Francis Fukuyama on the War in Ukraine, Authoritarianism, and Liberal Democracy

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Eleven months into the war, where do things stand in Ukraine? What does the West need to do to help Ukraine win? What lessons can we draw from the war about the ambitions of authoritarians, the resolve of liberal democracies today, and the most pressing geopolitical challenges we face? To discuss these questions, Bill Kristol is joined by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, who has led important efforts in education and civil society in Ukraine over the last decade. According to Fukuyama, we are in the midst of a difficult moment in the war. Nonetheless, he argues, the fundamental dynamics remain unchanged: Ukraine can win if it receives adequate military and financial support from the West. Fukuyama argues that Ukraine’s impressive performance and Russia’s weakness should force us to confront and reassess the fashionable narrative of pessimism about liberal democracies. The war, as well as other recent developments, has revealed the reserves of strength and resilience in liberal democracies, while the weaknesses of strong states such as Russia and China have become more apparent. This assessment is not one of complacency. Rather, Fukuyama points to the high stakes of the war—and the importance of strengthening our resolve to defend free countries against authoritarian threats.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by
0:19.5	little friend, Frank Fukuyama, who really doesn't need no introduction, but I'll give a very brief one.
0:24.8	Senior fellow at the Freeman Spelling Institute for International Studies at Stanford University,
0:30.6	author of many, very important books and articles, I guess most famously the end of history and
0:36.0	the last man. People always forget the last half of that title. In 1992, a political scientist,
0:42.2	a political economist, a broad thinker about politics and society, what a book called Trust,
0:48.8	which I very much liked in 19, shortly after the end of history of the country, with
0:52.5	the vision X book, wasn't it on social trust and how important it was to prosperity and to
0:59.8	well-functioning societies, books on order and disorder, liberalism. You can look them well up,
1:05.3	but Envin very involved in Ukraine in the last seven, eight years, courses with Ukrainian's
1:13.5	coming to Stanford to study and I think Stanford's done things in Ukraine as well. So we'll begin.
1:18.1	That's the focus of our conversation today. I'm sure we'll go discuss many
1:22.5	other topics as well. So Frank, thanks for joining me today.
1:28.0	Yeah, thanks for having me on, Bill. I'm a regular listener to conversation, so it's a pleasure
1:34.0	to be on. Excellent. And you still agree to be on. That's good. Yeah, that's very surprising.
1:38.9	That's great. Well, anyway, so thanks a lot and let's just jump right in. On you credit,
1:42.9	as I say, I'm sure we'll touch on a million other topics and broader topics, but you've been
1:47.6	writing a lot about the war. You were very early in predicting sort of Putin's failures and
1:54.0	Ukraine's relative successes. We're almost like, what is the January 23rd to speak? So almost
1:59.6	exactly 11 months in. So where in your judgment do we stand and what lessons do you take from it?
2:05.6	Well, I think that at the moment we're in a kind of disparaging phase because
2:12.5	the Ukrainian forward momentum that we saw at the end of the summer has slowed down.
	...

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