Francis Fukuyama: Trump and the Crisis of Liberalism | Foreign Affairs Interview

I'm Dan Curts failen and this is the Foreign Affairs interview what a lot of people that supported Harris were surprised by was the power of economic discontents to overwhelm anything like support for Global democracy Donald Trump's Victory comes at a moment of turbulence for Global democracy it's been a year of almost Universal backlash against incumbent leaders by voters apparently eager to express their anger with the status quo and also an era when liberalism has been in Retreat if not in crisis Francis fukiyama a political scientist now at Stanford University has done as much as anyone

to elucidate the currents shaping and reshaping global politics he published the end of History more than three decades ago and in the years since he has written a series of influential essays for foreign affairs and other Publications so I wanted to speak to fukiyama to understand what Trump's return to the presidency might mean for Lial democracy and whether its future in the United States and around the world is truly at stake Frank thanks so much for joining me as we start to attempt to make sense of what Donald Trump's return to the presidency means for

Global democracy and also for America's role in the world going forward well that's a big question that we're going to be thinking about a lot in the next few weeks that's right so let me start by going back to a piece you wrote in foreign affairs a few months ago called the year of Elections has been good for democracy you were taking stock of the first part of a year in which something like half the global population was voting for new leadership and that was from the the UK and France to India and Indonesia and

Mexico and many others you noted in that piece that quote fears that this year would reflect the global Triumph of illiberal populism have so far been proved wrong but you did note that big test would come in the United States uh we have now seen the results of that test how do you assess the year of Elections now what exactly does Trump's Victory mean for Liberal democracy here and abroad and how should it shape the way we think about the state of global democracy in this moment yeah you know my colleague Larry Diamond wrote another

piece for you that kind of updated what I had written and I think we had the same bottom line that uh the American election was the most important election of all of the ones occurring around the world it would set a pattern for global politics thereafter and I think that it's not good for Global democracy I think that Trump's victory has already been celebrated by all the wrong people from my point of view as a as a committed liberal Democrat people like Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin and a whole bunch of political leaders that are

not terribly committed especially to a kind of liberal form of democracy have all I think taken encouragement and I think that it means in Europe for example that you know the national rally in France or brothers of Italy other populist political parties are going to jump on the bandwagon and push the entire region to the right and you know we saw that bolsonaro was imitating Trump when he was elected in Brazil and so you could get other imitators popping up in other parts of the world so you've been writing about the crisis of liberalism for

for years I think this goes back long before Trump and I'm curious as you assess Trump's re-election if you see this as a kind of historical hinge point or real kind of change in the the direction of history or just one more step in liberalism's Retreat and I suppose as we do this it would be worth defining liberalism for people who are thinking of this in the American political context okay well let's begin with the definition part so liberal democracy is a political system with two separate parts the Democracy really has to do with accountability

to populations through elections hopefully free and fair elections the liberal part has to do with constraints on the power of the state imposed by checks and balances and a constitution and fundamentally by a rule of law that limits what the state can do to its own citizens as it tries to exercise power and in the case of these populists the real threat is not to democracy because you know they are for the most part legitimate elected you know erdogan in Turkey Modi in India Donald Trump in the United States what they threaten in the first

instance is much more the liberal part of liberal democracy that is to say the rule of law and so they want to skirt the kinds of checks that exist on their power by packing courts by intimidating journalists by trying to revamp the bureaucracy so that it will carry out their wishes more fully and I think that this is something that is true in every one of these cases where an illiberal populist has been elected and I expect that's going to happen in the United States now does that mean in this country that it's the end

of liberal democracy I rather doubt it you know there was this big discussion of fascism in the last couple of weeks of the election campaign and I think that that was a that was the wrong framing for what you know we should fear and expect because you weren't going to get a march on Rome or brown shirted people saluting Donald Trump uh what I think it would look like is much more like what happened in Hungary since Victor Orban came back to Power in 2011 which is a gradual erosion of the liberal institutions in Hungary

as he put more and more of them under his control now the United States is not Hungary it's a much bigger more complex society with many more checks and balances among which is something like federalism so I think you are going to get a pretty vigorous push back from Blue States and other places it's going to put a real damper on his ability to deport undocumented immigrants as he's promised to do because a lot of them live in blue jurisdictions where there's not going to be a willing you know Cadre of enforcement officers that will

follow you know a national dictator and so I think that it's going to be a a slow process of erosion where the normative changes are probably the most significant in terms of what presidents think they can do and what they can get away with but it's still going to be a democracy and I think there's a chance you know some of his policies seem to be so counterproductive like across theboard tariffs of 20% and the attempt to deport millions of of people that are embedded in communities and critical to the labor force that you could

get a big reaction to this and in the 2026 midterms you'll see the Republicans thrown out so that's democracy working as it should I don't want to venture a prediction how that's going to play out but I think we should be far from thinking that somehow our system isn't going to continue to work I want to turn to some of those forward-looking questions in a moment but I want to First Linger on some of the explanations for how we got here in your account of the crisis of liberalism you focused on a few failures as

you see them the first of those and I believe the most important in your framework is the turn toward you know what is often called neoliberalism in economic policy and that's used in you know often kind of sloppy and inaccurate ways but I think it broadly would refer to a too much faith in markets not enough attention to concentrations of power in certain industries and inequality and and other kind of defects of the market system the Biden Administration could have been reading your account of that crisis they you know kind of explicitly turned away from

this you saw this in domestic policy and various ways um and you also saw it in in international Economic Policy Jake Sullivan the national secur adviser gave a couple of very notable speeches kind of pronouncing the end of of neoliberalism in in global economics and there was not you know much in the new way of trade deals and a lot of the signature initiatives were much closer to what someone who was in the kind of anti-neoliberal Camp would have suggested what did you make of those policies and especially the international dimensions of that and why

didn't it work politically why did that not seem to have effects on working-class voters in the United States well it's uh something we're going to have to be analyzing for some time in the future one thing that the Blogger Noah Smith noted is that people care much more about inflation than about employment and something like the IRA or the chips act that were industrial policies that were in tended to shift manufacturing to the United States may have been good for employment but they were not very large scale and average people simply did not feel the

effects of you know a semiconductor plant in Phoenix but everybody feels inflation and that really hit a lot of workingclass pocketbooks very hard and I think that swamped any positive impact you know an industrial policy meant to build the manufacturing base in the United States no matter who does it that's a really long-term project and I think that that's one of the reasons why we didn't really see you know much of a political benefit to the Harris campaign from those sorts of things one thing that is striking to me is how we're seeing in some

ways uh similar manifestations of this crisis in places with very different political models very different kinds of politics and you can look at a whole set of different countries around the globe where you're seeing similar kinds of Crisis I went back to a piece that you wrote in 2020 in foreign affairs called the pandemic and political order that's very dangerous you know reading my old stuff is really dangerous but this one I think you're going to be happy to hear because you this was of course very early in the process of grappling with what the

pandemic would mean we were right in the the middle of that first phase of it you did note that um and I'm quoting you here future historians will Trace comparably large effects to the current pandemic the challenge is figuring them out ahead of time but you note that some of them were likely to be the proliferation conspiracy theories the turn against establishments how much of that is driving this Global anger at incumbents and turn against incits globally yeah I I think that's huge we didn't realize it I think at the time as we were living

through the end of the pandemic but it had a big effect in discrediting existing governments and you know a lot of that discrediting was unfair because a lot of them were trying to do their best but the measures and the way it affected Ordinary People really quite large I mean shutting an entire Society down for months at a time you know in a way it's kind of amazing if that doesn't have a big effect and I think that in terms of the specific trumpian narrative about the government being untrustworthy was vastly reinforced by the pandemic

and it reflected some real policy I would say not malign intentions but mistakes you know so for example in a lot of blue states in the United States and in other countries abroad they closed schools for too long that was often times a result of political pressure from teachers unions and this sort of thing but it really convinced a lot of people that the government was more attentive to these interest groups than they were to the welfare of children in general and I just think it made you know people very grouchy I you know on

the Democratic party side I think the lockdown really accentuated the big Progressive reaction after the killing of George Floyd in mid 2020 and all of a sudden you know all of this could come out in a lot of demonstrations violence and that in turn Sparks this big reaction on the right where people say oh so that's what the Democrats are really about you know it's trashing City centers and that sort of thing so I just think that we're living with you know these consequences and it's going to be very hard to restore any basic Fai

and Trust in the ordinary operations of Government after that experience I want to go back to one other thing you wrote this one was before I think Donald Trump was even a prominent figure on the scene at least on the political scene and that's the book you did on political order and political Decay I think about a decade ago this was published and you know you know the inability of Institutions to adapt to changes and changes that are in some cases accelerating we would have thought I think that that Trump would have been the kind

of shock that would force institutions to change and adapt it seems like that that did not happen uh that did not happen under trump it did not happen um as much as you would want in the Biden Administration does that tell you that the system is so kind of sclerotic and fixed that there's little hope of real adaptation how do you kind of account for that stasis and what would change it well look it's not just Trump I mean we've had two other really big exogenous shocks so the first uh was the financial crisis in

2008 and the second was the pandemic and both of these are big things that affect everybody in the society they're the sorts of events that should trigger you know in the first place National unity and then hopefully lead to a consensus that there are structural things wrong that need to be fixed and instead every single one of them deepened the existing polarization and made it less likely that we would actually confront some of these problems because we can't agree on the solutions and that weakens us overall and makes a real reform even more difficult and

I do think it just demonstrates how rigid our institutions are if you were writing a new constitution today from the ground up you would change many many aspects of what the founding fathers Beed the Constitution itself makes its own revision so difficult that in a still divided Society it's it's really hard to make those adjustments so that reinforces the general point I was making in that political order book that that's what political Decay is it's it's when institutions that were created in one time period to deal with the issues of that time period become so

rigid that you can't fix them uh that's the moment when the system gets into a lot of trouble turning back to what we may see in the the months and years ahead I mean you had a think relatively uh optimistic um account earlier of the ability of the system to survive of the democratic system United States to survive even um a more extreme Trump Administration we of course saw last time that you know the kind of institutional guard rails that were designed to prevent overreach from a a president largely held that was true even on

January 6th when despite the the attack on the capital it did not end with the overturning of the election and you saw figures within the administration at various points blunting some of Trump's more anti-democratic impulses do you expect those guard rails to remain in place are there things that you are particularly focused on as sources of resilience or on the uh on the flip side as sources of risk well I've actually been focused more on the weaknesses I think that Trump and his colleagues realized that he did not accomplish a lot of things in the

first term because of personnel that he had inherited a an apparatus in the White House and in the agencies that was really mainstream Republican and he didn't like that he went through 44 senior officials 26 cabinet ministers in the course of his four-year term and they either resigned or were fired because he didn't like the way that they were implementing what he wanted to have done and so this time around they've been quick in making a lot of appointments because they've been Gathering names for people that Trump believes will be adequately loyal to him to

fill these positions quickly I think the biggest threat on the horizon is this return to schedule F right this was an executive order at the end of the first Trump term basically putting all federal bureaucrats on an atwi basis where he could fire them not for cause and replace them with people that were loyalist basically that was a system that existed in the 19th century before the passage of the 1884 Pendleton Act that implemented you know Merit requirements for hiring and promotion in the federal bureaucracy and now every is going to be political and that

you know has big consequences for expertise in government uh it's going to as in the 19th century be a huge opportunity for corruption where people can simply buy their way into office and it's also going to enable Trump to accomplish I think much more of his agenda than he was able to in the first Administration so that's why I think that we're in for a much more determined and turbulent time in the next four years we'll be back after a short break and now back to my conversation with Francis fukiyama I want to turn the

conversation towards some of the foreign policy and Global dimensions of the next four years but so I want to start by think reflecting on a tension that we see in a lot of these discussions between the pessimism of the domestic conversation and the domestic mood in the United States and in America that remains in a very very good position internationally that you know in many ways is in as good a position as it's ever been in whether you look at its share of the global economy and the record of economic growth the dominance of its

companies you the strength of our alliances internationally has also been a kind of striking feature the last few years it seems we're either not kind of paying a price for the domestic political dysfunction or somehow that dysfunction is a sideshow or somehow causes us to miss these kind of underlying strengths how do you understand that tension that kind of seeming Paradox what do you think accounts for it I disagree with your assertion that it hasn't already you know weakened our International position I felt for some time now that the single thing that is the real

measure of American decline is our internal polarization because it doesn't matter how good your economy is or how powerful your military is if you can't agree on how to use those resources then you might as well not have them and I think that's the situation we're in right now you see this in the case of Ukraine where we could really push back the Russians very decisively but Republicans last winter cut off all military assistance to that country for six months and that was a big issue within the campaign I think that deterrence depends on credibility

and I think there you know you're not going to know it until you hit a crisis where it becomes evident that you don't have that credibility but I think that you know if Russia subdues Ukraine and then moves on to other Targets in the former USSR I think that they're going to be much less worried about a strong push back from the United States same thing in East Asia you know if I were xiin ping I would you know I might actually be tempted to test the United States because although Trump talks tough about China

and other threats he really hasn't delivered on that he's really reluctant to use course he keeps talking about the danger of World War III and so forth so I think that we're already living in an era where our domestic internal divisions are weakening our Global credibility let's stick with Ukraine because I think that is the foreign policy crisis at the moment that is probably most at risk of a Sharp change in US policy in the near- term Trump has of course said that he wants to end the war on day one you have various figures

in in his administration starting with JD Vance who have talked about a settlement that would look quite uh quite similar to what Vladimir Putin would propose what he would want what do you expect in the first months on Ukraine and if we do get a quick settlement if that's you know something that allows Putin to keep the you know 20% or so of Ukraine that's in his hands currently what will that mean going forward globally how do you expect that to play out well first of all I don't think that you can have a peace

settlement in Ukraine because I don't think any Ukrainian government will formally agree to seed those territories that Russia now occupies what you could get is a ceasefire that would in a way freeze the current front lines for the time being but getting Ukraine to agree to that is actually going to be pretty difficult without a NATO guarantee basically you know it's interesting over the last year there has been a change in Ukrainian attitudes a year ago when I was in Kiev people would say not a single inch of territory we're going to keep fighting until

we've recovered everything I think now there's a little bit more realism and so they would probably be willing to trade a ceasefire for a NATO guarantee uh it doesn't mean that they formally give up on those occupied territories but it's something they wouldn't have done a year ago but it does depend on that guarantee and I just don't see that being forthcoming and so I would worry a great deal about your ability to get some kind of settlement now if it is really a pro-russian deal the one thing that makes me a little bit hopeful

that the worst will not happen is that the one thing Donald Trump really does not like is to be seen as a loser and if the Russians get such a favorable deal that they can then roll their tanks into Kiev that's not going to look good for Trump and I think he knows that he knows how bad the Afghan withdrawal was for Joe Biden that's really the moment when his poll ratings really cratered because it looked so disgraceful and I think he probably doesn't want to put himself in a similar position with regard to Ukraine

so that may stay his enthusiasm for to pro-russian a deal but it's going to be hard one way or the other because you know what the Russians will agree to and what the ukrainians will agree to at this point is so far apart and whether we would really be willing to Strongarm the ukrainians to do something really didn't want to do I you know I'm not sure that's possible even with Republican control of both houses of Congress and is that mean we get a a gradual disintegration of the Ukrainian position that leaves us in a

similar Place yeah it could be I mean their military position is deteriorating and they simply don't have the manpower to maintain a front that's that long and so I would worry that we actually would have to escalate in certain ways if we're going to keep that from happening and then looking at China which you also mentioned earlier you know I could imagine a a a confident China a confident XI Jin ping who feels a little bit more assured about his own position kind of being patient in this moment and in accepting that we'll see American

alliances gradually diminishing and that his position will get stronger in time you could also Imagine them kind of grabbing at opportunities in the near- term for the reasons that you laid out earlier how do you think those discussions will play out in in Beijing and what will that mean for the US China relationship next next year well you know this gets even more speculative you know the one thing I would note is that xiin ping is not a risk-taker the way Putin is uh he has in his career been pretty cautious about you know rolling

the dice in a in a really big way and moving on Taiwan is really a huge risk you know for for him but he may be tempted to do other things a lot of it depends on the relative strengths of the Coalition so one one big thing that's affecting both Far East and Europe is that there really is this uh axis of Evil that's appeared uh you know we talked about this at the time of the Iraq War in 2003 but right now Russia China North Korea and Iran are cooperating militarily and at the same

point our alliances are fraying there's a question about whether Trump really wants to support European countries that he claims aren't paying their dues and then in the Far East you've got this situation where both Korea and Japan have in a way leadership crisis where they have weak leaders uh Japan in particular right now you know the ruling party lost its majority and the current prime minister although he was recently reconfirmed he's not an A type that projects a lot of self-confidence so I think there's things to worry about in terms of you know you don't

have to risk an allout assault on Taiwan you could have a naval blockade you can step up economic pressure there's a lot of things that China could do and they may well be tempted to push on that in the near term you wrote in 2012 in foreign affairs that the single most serious challenge to Liberal democracy in the world today comes from China which is combined authoritarian government with a partially marketized economy that model doesn't look as good right now um that's not to say that we should kind of declare the the the end of

that system but it doesn't look like it's delivering results in the way that it did in 2012 do you think that will have a significant effect on these Dynamics um given what XI Jen ping is contending with economically and and in every other way well it could have an effect but we don't know what the sign is whether it's positive or negative if they really are going into a period of prolonged stagnation that means that they have fewer resources to use to build their uh military they have to worry about public opinion being really unhappy

declining incomes and that sort of thing on the other hand it may stimulate them to act now because you know they may figure that in 10 years it'll be worse or that the US and the West could recover so it's one of those things that uh you could easily imagine the leadership pushing in opposite directions given that economic decline that you talked about I do think that in the long run it should make some difference in terms of the appeal of their model because because you know Xi Jinping is basically he's still a communist in

many ways and he really wants to have State control of the economy he doesn't want to allow the development of private sector power centers that might challenge the Communist party and that's the model that's really kind of floundering and so you know in the very long term that's probably not good for China but in the short run I'm not sure it makes much of a difference I does it in some ways give you hope in the viability of the liberal Democratic model and that there's not a clear ideological alternative offered by China at least well

that was always the meaning of my assertion about the end of History you know it wasn't that there weren't competitors and nationalists and you know anti-democratic forces but there wasn't a really plausible alternative model that was very attractive to people for the last 30 years I felt that China was the single system that could play that role because they were were very successful economically they were socially stable uh politically coherent um but I think in the end it's revealed certain weaknesses when you concentrate that much power in a single leader and I'm still not convinced

that that's the most sustainable model now of course the American Democratic model doesn't look that stable or powerful either so maybe we're going to face a period of competitive decline you know noted the weakness of governments in South Korea and Japan you could kind of go across Europe and look at a number of governments that are struggling whether it's the German Coalition that's falling apart or macron in France a new UK labor government that is having a uh fairly tough time dealing with the economic problems there there really doesn't seem to be a leader of

a liberal Democratic Society that can take up the mantle of of this cause globally in the years ahead no that's right that's something very worrisome so the question that this raises then is is there some systematic or systemic reason why the West is not producing strong leaders and that's a you know it's a question that I wonder about I don't have an answer to that I hope it's not the case that you know there's something deeply buried in the DNA of you know modern democracies that uh prevents the emergence of and you know I guess

in the end I would have to say that I don't believe that that's the case because if you just look historically you know we've gotten the Lincoln and the Roosevelts and the Churchills and other people that have risen to the occasion and I don't really see why that couldn't happen in the future but it is kind of a role of the dice whether that kind of leader appears in any given generation I was struck going back again to work you've done in foreign affairs in the last few years you wrote a piece around the time

of the start of the war in Ukraine drawing on a book you published on liberalism around that time when you saw Ukraine as in some ways a useful wakeup call a necessary wakeup call in that it reminded liberals of the the importance of nationalism and identity I think Biden in some ways got that he certainly you know tried to give speeches to that effect but it didn't ultimately connect do you see other ways of trying to build that sense of identity that would be consistent with the kind of of liberal Democratic politics you you support

well Biden's message was kind of contradictory because the big alternative on the left has been some form of identity politics in which you don't actually stress patriotism and a single national identity but you celebrate all the particular identity groups in your Coalition and he didn't necessarily give up on that approach to American politics and kamla Harris she didn't stress her identity as a woman and as a person of color too overtly but she also didn't break with the kind of identity politics popular on the left wing of the democratic party which I think she probably

could have so I do think that there's room still for a person on the left to cultivate national identity you know Harris tried to do this I mean she talked about patriotism and having a strong military and so forth but I just think that in the time that she was a candidate she wasn't able to sound too credible on on all of that stuff and I think that that would be a task for any future Democrat running for national office the other piece of this in in Biden's rhetoric and to some extent in Harris's the

lesso was to talk about the global battle between democracy and authoritarianism this was true in the context of Ukraine the kind of you know Free World versus threats to it um it was also true in the way he talked about his foreign policy more generally were you surprised by just the extent to which that did not seem to be effective for him yes I was I guess what a lot of people that supported Harris were surprised by was the power of economic discontents to overwhelm anything like support for Global democracy because and this is what

Biden kept saying the economy is actually doing well unemployment is very low we got control of inflation what are people so upset about and I think that the Baseline for discontent has dropped a lot for a lot of complicated reasons and therefore politicians are going to have to pay much more attention to the way that ordinary people are being affected by these conditions the other thing is um these are really problems of the working class and there's been this big shift as the working class has moved from the Democrats to the Republicans and I think

that the Democrats in particular continue to take for granted the support of working people and especially working people of color and Hispanics and it turned out that that simply wasn't working any longer so yeah there's a lot of adjustments that they're going to have to make since you mentioned the end of History I will bring it up I was not going to since you've been talking about this for for 32 years uh almost without stop but if you could go back and tell yourself in 1992 about the course of the last decade or two what

would surprise you and what wouldn't or what would challenge that framework and what would not well the single thing that would challenge the framework the most is what's happened in the United States because you know with new democracies of Poland elects a populist party or Hungary goes bad I mean that doesn't really uh challenge the core of the thesis but for the world's most powerful and oldest democracy to succumb to the kind of populism that we've seen and weakening of its commitment to rule of law that's something I really would not have expected to see

I always had this what looks like now a naive faith that American voters could make a mistake but they would correct that mistake over time and with this last election I think they've kind of doubled down on the mistake instead uh and I'm not sure when and if the self-correction is going to happen we will end on that note and I will say that we will look forward to reading you and and I hope publishing you on a lot of these uh still quite big questions in the months and years ahead Frank thanks so much

for doing this okay thanks very much Dan thank you for listening you can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com the Foreign Affairs interview is produced by Julia Fleming dresser Molly mcin Ben mner and Caroline Wilcox our audio engineer is Todd joerger our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you heard please take a minute to rate and review it we release a new show every other Thursday thanks again for tuning in [Music]

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