By the early 1980s, therefore the ISI regime had been thoroughly discredited. Economic liberalism or open markets and free trade were about to take its place. There trends were reinforced by the growing realization of the economic failures of the Marxist-regimes, and then by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the 1989-1991 period. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Third World economists, businessmen, and government officials, who had been the chief supporters of ISI, were entirely convinced that ISI was bankrupt and that economic liberalism should take its place. In the United States, the emergence of an open markets/free trade regime has been celebrated as a complete victory and the triumph of “our” model, but in the Third World that supposed triumph was far more ambiguous.