI added a religious victory, which demands that a player’s chosen religion is the majoritarian religion in all cities around the world. Like the other artificial victory conditions, however, any player getting close to a religious triumph would soon find the others rebalancing against them. Essentially the Religious, Cultural, and Diplomatic conditions were impossible without a strong military.
This, as mentioned previously, clearly rubbed the developers the wrong way. Throughout the series’ development, starting with Civilization III, the creators were seeking to find ways to reduce the violent nature of their digitized international relations. Civ’s V and VI included some variation of a World Congress, designed to allow for some sort of international decision-making, such as trade embargoes. But ultimately, the World Congress appeared tacked-on, a way to artificially rebalance power. The developers seem to have acknowledged this by dumping the system in Civilization VII—though they made other curious changes.
While the Civilization series was never historically based, it still served to inspire players to look further, be it to pick up a real-world historical atlas, a biography of the leader they played as, or even a book on the mechanics which drive international relations. But in VII, that changed. The developers removed the ability to play as a single civilization throughout a game. Instead, players pick from a strange selection of leaders; “American” leadership is represented by Benjamin Franklin, Harriett Tubman, and Lafayette. Players then remain with those leaders while changing civilizations as the game reaches new eras. Barbarians, which had appeared throughout earlier entries as randomly-spawning, violent enemies, were eliminated in favor of “independent powers,” as the developers argued that they now “[thought] about these things more deeply” and that they could “do a little bit better than [using terminology such as barbarians].” The new independent powers could be friendly, or they could be a “nasty military person.”
They also expressed concern about the game’s model of expansion by growing one’s empire, something that the creators were “challenged with.” To solve their moral dilemma, they discussed it with Shawnee representatives, who told them it was acceptable, as the new mechanics theoretically meant Tecumseh could lead the American civilization. But they were careful to be “thoughtful about how the history is presented,” to “not put…the player in situations where a colonial power is now in charge and you didn’t want them to take over your lands.” A far cry from a series which once included a game devoted to colonization.
Eventually, outcry from players forced changes, including letting gamers play as one civilization throughout. But that concession does not abrogate the series’ long and increasingly desperate attempt to mask Thucydides’ truth of international warfare: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
But this desperation did not come in a vacuum. Civilization’s increasingly silly obfuscations of reality matched that of Western civilization’s same attempts in the real world.
End Game
As the Cold War was ending, liberal internationalists were trying to argue that that the old ways of conducting international relations were done, thrown onto the ash heap of history along with the Soviet Union. World War II had ended most of them, and America’s victory in the Cold War had finished off the remainder. There would be no more changing of borders by force, and international organizations would play host to solving disputes peacefully. Opposition to liberal democracy would melt away. When rare rogue actors did lash out, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Gulf War, the world would unite to stop them too.
This all was an attempt to fundamentally change the nature of international relations. The most famous and oft-repeated of these was Francis Fukuyama’s now much-derided declaration that we had reached the end of history, and that liberal democracy was the final evolution of governance.
The notion that the world no longer needed to adhere to the old rules of the balance of power was on display when President George H.W. Bush, fresh off of victory in the Gulf War, spoke on September 11, 1991 to the United Nations. In his address, he proclaimed a new world order, though not one which would be dominated by a Pax Americana. Instead, it would be a Pax Universalis, “built upon shared responsibilities and aspirations.” The United Nations would play “a key role.” The hard power which had built the United Nations—that of the Allied armies—would give way to a soft power, which would keep the peace forevermore.
This notion, soft power, was particularly audacious, as it represented an entirely new way of thinking about how states interact. International relations departments around the world teach soft power as a critical element of understanding the “science” of international relations. It is treated in classrooms as the yin to hard power’s yang, its equal and opposite. Its existence is taken as a fact, as scientific as water being two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
But far from being a longstanding, critical piece of international relations, “soft power” as a concept only emerged in the late 1980s, and only became truly widespread in the 1990s. The term was made famous by Joseph Nye—the man who also developed “neoliberalism”—an international relations scholar who served in Bill Clinton’s Pentagon. Nye defined soft power as “the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment,” resting on a state’s “culture, values, and policies.” America won the Cold War in this telling due to its military power, but also because of the desires of Soviet citizens to access American culture, like art and blue jeans.
This ignores how America was able to get that culture. Figures like Jackson Pollock, who is lauded as an example of America’s Cold War soft power, were covertly promoted by the CIA, hardly a soft power institution, as a means of highlighting the liberal nature of capitalism as opposed to the Soviet Union’s restrictive artistic policies. But Soviets and those in the communist bloc did not wish for blue jeans because they were examples of America: they wanted them because they were comfortable, and the communists made them difficult to obtain. Had the Soviet Union managed its own internal affairs better, it likely would not have collapsed. People did not want American blue jeans—they just wanted blue jeans.
Weaker countries which were supposedly bastions of soft power, such as Sweden, or even entities like the European Union, only managed to do so under the umbrella of hard power. Sweden was neutral until recently, and the European Union has spent its entire existence under America’s protection; with the exception of Finland and Sweden, two unique cases, not a single country joined the European Union before joining NATO, even if it was only a matter of months. The European Union itself only came into existence in 1992, after the Soviet Union was ended and Bush’s America-driven Pax Universalis had come about.
As for the result of Pax Universalis? There have been no world wars, yes, though we are constantly warned that the globe stands on the precipice of a third, and world wars themselves were the exception in history, not the rule. Nevertheless, there is no pax, and universalis exists only in the dreams of liberal internationalists.
The United Nations itself, much like Civilization’s World Congress, feels tacked on and unnecessary. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described it similarly earlier this year, saying the organization “has no answers and has played virtually no role” in solving today’s problems. Which makes sense: the UN was created as a means for the victorious powers of World War II to divide the world and ensure that they would remain in charge. Even the number of member states was carefully managed to ensure a roughly equal composition (this was why the Soviet Union fought to ensure that Belarus and Ukraine were counted as separate states for voting purposes). It was never about replacing hard power with soft power, it was about dressing up hard power in order to make it palatable after the brutality of World War II.
The three major powers today—the USA, China, and Russia—have mostly left the soft power costume behind, though the United States has only done so with the advent of the second Trump administration. With that recognition, the liberal international order—such as it was—has been transformed into an international arena, one in which power, and obtaining the resources to allow for the perpetuation and expression of that power, is all that matters. This has played out across the globe, from the Trump Corollary to ensuring access to critical minerals to finding ways to keep oil flowing during the Iran War.
Civilization players would find it all rather familiar.
