History Main / TheGreatPoliticsMessUp

* No one really expected [[TheApartheidEra apartheid]] to [[VelvetRevolution end peacefully]].

-->Oh, and no one expected [[Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus the Spanish Inquisition.]]

* No one expected China to become an economic power.[[note]]Eric Idle and Tom Lehrer expected it.[[/note]]

** For that matter, even a non-Protestant President had been considered unlikely before Kennedy (Al Smith being Catholic in 1928 helped to lose him the White House).

--> "This is not a peace, it's an cease fire for 20 years" -- Ferdinand Foch, 1919

** Another leader who correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and the Arab Spring was Cuban leader Fidel Castro. However, he also predicted in 2010 that the budding nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea were "proof" that World War III was imminent, something that most experts believe unlikely

** In ''The Next Generation'' episode "The High Ground", Data casually mentions that a series of terrorist attacks lead to both the reunification of Ireland into a single state by 2024. At the point the episode was written (1991), a peace treaty was seen as utterly ''inconceivable'', let alone that it would take effect by the end of that decade. Of course, reunification in full has still not happened, and probably won't for as long as the United Kingdom remains.

* Carl Sagan's ''Series/{{Cosmos}}'', which was produced TheEighties, featured in the original run afterwords in each episode that mentioned the Soviet Union, later the Special Edition of the TheNineties acknowledged this trope in more updated afterwords like the one on the final episode "Who Speaks for Earth?", where it mentions that the world has changed: "Walls have come down and Irreconcilable Ideologies have embraced" while showing footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the abolition of the Apartheid in South Africa and the iconic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in front of Bill Clinton.

* No one expected the [[TheBritishEmpire several]] [[CheeseEatingSurrenderMonkeys European]] [[ImperialGermany colonial]] [[VestigialEmpire empires to fall]]. [[note]]Some, including Jean Jaurès, understood they were about to [[WorldWarOne blow each other to hell]].[[/note]]

** For that matter, even a non-Protestant President had been considered unlikely before Kennedy.

* No one expected the Pope to resign for the first time in four hundred years.

* No one expected a non-white President.

* ''{{Patlabor}}'', created in the late 80s but taking place in the late 90s, has this. The Brocken military mech that shows up to cause trouble for the Mobile Police in every continuity was said to have been commisioned by West Germany's border patrol & the OAV episode featuring it has it "accidentally" falling into the hands of Communist sympathizers as part of some kind of ill-conceived WarForFunAndProfit scheme by the manufacturer. A memorable episode of the TV series involved a Soviet defector bringing an experimental mech to a Japanese seaside resort town where everybody was actually a spy of some sort. The second movie mentions the end of the cold war, but it's uncertain if this is a {{Retcon}} or if it happened sometime between 1998 & 2002 in the movie-verse.

* The arcade versions of the ''VideoGame/StreetFighterII'' games continued to list Zangief's nationality as "USSR" well into 1994 and his ending sequence in all five games even featured a caricature of Mikhail Gorbachev, who is helicoptered in to congratulate him on his victory, espousing the greatness of the "Soviet spirit", even though the 16-bit ports (which were released after the fall of the Soviet Union) already had Zangief addressing Gorbachev as "Mr. Ex-President". It wasn't until ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIV'' that Zangief's nationality was officially changed to Russian (although the ''Alpha'' games released in-between were technically prequels).

* No one expected China to become an economic power.

* No one xpected OsamaBinLaden to be found and killed by American forces.

* No one expected Al-Qaeda, an until-then obscure terrorist group to pull off something as big as 9/11.

* No one expected an until-then obscure terrorist group to pull off something as big as 9/11.

* This is a common trope in very old sports games (especially in sport simulations like FootballManager) since you can manage teams from pre-ColdWar era and control them until beyond the 90s without any changes.

Contrast WhyWereBummedCommunismFell and HistoryMarchesOn.

* Music/DavidBowie's [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWtsV50_-p4 "Where Are We Now?"]] reeks of [[WhyWereBummedCommunismFell Cold War-era nostalgia]], likely inspired by David Bowie's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie#1976.E2.80.9379:_the_Berlin_era Berlin period]], and is a reflection on post-reunification Germany.

** Ironically the [[MisaimedFandom cache of the .su domain]] allows it to be sold at a premium compared to the .ru domain. Lenin would be spinning in his tomb[[hottip:*: if it wasn't a huge tourist attraction]].

* No one really expected OsamaBinLaden to be found and killed by American forces.
** Nobody expected this, or the many other killings of top terrorist leaders, to happen under Barack Obama.
** No one expected an until-then obscure terrorist group to pull off something as big as 9/11, either.

* No one expected Pluto to stop being designated as a full planet. Then again, [[PlutoIsExpendable it was always expendable.]]
* No one expected gay marriage to become such a divisive issue.

* No one expected women to actually achieve legal equality with men.

** It should be noted that Todd's prediction (which was published as ''After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order'' in 2001) was based around the theorized economic growth of the European Union (which would have transitioned into a formal country instead of just an alliance between individual European nations), Russia and Japan, which would result in all three developing into superpowers and challenging the US. That said, he apparently failed to predict the global financial crisis of 2008, which resulted in the European nations losing much of their economic prestige (such that a few of them, namely Greece, Ireland and Spain, were or are near bankruptcy[[note]]though there's a school of thought that says this makes a true United States of Europe ''more'', not less, likely. Only time will tell.[[/note]]) as well as Russia and Japan falling even deeper into their respective ruts from the 90s.

** It should be noted that Todd's prediction (which was published as ''After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order'' in 2001) was based around the theorized economic growth of the European Union (which would have transitioned into a formal country instead of just an alliance between individual European nations), Russia and Japan, which would result in all three developing into superpowers and challenging the US. That said, he apparently failed to predict the global financial crisis of 2008, which resulted in the European nations losing much of their economic prestige (such that a few of them, namely Greece, Ireland and Spain, were or are near bankruptcy)[[note]]though there's a school of thought that says this makes a true United States of Europe ''more'', not less, likely. Only time will tell.[[/note]] as well as Russia and Japan falling even deeper into their respective ruts from the 90s.

** It should be noted that Todd's prediction (which was published as ''After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order'' in 2001) was based around the theorized economic growth of the European Union (which would have transitioned into a formal country instead of just an alliance between individual European nations), Russia and Japan, which would result in all three developing into superpowers and challenging the US. That said, he apparently failed to predict the global financial crisis of 2008, which resulted in the European nations losing much of their economic prestige (such that a few of them, namely Greece, Ireland and Spain, were or are near bankruptcy), [[note]]though there's a school of thought that says this makes a UnitedStatesOfEurope ''more'', not less likely. Only time will tell.[[/note]] as well as Russia and Japan falling even deeper into their respective ruts from the 90s.