Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Gary Murphy and this is

the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives

and the events that have helped shape them. Now this week we are recording from Ukraine

where I've been covering the war for Channel 4 News but we couldn't be speaking to a

more apt guest because joining us today is the professor of politics at Stanford University

Francis Fukuyama and of course he's most famous perhaps for that book 30 years ago the

end of history and the last man but he has a new work out at the moment one of many it's called

liberalism and it's discontent and it's very relevant to everything that is going on today. Francis

Fukuyama thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much. Let's begin with the war

straight forwardly. What do you think this war is fighting for? Is it more than Ukraine?

Yes definitely obviously the Ukrainians themselves are fighting for the independence and sovereignty

of their country but there's a much larger issue at stake because the ambitions of Vladimir Putin are

much larger. He wants to not just re-incorporate Ukraine into a greater Russia but he really wants to

roll back the entire democratization that happened in parts of the former Soviet Union like Ukraine

and Georgia and Moldova but also in Eastern Europe I think that he wants to extend his sphere of

influence all the way back to what it was at the time of the Cold War and so the freedom of quite a

lot of other countries are resting on this particular fight. I mean you say quite a lot of other

countries and obviously we've all discussed the threats to the Baltic States and Poland and the

former Soviet Union but is it perhaps even bigger than that? I mean is this actually a fight about

liberal democracy? Well it is Putin has gotten support from a whole bunch of populist leaders

in established democracies so that includes Viktor Orban and Hungary, Erickse Moran,

Marine Le Pen and France, leaders of the AFD in Germany and Donald Trump and a number of other

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