Transcription
I think that the United States is in a period of long-term decline. You know, the rest of the world is now slowly adapting to this world in which the United States is really not the kind of big player that it was for most of the 20th century. Given the way the Trump administration has treated its closest allies, nobody would trust the United States. So a good outcome would be everybody stepping back and saying, "Huh, maybe we ought to focus on domestic reform and doing things a little bit better in our own countries and not worry about threatening other people and putting global security on the line. How do you see this interaction or even collision among liberalism, realism, and nationalism?"
Oh, well, so Hi friends, it's a pleasure to tell you that my book, What It Takes Southeast Asia, has been released in English and Bahasa Indonesia. You can buy it through books.game.id or at any of these stores. Now, back to the show.
>> Hi friends. Today we're honored to be graced by Professor Frank Fukuyama at Stanford University. Frank, thank you so much. It's our second time.
>> Yes.
>> Having a discussion.
>> Thank you very much for having me.
>> Recently, you made a remark about someone else's remark about Western civilization in Germany. Talk about that.
>> Yeah. So this was Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He gave a talk at the Mun Munich Security Conference in February. In contrast to um JD Vance who was very hostile to the Europeans, uh Rubio tried to say some nice things and he said we're all part of a common western civilization and uh he was one of the only people in the administration to actually talk about political values uh as opposed to just grabbing oil and territory and this sort of thing. But um I think that if people had watched or listened to him carefully, they might not have been quite so encouraged because there's really a big split in the United States over what the west or western civilization means. Uh I think that Rubio referred to uh the practice of Christianity. Uh and that's one way I think correctly of characterizing Christian I mean Western civilization. It did come out of a Christian culture. But I think uh where I would differ from him is that for many Westerners, what came after Christianity is what's important. You know, Christians fought wars with each other for 150 years following the Protestant Reformation. And at the end of this, they agreed that what we should have is a liberal civilization where people could practice their own religion peacefully. uh there would not be a state religion that would be you know force everybody to follow one particular faith and it's that liberal enlightenment that to me characterizes what western civilization is about its tolerance uh its pluralism u you know all of the things that we associate with modernity and in addition modern natural science you know was uh opposed by the Catholic Church the Catholic Church said you know the um uh the sun circled around the earth and they they punish Galileo for saying the opposite and you can't have the modern world you know if you have religion in you know uh impinging on uh politics to that extent and that's the modern west that I think is what's really important
>> this would have been largely driven by the enlightenment
>> right the the emphasis on rationalism and everything
>> how how do you think this reshaping or evolving going forward in terms of the notion of what western civilization will be like.
>> Well, it's going backwards. You know, I think that um a hundred years ago or more, uh many people in the west would have said, "Yes, this is a Christian civilization and uh the United States is a Christian country." I think by the time you got to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, it became harder and harder to say that because first of all, what's Christianity? There's Protestants, there's Catholics, there's all sorts of sects within Christianity. There was a lot of uh Protestant opposition to Catholics coming to the United States, you know, in the 19th century. Then you have Jews, you have now Hindus. You look at the Republican party, it's full of people from the subcontinent. Uh uh and so the pluralism, the de facto pluralism in the United States is such that, you know, nobody can just stand up and say this is a Christian country any longer. But a lot of Republicans want to do that. Uh, you know, they want to try to focus um, uh, American national identity around one religion. And I think this is just a hopeless uh, and also a very divisive uh, effort. You wrote a great book, the liberalism and its discontents uh, which we kind of talked about earlier. Recently more and more people are resonating or are reverberating to or gravitating to the idea of realism, right? Realism,
>> right? By the way, whatever we're witnessing in many parts of the world, how do you see this interaction or even collision among liberalism, realism, and nationalism?
>> Mhm. And if if that were true, how do you see liberalism evolving going forward?
>> Well, uh, liberalism has been under attack both domestically and internationally. You know, liberals believe in free interchange, free commerce, free trade, and that's obviously something that the Trump administration really doesn't want. It's been trying to walk back on the economic part of liberalization. The nationalists are also not liberals. They want to say that national identity belongs to a certain ethnic group uh and therefore there are some people that are less part of the national identity uh than others. Realism is a little bit complicated because I character characterize myself once as a realistic Wilsonian, meaning that I believe that democracy and human rights ought to be values that shape foreign policy, but that you need realistic means to get there. And uh you know this really came up at the time of the 2003 Iraq war where the Bush administration was trying to use military force to democratize you know Iraq and Afghanistan. And I thought that that was actually not realistic at all. Uh you need power but there are real limits to the way that military power can be used to shape politics. And I think that that's not the way that you know either liberalism or democracy spreads. There is a notion that there has been some weakness in the way liberal values have been campaigned you know over with respect to many parts of the world right and and we saw that in the last 20 30 years. There's also a notion that the notion of liberalism is difficult to exist when there is more than one superpower. This is adhering to the theories of realist, right?
>> Is is that true or I'm just curious what your views are and and how you would react or respond to some of those guys.
>> Yeah. Well, I think we need to distinguish between liberalism as a domestic political uh doctrine and and liberalism internationally because they're slightly different. I think that there's been tremendous backsliding on liberalism domestically.
>> Uh you know, basically what liberalism is, it's constraint on the power of the leader, this the president, the prime minister. Uh that says that you cannot do any everything you want. There are limits. You have to obey the law. You have to stay within the law. There may be constitutional provisions that limit the power of whoever the leader is. And uh that's come under a lot of attack because a lot of uh would be authoritarians don't want any limits on what they can do to their own citizens to media to you know the economy uh and so forth. And I think that's actually under greater attack than democracy. Most people accept the principle of democracy but they don't like those limits. So you see this in Russia, you see this in or you saw it in Venezuela, you certainly see it in Iran, many other uh places. Now liberalism internationally really refers to a couple of different things. Most important of which is liberal economics and that, you know, builds on Adam Smith's notion that, you know, there's a division of labor internationally. Everybody is going to get richer if they are allowed to trade, exchange things that you're good at for things that the other person's good at. And everybody, you know, benefits from that. And that remains true. Uh I think that it's been attacked uh quite unfairly by uh Donald Trump among other people who seem to think that international trade is a zero sum game. Either one person wins or the other side wins. Um whereas in fact, you know, the reality is that it's a uh it's something that everybody uh benefits from. But it's it's had, you know, bad effects particularly on workingclass people in rich countries uh who've seen their jobs outsourced to, you know, low labor cost areas. Uh so I think that that's really what's caused the backlash there uh against um you know, against free trade.
You you wrote a piece recently about the possibility or the fact that Kim Jong-un might have been right in doing what he did, right?
>> And put that in the context of the degree to which perhaps liberalism needs to be rearrated, the degree to which
>> perhaps globalization needs to be renarrated.
>> Well, okay. So, got to be very careful about the argument here. Uh, I'm not in favor of anything Kim Jong-un has done. The point of the article that was written is that there's actually a point to having nuclear weapons. Yeah.
>> Right. If you have a nuclear weapon, uh, you've actually got a bomb, uh, then you can't do what Donald Trump is trying to do to Iran. You know, you've got a certain guarantee. Uh, that nobody's going to try to unsee you and destroy your regime. Uh that's something that Gaddafi learned to his you know I mean he ultimately was overthrown because he gave up his nuclear program. The Ukrainians had nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union broke up. They agreed to give them up and if they had them the Russians wouldn't be doing what they're doing to them uh right now. And so it actually does make sense if you can get away with building uh a program, you know, covertly the way the North Koreans have done. If you can get away with that, it actually may be good for your security. The trouble is that getting from no nuclear weapons to nuclear weapons is a big task. You know, it's hard to hide these kinds of programs. And as long as you don't have the nuclear weapon, then you become much more vulnerable to foreign intervention. And that's exactly what's happened to the Iranians.
>> Well, you also made the point in that article that the the tragedy was what has happened with civilizations, right? elaborate on that. It's it's it's not what Kim Jong-un did that was tragic, but what's happened to Western civilization?
>> Oh, well, so yeah, Western civilization uh itself has been battered uh by this failure to agree on what Western civilization is. Uh and a lot of people think it's in decline, but for different reasons. Conservatives in the United States think that it's declining because church attendance is going down. By the way, I'm not sure that that's actually empirically true, but there's a perception that the United States is becoming less Christian than it uh than it had been. Um,
>> on the other hand, I think people on the more progressive side think that it's declining because uh religion is coming back and the liberal parts of Western civilization are now uh under attack. there's been uh you know democratic backsliding all over the world and I think this is something that uh is very concerning to people that believe that you know uh politics ought to be open and free. The idea that nuclear would have been an effective deterrent for North Korea, how do you think that would bode for proliferation in in a world that's become more multipolar? I don't think that that is provoking uh proliferation incentives as much as the failure of America to stand up for its allies. You know, at the end of World War II, um everybody knew that Japan and Germany were problems. They had been aggressive imperialist powers. And as they changed their regimes after 1945, the guarantee that they wouldn't do this again was not that they have nuclear weapons, but that the United States provide a nuclear umbrella such that if they were threatened, uh, the United States would, you know, would deter using its nuclear force. And that's been very important in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. And the problem right now is that um given the way the Trump administration has treated its closest allies, you know, countries like Canada, Britain
>> or Japan,
>> Japan, I mean, nobody would trust the United States. I mean, is the United States really going to risk losing Los Angeles or New York in order to protect Tokyo or uh Berlin? You know, uh that was a question during the Cold War. People didn't think that that was fully credible. But when you know Washington is actively attacking Tokyo and Berlin uh you know it it's quite reasonable to wonder whether you know the United States would carry through on any of its nuclear guarantees.
>> I want to touch on the the foreign policy of the United States. The there seems to be a high degree of unilateralism on the part of Donald Trump. There also seems to be not a whole lot of respect for institutional memory in their policy posturing. Why? Why is that occurring?
Well, this happens, I think, when you have a president that has no foreign policy experience, but also has a personality that is very anti-institutional. You know, there's a good reason why you've got procedures around the president and presidential decisionmaking. The president of the United States has such enormous power. He's got this gigantic military machine at his command, and if you don't use it wisely, you're going to get into a lot of trouble. Now, the United States intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and it was a big disaster uh for everybody concerned. The United States did not defeat the enemies that they were fighting. They did not construct a peaceful uh successor regime to the Taliban or to Saddam uh Hussein and actually brought about you know much more instability uh in the whole region. Uh you would have thought that for a president running in 2024 25 that they would have absorbed you know those lessons. But Donald Trump uh you know is not uh he's not somebody that reads and ponders history and thinks about lessons from the past. He's much more impulsive. Uh I per you know I I don't know this for a fact but I think that the fact that he got away with two things. He bombed Iran in the summer of last year, summer of 25. It was a onceanddone thing. You know, you just go after this one reprocessing facility and that's it. and he, you know, he didn't have to pay a price for that. And then he snatched Nicholas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and what was really rather technically quite stunning operation. And I think at that point he began to think, well, I can do anything. You know, I did these two things. I didn't pay a political price and so I'm now going to get rid of, you know, Iran, the Iranian regime. And I really think that he expected that uh it would be like Venezuela that he would launch this campaign together with Israel, that the Iranians would give up and they'd surrender basically and say, "Okay, you know, we're going to stop our nuclear program." And again, this is just a pure lack of kind of historical perspective uh to see why this might not happen.
There seems to be a miscalculation here somewhere, right? How do you see him recalculating
Well, uh, he's really got himself in a bad situation. And the worst thing from from his standpoint is what this has done in domestic American politics. So, we have a midterm election coming up in November. He was already predicted to lose uh that election. Many of the people in his base uh really voted for him because of his promise to stay out of wars. And it looks like, you know, he's gotten himself into a really big war that's driving up gasoline prices and inflation uh uh in very damaging ways. And so his main motive now is to somehow uh settle the international energy markets down. You know, he has to reopen the straight of Hormuz. Uh so when the war began, he had these very expansive war aims. He wanted regime change. He wanted an end to the Iranian nuclear program. At one point he's called for uh um unconditional surrender
>> and uh he's not going to get that. He will be lucky if he can get the Iranians to agree to open reopen the Straits of Hormuz. And I would imagine he'd take that deal in a minute, you know, uh small as that is uh simply because of the way it affects his domestic electoral prospects.
There is a report that the foreign minister of Pakistan is about to fly up to Beijing to try to help mediate between two sides or a few sides. Is that a potential remedy to the miscalculation or or are we likely to see a continuation of the diplomatic ruse that we might have seen in the last few days?
Well, gi given that there's not clearly been any direct contact, uh, you know, I I don't think the Pakistani foreign minister is going to hurt things, but I'm not sure that, uh, we're really in a situation where the sides are at a point where they could actually come to any kind of agreement. Uh, and I think they've got, you know, once they're ready to do that, uh, I think they can just probably talk to each other, uh, directly. Uh I think both of them have both sides have very um exaggerated expectations. It's not that they have exaggerated expectations. It's that the cost of backing away from their current position is going to be very costly domestically. And that's one of the big things that's preventing an agreement from happening.
The the Iranians seem to be showing a higher threshold for pain than many anticipated. Right. It it just seems that the war is only going to get more protracted. Visualize or draw the picture in terms of a possible off-ramp for any site.
>> I think the deal that is most likely is pretty straightforward that um the United States and Israel agree to stop bombing Iran and Iran agrees to allow ships to go through the straits of Hormuz. That's it. Nothing about the nuclear program. nothing about ballistic missiles, nothing about militias in other parts of the Middle East. Uh, and I think at this point the Trump administration would be willing to take a deal like that again because it doesn't like high oil prices. And you know, I mean, the Trump administration has taken the sanctions off Iran. So Iran is earning billions and billions of dollars from its oil exports because the administration in Washington doesn't want to see oil prices go up. So it it really shows I think that um they're pretty desperate, you know, to have uh anything that will reduce the energy crisis uh and and do that before November. Uh so that's why I think it's it's completely plausible that there will be an agreement reached.
elaborate again on how you think the midterm elections are going to look and then given the unique nature of his foreign policy posturing, how you think there could be some sort of a a constitutional reawakening in the US.
Americans vote on the basis of domestic issues, primarily economic ones. They don't care about foreign policy by and large, unless there's a war that's not going well. Yeah. you know, that's what did in the Republicans in, you know, after Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think that's the danger that, uh, you know, uh, Trump faces. What Americans really care about right now are inflation, you know, uh, interest rates, housing prices, you know, all these sorts of things. And this war has done nothing but exacerbate those concerns. And that's why I think most um pollsters were predicting already a fairly large Democratic victory certainly in the House of Representatives. Uh now with this war um you know we don't know if it's going to end, how it's going to end, but even if it ends tomorrow, it's going to do a lot of damage to the Republicans. And so they, you know, there's a there's a small but significant chance that they'll not only lose the House of Representatives, but they may even lose the Senate. And at that point, Donald Trump's agenda is over. He's not going to get a single law passed.
You know, I'm curious. So his unilateralist posture is manifested a number of things. One of which is the recent border peace frame, right? What's your take on that?
Board of Peace is a curious uh device because it's not sanctioned by the United Nations or by any international body. This just came straight out of Donald Trump's brain. Uh he has um organized it in such a way that he's the permanent chairman even if he steps down as president. Uh it has a governance structure that seems basically designed to benefit Donald Trump and his family. you know, uh, people have to pay in a billion dollars to join this board. Uh, it doesn't have any particular international legitimacy. Uh, it's not going to have the leverage, I think, that's needed to actually bring about peace. It was originally meant to help in the reconstruction of Gaza, but since then, uh, even that has not been, you know, at the center of, you know, the intentions there. Uh so you know it could just be a corrupt mechanism to collect you know in a way tribute from other countries uh but not a serious you know effort to create anything durable uh in terms of peace.
The the security council was deemed previously or until today as somewhat a weakness within the United Nations framework. Right. And it just seems to many people that he's actually trying to singularize that by way of a veto power vested in, you know, the chair who's going to be there for life, right? Do you see this holding and sustaining?
>> I I don't think so. I think if you look at the countries that have signed up already, you know, if you don't get the major powers involved, uh it's not going to be a very effective uh board. Uh so um you know that was always the intrinsic problem with the security council. It involved the biggest powers in the world but they don't agree with each other and they have conflicts with one another. So therefore the security council is not going to be able to agree particularly when everybody has a a veto. Uh I think in this in the case of this board uh it really doesn't involve uh any great power except for the United States. China, Russia are not part of it. Uh and therefore uh it's only going to be able to deal with, you know, relatively minor uh issues and it's not going to be able to exercise any independent um influence either as a legitimator of action or uh really as a mediator.
>> If if that's not going to work, how do you think the UN will be effective going forward? what what sorts of I guess amendments or reforms that need to be undertaken for that to be effective.
>> You can you can fantasize about different uh ways of reorganizing the security council. You can probably the most important thing would be to take away the um P5's veto power uh and then you want to expand it to reflect you know the realities of power around the world. But people have been talking about this since the end of the cold war and you've not been able to move forward on it because nobody can agree on actually how to redistribute power even within you know regions like Africa or Latin America that are really not at all represented. They can't agree among themselves who among us should actually sit on a revised you know security council. there's too much internal jealousy between each individual region and that's why you haven't been able to get serious security council reform. Now I must say, you know, in terms of a board of peace, if it were being pushed by a a more clever American president, you could imagine it evolving as a kind of parallel United Nations that would get around some of these vetos and and maybe be a little bit more effective. But I think right now, you know, the United States has made itself toxic to so many different countries that, you know, all of the important international players that you would want to have on this board are not going to, you know, want to come anywhere near it.
Frank, what's the recipe for peace around what's happening in the Middle East? I mean and and if there is one, how do you visualize it, you know, as it relates to the common people in the developing world?
>> Well, look, there there's so many layers to this, but the fundamental driver of instability in that region right from the beginning has been the Palestinian Israeli conflict. uh there was some progress in trying to solve that in the Camp David process and then in the Oslo uh Accords in the 1990s they came somewhat close but then that really fell apart and you know in a sense it's just gotten worse since then because both sides have hardened their positions. you had, you know, u groups more extremist than the PLO, you know, representing the Palestinian side. And now you've got this extreme right-wing Israeli government that doesn't want to compromise. And so that's a conflict, I think, that has gotten much more intractable. Uh, you know, and it could get worse. I think the Israeli, this Israeli government could decide that they're going to enex the West Bank outright. Um uh so that's one of the fundamental drivers but then on top of it you've got a Sunni Shia conflict among the states uh in the Gulf and then within individual states where you have sectarian conflict going on between these two uh branches of Islam. And I think that finally the geopolitics is really bad because you know you have now a whole range of medium powers. So Indonesia is one of them. Turkey uh uh the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, all of these countries now have serious capacities to do things. They're economically more developed. They've got military you know uh uh establishments of one sort or another. And I think their ability to intervene in local conflicts is what keeps those conflicts from being resolved. So I think the Syrian civil war would not have gone on for 15 years the way it did if you know if uh if it hadn't been for these outside parties. The Libyan civil war could have been resolved you know many years ago but for the fact that the two sides have these you know outside supporters. And that's kind of the tragedy of the region.
It's pretty messy though. Doesn't it doesn't look like it's going to get
>> No, I don't think so. Unfortunately, there was a time, you know, after the end of the Cold War when it looked like you could get a consensus of all the powerful countries to settle some of these conflicts, but their relations have just, you know, fallen apart. So, I don't think that's going to happen.
You know, we in the developing world, we we're we're a little confused by how easily a superpower could just decapitate and undertake the selective type of rule of law with respect to anybody on earth, right? Do you see that sustaining for a long time?
>> Well, I don't know.
>> It's in in conflict a lot of the values that you've been preaching, right? And it's it's just difficult to stomach.
>> It is. It is. I mean, there's a good reason why countries didn't do this kind of decapitation. Uh because, you know, if it happens to one country, it can happen to other countries. Uh and I think that the US decision to I mean, the Israelis have been doing this for some time, but the decision of the United States to go go along with this, I think, is a very bad one. And I think it's something that's going to come back to hurt uh you know the United States because basically it means that assassination and decapitation are tools that are going to be used regularly and you know uh the United States is vulnerable to that as well.
Talk a little bit about what you think will happen to the GCC the Gulf countries on on a postwar
>> you know, basis.
>> That's a very interesting question. I mean I think that they will have to work much more closely together uh regionally because you know obviously all of them have suffered tremendously from uh from this war. You know, the big question is how they're going to regard the United States after this because the US was their big protector and now, you know, the US has gotten them into much bigger trouble than, you know, they ever could have imagined. And so that dependence is something I think they're going to have to think about. They're going to have to, you know, maybe move to Russia, to China, to other outside powers that could help them. But most of all, I would think that some internal solidarity would be, you know, the first order of the day because there have been all these conflicts, you know, between the Saudis and the Emirates over, you know, Sudan and Libya and so forth. And I think that they can't afford that kind of, you know, squ. I mean, there there's this period, you know, in the last decade where they're rising powers, they're they've got ambitions, they're doing things outside of their normal area. And I think there's a kind of competition to see who could do more. Right now, I think they're going to have to move back into a much more defensive, you know, position and just protect what they've got.
>> Well, the dependability on the US or the patronage of the US seems to be on a decline, right?
>> Well, that's just rational.
>> Yeah. and and that that only means intuitively to at least people like me that agency is really highly required for anybody to prevail, right? I mean this will if it applies to the GCC countries, it's certainly going to apply to Japan, Korea, and all the others that have been under the patronage of the United States, much less those that would not have been with the patronage of the US. just tremendous degree of agency is
>> going to be required. Is that
>> possible?
>> Oh, it's certainly possible. I think uh whether it's possible within the time frame that's necessary is a you know, a big question. Japan is in the process of rearming. Uh so is Germany. You know, many American allies are now realizing that they're going to be on their own. Uh I think that you know uh a lot of middle powers uh are going to need to start thinking about cooperating among themselves because they're not going to be able to depend on the United States as they were. Uh and you know even Canada you know after all the pressure that Trump has put on Canada you know their prime minister's gone to China to try to get more Chinese economic cooperation. So, you know, the world's really been turned upside down.
>> Well, China seems to be beneficiary of whatever's
>> Yeah, definitely happening, right?
>> And Russia as well. I mean,
>> yeah,
>> oil prices going higher, uh, only helps Russia. I I'm I'm curious. How do you think this is going to have an impact on the US dollar if the dependability on the US in the Middle East is perceived to be on a decline?
>> Well, I'm the one that should be asking you that question as a former trade minister.
>> Well, I I just seem to think that it's it's likely to decline. I think that, you know, there are many countries right now that are really worried about holding a lot of assets in dollars and, you know, it could get worse because we could be heading for a recession. It could be triggered by the, you know, the the uh private equity market in um uh in the United States. Uh and I think that it's probably prudent for a lot of countries to diversify where they hold their, you know, their reserves. Um
>> I I just think that there is consistent underestimation with respect to the potential consequences or repercussions economically speaking by way of what's happening at the moment. I mean at the rate that 20 million barrels of oil are stuck at that choke point, right? And and there is no apparent,
>> you know, escape out of this in the near foreseeable future. I mean there's going to be millions of people around the world that are going to be affected adversely.
>> Yeah. Especially in Asia.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not to mention Southeast Asia which depends on about on the Middle East for about 3 million barrels of oil per day out of the 5 million barrels of oil of consumption on a daily basis. It's that's got to have an effect on millions. Uh it's and and people I think just consistently underestimate this. And and I do believe that this economic repercussions will reshape politics and geopolitics in a big way. More ways than than one. I think more ways than people could imagine.
>> Sure.
>> I I see this as a white swan that's going to be I think eerily more profound in terms of its consequences compared to the great financial crisis in 2008. even the Asian financial crisis in 1998.
>> If you're looking for a bright side, I think that this is going to uh this is going to encourage people to shift alter alternatives to fossil fuels. Uh
>> yeah,
>> because you know, turns out that even now we're still dependent on this region, this unstable region.
>> Yeah. But the concern is renewable energy is still not cheap, right? It requires massive capital formation and at the rate that most developing economies don't have the necessary rule of law which is a prerequisite for any kind of capital allocation right so that's problematic for anybody that wants to shift over to renewable energy
>> the desire is there
>> but the implementation I think is problematic
what about bricks how do you see that fitting into this whole picture.
>> Well, uh I don't think that there's enough commonality of interest in that group to really make it that big a player. Uh because they're pretty divergent uh countries, you know, uh
>> well, Iran is there,
>> Saudi Arabia is there.
>> Uh but I'm thinking, for example, India and China are out there
>> and say no more,
>> right? uh you know, Brazil is not, you know, it's not like Iran.
>> They've got problems with the United States, but they're not a rogue state that's, you know, going to try to undermine the the general world order. So, I I just don't see that there's a kind of natural basis of cooperation uh among the bricks as there is, for example, in NATO. um
you see NATO still being more effective in bringing about peace than like a bricks or whatever.
>> NATO is in big trouble. you know, it always depended on American leadership uh and American military might. And uh that is really been damaged first by Trump wanting basically to get out of NATO and now with all this squabbbling over whether NATO is going to help him get out of this problem he himself created, uh I think it's just going to further decrease the levels of trust in that organization.
the national security document last November, right? It makes reference to the Mandro doctrine.
>> Mhm.
>> Do you think that will hold?
>> Well, it's already fallen apart. I mean, if you're going to concentrate on the Western Hemisphere, why are you launching this big war in the Middle East? Uh, you know, if if that Donro, as they call it, Donro doctrine meant anything. it meant that you're going to get out of the Middle East and you're going to focus on, you know, things happening in the Americas and instead we're involved in yet another, you know, Middle Eastern war. So, this is one of the big problems is trying to put any intellectual coherence on what Trump has done because I don't think he thinks strategically in that kind of manner. I think he just sees opportunities and uh takes, you know, takes them as they come up.
What's the worst that could happen to the US and what's the best that could happen to the US
>> given everything that's happening?
Yeah, the worst well, I mean, if you really want to get into worst case scenarios, you know, I do think that the incentives to acquire and perhaps even use nuclear weapons has gone up. Uh just because uh these old structures that kept everybody more or less secure are now deteriorating. Uh I think that short of that uh the United States is in a period of long-term decline. I mean I just don't see any other way to describe it. Uh we don't have the internal unity uh that's necessary to act like a great power as we once did. Uh uh we have alienated many of our friends. We don't know what we stand for. I mean we began this talking about western civilization but Americans don't agree what western civilization is among themselves and therefore uh we can't defend something we don't you know uh mutually agree on. Uh so I do think that you know the rest of the world is now slowly adapting to this world in which the United States is really not the kind of big player that it was for most of the 20th century.
>> What's the best that could happen?
Well, the best I think is that everything things won't go back to the way they were before 2016. But, you know, the players with the biggest uh incentive to upset the system will uh learn a lesson. You know, the United States might become uh go back to being a little bit more responsible. Uh the Russians should have learned a big lesson in their invasion of Ukraine. This was already the fifth year of a war that they thought would take you know less than a week. Uh and China I think also um uh has vulnerabilities in its economy. Uh and you know the kinds of uh state interventions that Xiinping has overseen. So a good outcome would be everybody stepping back and saying, "Huh, maybe we ought to focus on domestic reform and doing things a little bit better, you know, in our own countries and not worry about threatening other people and putting, you know, global security on the line."
On on China, there's there's quite a number of Chinese that would have thought that the United States ill campaign of spreading liberal values. The reason for that would have been its effort or attempt to campaign with universalism as in my god is your god. Whereas a Chinese approach would be different. Yeah.
>> My god is my god, your god is your god.
>> As a result of which they're probably going to approach globalization with pluralism. To what extent do you think that'll hold or the theory holds that that approach will hold?
>> It's much more likely to hold now that the United States agrees with China. I mean,
>> one thing that's I think at the core of Trumpism is this rejection of this um uh unil well not rejection of unilateralism but rejection that there's this dominant idea about democracy and human rights that motivates America. Uh I think that Trump himself and you know the national security doctrine there's many spokesmen on the right that basically take a Chinese position. You know, there's a lot of different countries in the world. They're all pursuing their national interest. They have a right to do that and the United States doesn't have a right to tell them not to do that. Uh that's something very different from a lot of past American presidents.
Frank, uh, you know, it's it's pretty sad with so many things that are happening, right? If if you had one advice for a student who's aspiring to be an international relations expert, what would you tell her or him?
>> Well, I think given what's happening and how do you think it's going to reshape going forward? Yeah, I think you basically need to learn a lot of history especially of the last, you know, 50 years because uh a lot of stuff has happened internationally that we could draw lessons from use of military power. You know, that's one of the big things that this president doesn't still understand that military power by itself cannot achieve a lot of political ends. But you're not going to uh be act on that insight unless you've actually thought about it and studied it a little bit. And so I would think that that would be very important for any aspiring uh uh student. The other thing is that economics and military strategy are not completely separate fields. They require different kinds of knowledge. But I think we're moving into a geopolitical world that in many ways resembles the 19th century more than the 20th century where uh you know you do have uh e economics used as a weapon and weapons used as you know generating economic benefits. Uh so I think you need to be knowledgeable about a lot of different domains but that's on the assumption that there is no diversion right between policym and public opinion. How do you fix that divergence?
>> Um, well, I think that all leaders need to, you know, focus on uh their own domestic bases. I think that that's one of the big advantages of a democracy is that ultimately if the people don't like what you're doing, they can remove you as a leader. Um, so that I think remains uh important. And I also think that you're seeing the limits of a lot of international action because of lack of domestic support. And we're going to see this in the United States, you know, when we get to the midterm elections in November.
>> Any final message for world peace?
>> Uh I think that uh moderation is a good idea, you know, both as a something to guide your individual life but also for nations. And unfortunately, the United States has never been very moderate in, you know, doing the things it wants to do. Um,
>> thank you so much for your time as always.
>> Thank you, Gita.
>> That was Frank Fuyawa from Stanford University. Thank you. Heat. Heat.