The Daily Populous Tuesday April 1st, 2025 evening edition
Authored by iai.tv and submitted by whoamisri

Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, predicted that liberal democracy would be humanity's final stage of ideological evolution. But with rising autocratization across the world, the ascent of China, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many argue this hypothesis is now false. In this exclusive IAI Live Special interview, Fukuyama defends his account of “the end of history” from critics, explains why John Mearsheimer’s realism is flawed, and uncovers what Trump’s Greenland and Canada statements mean for global relations.

Charlie Barnett: You famously wrote in The End of History that liberalism normatively satisfies the most basic human longings and, therefore, can be expected to be more universal and durable than other principles. Is this still a fair characterisation of your position today?

Professor Francis Fukuyama: Just to state the obvious, we're in a very different period than when my original article and book came out. Democracy at that point was expanding very rapidly, and it's been in retreat over the last, I would say, almost 20 years now; really, since about 2008. I think that this retreat has been accelerating, especially with Donald Trump taking office in the United States. I would say, of all the unexpected things that have happened, the fact that you could get this much regression and that Americans could vote for a demagogue like Trump is something I really wouldn't have anticipated. The concept of the end of history was not mine. It was really the philosopher Georg Hegel who articulated it, and it was used then by Karl Marx. Both of them believed that history was directional, that there was progress, and that societies evolved and changed over time. The question of the end of history was: To what sort of society were they progressing? Hegel's was basically a liberal society coming out of the French Revolution, and Karl Marx's answer was a communist utopia. My point back in 1989 was that the Marxist version of the end of history did not look like it was going to happen. If anything, we were going to end up with a liberal state. I think there's still a lot to be said for this because you need to step back a little bit from current events. Since the Hegelian declaration, we've had a lot of things happening in the world, but over the past couple of hundred years, since the French and American revolutions, the fundamental idea that a modern society needs to be based on an equality of recognition has really been accepted by you know, virtually everybody. There are very few people that say, systematically, this race or this particular group is superior to every other one.

The other foundation has to do with economics, that liberal societies tend to be the richest societies in the world. Even China today, which is not a liberal political order, has adopted important parts of economic liberalism, and that has a lot to do with why they're as rich as they are today. And so the question that I was trying to address is whether there's an alternative form of social organisation that is higher than a liberal democracy connected to a market economy. And to this point, I haven't seen it.

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In the Financial Times, you wrote that Trump's election represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism, and they voted with “full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented.” If the normative defence of liberalism is in large part what people prefer, but they are rejecting liberalism en masse, how do we ground its defence?

I don't think that I said that the American voters were rejecting liberalism as a matter of principle. I think that Americans remain deeply liberal. They actually don't think about these things in terms of ideas or doctrines. I think that they remain fundamentally liberal. Nobody wants to abolish the Bill of Rights or have an authoritarian government. And, in fact, I believe what I was referring to when I said that they knew what they were voting for was that they wanted a leader that promised them all sorts of good things in the short run. They didn't care that much about his bad character, and they should, therefore, not have been surprised when that bad character became evident once he was elected to a second term. But that's very different from saying, “Yeah, we actually don't like our freedoms. We really wish that we had a dictator running, or if not a dictator, a Viktor Orban type.”

If you look at the people on January 6th that assaulted the Capitol, the vast majority of them had comfortable jobs and middle-class lives.

Some, like John Gray, have argued that problems like inflation, stagnating wages, and de-industrialization are inherent to the structure of liberalism itself. What would you say to a critique like that?

Well, you have to decompose it into different elements. We didn't have simple economic liberalism over the past 40 to 50 years, we had something that is sometimes labelled neoliberalism, meaning it was an extreme version of market economics. It was pushed very strongly by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s in which the state was demonised, a lot was deregulated (especially in financial markets) and that led to both the rise in inequality and a destabilisation of the global financial system, and that is not the same thing as liberalism. Fundamental classical liberalism really has to do with things like property rights and freedom of commerce, but it doesn't imply this kind of libertarian approach to economic policy. The other thing is that the real complaint about liberalism these days, which motivated a lot of Trump voters, was not about economics, fundamentally. If you look at the people on January 6th that assaulted the Capitol, the vast majority of them had comfortable jobs and middle-class lives. They were more upset by a certain kind of social and cultural liberalism that I would put under the banner of woke liberalism, in which issues like race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are prioritised.

I want to talk about international relations a little bit more generally. Some might say that we are seeing a surge in a realist interpretation of global politics, namely the idea that there's no higher power in international politics and that great powers behave to protect their own interests rather than adhering to a set of moral or political values. You used to be very critical of this school of thought. Are you still critical now?

Well, I would make a distinction in the different types of realism. There's a realism of ends, and then there's a realism of means. And I've always been a believer in the realism of means. That is to say, you can pursue non-realist goals, but you need to do that realistically with an appreciation for the importance of power and, occasionally, for the importance of military power. The realism of ends is something different — like John Mearsheimer asserting that it doesn't matter what kind of regime you have, that all countries want to maximise their power. And that, I think, is simply empirically wrong, and it's normatively wrong because countries do pursue very different types of foreign policies based on their domestic orders.

Trump was actually quite surprising because I, and I think many other people, had assumed he was an isolationist.

You outlined your critique of realism in international affairs earlier, but you've also said that Trump's behaving like an imperialist in many ways, with what he's saying about Greenland, Canada and Gaza. Do you think the future is one where Trump or the US or great powers behave imperialistically and retreat into their spheres of influence?

Russia and China never abandoned the spheres of influence type of thinking, especially Russia. Putin has a very 19th-century view of Russia's mission. It is based on territory and physical extent. China has had territorial ambitions for the last several decades. The militarization that it's undertaken of the South China Sea is not isolationism. It's making a huge assertion about the territorial extent of the country. So these countries haven't changed over the recent years. They simply saw that the balance of power in the world had shifted away from the United States and that they could take advantage of it. What is different is the position of the United States, and there, Trump was actually quite surprising because I, and I think many other people, had assumed he was an isolationist. He had criticized America's forever wars, the fact that we'd gotten involved in all these hopeless conflicts in the Middle East, and that we weren't going to do that anymore. And then all of a sudden, he wants to remake Gaza into a luxury resort. It's a very old understanding of national interest, and one that we had thought had largely disappeared in the thinking of most people in modern, liberal democracies.

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If Trump withdraws decisively from European security, what is the future of Europe?

Well, it depends on choices that the Europeans will have to make. I think that the French have been insisting on the need for a separate European defence capacity. They've never backed that up sufficiently with the kinds of military investments that you would need to make that credible. But this is increasingly going to be on the agenda. Within NATO, there was a division in recent years between the French and other Western Europeans that thought maybe it would be better to have an independent capability. We're going through a very interesting period right now where a lot of Eastern Europe is now beginning to recognise that that strategy isn't going to work because the United States isn't reliable and that Europe has to take care of itself. It certainly has the economic wherewithal to do that. So the question is whether you can get the political agreement to reorganise things. Both the EU and NATO have very defective decision-making systems where, on a lot of critical issues, you need unanimity between 31 countries or 27. And I think if the Europeans don't fix some of those decision-making systems, they're also going to suffer from that kind of weakness.

He has managed to insult and offend virtually everybody in the world, both friends and enemies alike.

As you say, many assumed Trump was an isolationist at first, but now his policies don’t always seem to reflect this ideology. Could it be that Trump is motivated by a realist frame of thought when it comes to power and that his tariffs and foreign policy are ways of legitimizing that power?

Well, he's certainly interested in maximizing power and wealth. But I think that there are different ways that you can be a realist in terms of ends without getting into this kind of imperialism. It might be a disease of larger countries that have options in that regard. But a lot of that classical realism wasn't about everybody trying to grab as much territory as possible. There was a belief that there weren't necessarily universal principles that you needed to follow, but you needed to be a little bit prudent. The way he's behaved is anything but prudent. He has managed to insult and offend virtually everybody in the world, both friends and enemies alike; everybody, apparently, except for Russia and Vladimir Putin. And that doesn't strike me as a very realistic policy, because a realist understanding the importance of power should be able to understand the importance of having friends, and if you slap tariffs on your closest trading partners, countries that you know support you in your own security, that doesn't seem like a very realist policy to me.

Commentators like Michael Linden and Yanis Varoufakis have argued that some of Trump's policies, like tariffs, are mechanisms to negotiate more favourable economic conditions for American exports. What would you say to this?

Well, we'll have to see. I think that's been a favourite way of minimizing Trump's impact. By just saying, “He's a clever negotiator, and he's going to drop all of this,” the business community, both here and in Europe, believed that was what he was all about and that it was okay to support him. I think that he's a lot crazier than that. This belief that tariffs are a way of raising revenue, that they have no downsides, just seems to me to stem from a lack of understanding of basic economics or of economic history. And I think that that's what makes him dangerous. But I'll be the first to admit maybe these are tactics, maybe he wants us to believe he's more credible than we thought, and that he'll drop this whole act at a certain point. We'll just have to see.

DifusDofus on April 1st, 2025 at 15:27 UTC »

Two things can be true

Trump is not realist (instinct driven, transactional thinking, personal grievances)

Realist backdrop within state's security priority still gives Trump the easy path to channel some of his impulses (ex: 'america first', 'sphere of influence': Panama, Greenland, monroe doctrine 2.0 focused on everything from central america above)

Matrim_WoT on April 1st, 2025 at 14:42 UTC »

This falls in line with how he's typically viewed Trump as being incoherent policy wise, transactional, and wanting to humiliate other countries he perceives as weaker. It's been easy for other commentators the past few weeks to see him as a realist trying to revive SOE when that's an inaccurate way to view it. Or they see him as a mad men when that's also not accurate since Trump lacks clear goals and credibility. American foreign policy has been relatively successful since the end of WW2 because it's always been backed by credibility (NATO) and strategic ambiguity (Taiwan) when necessary. What's happening now is worse than the faux realism seen during the second bush admin in that Trump is damaging alliances and global security for no discernable benefit apart from grievance while causing former allies to seek stronger ties with China and India who are more reliable even through they are less ideologically aligned.

Edit: I'm also clarifying that in his essay, End of History, he's making that case that human ideological evolution flattens out at liberal democracy. He's saying that nothing humans conceive of will bring greater prosperity and cooperation among nations than that. He's contrasting that to other ideologies that claim liberal democracy is a stepping stone to something greater and more utopian.

whoamisri on April 1st, 2025 at 13:37 UTC »

Submission Statement: Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, predicted that liberal democracy would be humanity's final stage of ideological evolution. But with rising autocratization across the world, the ascent of China, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many argue this hypothesis is now false. In this exclusive IAI Live Special interview, Fukuyama defends his account of “the end of history” from critics, explains why John Mearsheimer’s realism is flawed, and uncovers what Trump’s Greenland and Canada statements mean for global relations.