Welcome to Bait to Differ. The Bullworks Weekly Roundtable

discussion featuring Civil conversation across the

political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I'm Mona

Sharon's indicated columnist and policy editor, the Bullwork, and I'm joined by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the

Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker of the Week, and Linda Chavez of the

Niskanin Center. Our special guest this week is Frank Fukiyama of Stanford University

Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. We are delighted to have everybody together to discuss some very important issues and we're going to start with what is happening in Ukraine.

I'm going to start with you, Frank, you wrote a very provocative piece for American

purpose where you said that Ukraine is the front-line state in the global geopolitical struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

And I'd like to start there because there are a lot of people who do not believe that there is currently a

geopolitical struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. They think that

with the end of the Cold War, it's all in the past, and now it's simply

a matter of great power rivalry.

Well, I wish it were true that geopolitics is dead, but unfortunately this ideological dimension is really very powerful,

certainly in Vladimir Putin's mind.

I think that he has been talking a lot about threats of NATO to Russian security and I

think this is actually a lot of BS. The real threat that Ukraine poses is the fact that it is a genuine democracy.

I have gone to Ukraine. We run a lot of programs in Ukraine, so I've been there a lot over the last few

years and it's a free society.

It's a society where people can associate, they can complain, they can write articles criticizing

the government, they can do all sorts of things that you can do in a normal liberal democracy that you simply could not do in Russia.

And Putin has made a big deal out of the fact that there's a certain traditional

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