<nettime> Francis Fukuyama warns Trump is not a realist

[Lucy Pummell via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear all,

Please enjoy today's latest Institute of Art and Ideas article, an 
interview conducted between the IAI and American political scientist, 
political economist, and international relations scholar, Francis Fukuyama.
Here is the link so you can read online: 
https://iai.tv/articles/francis-fukuyama-warns-trump-is-not-a-realist-auid-3128?_auid=2020
Alternatively, please find the full article below.

I hope you enjoy,

Lucy

_____

*Francis Fukuyama warns Trump is not a realist*

/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.

*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.” 
<https://www.ft.com/content/f4dbc0df-ab0d-431e-9886-44acd4236922> 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 
<http://iai.tv/articles/the-end-of-the-west-means-even-more-than-you-think-auid-3093> 
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.”
*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 
<http://iai.tv/video/mearshimer-and-the-death-of-ideology>. 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.
*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 
<http://iai.tv/video/make-china-great-again-steve-tsang-on-xi-jinping>. 
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.**

<https://iai.tv/video/the-economics-of-a-viable-palestinian-state>

*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.
*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.


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