effective form of government, were we at the end of history? well, in the years since, liberal democracy has often seemed in retreat. but when russia invaded ukraine, the whole world changed again. francis fukuyama is convinced that president putin has miscalculated and is heading for outright defeat. what does that mean for the course of history and the progress of liberal democracy? francis fukuyama, welcome to hardtalk. thank you very much.
the country most sympathetic to russia that, you know, was the, in a way, the weak point of the western alliance. their transformation has been nothing short of miraculous after this russian aggression. and so i do think that the solidarity within the nato alliance has really been revived to an extent that we ve really not seen since the cold war. you re saying it s a good thing but part of the end of history idea was that force would no longer be appropriate or needed and this has shown how wrong that was. well, yes, that s. .. just to be fair, i never said that history was somehow this automatic mechanism that went on despite the actions of, you know, individuals, we still have human agency and i think it s pretty clear that if people don t believe in liberal democracy, if they don t fight for it, if they don t constantly struggle for it, it s not going to happen. and that s, i think, a useful reminder to everybody. ok, so germany spending 2% of gdp on defence is a good thing. it s a
were in government at that time, and you know, this is, these are historical figures. there s an entire generation now in america that has grown up in the world created by 9/11, with no memory of 9/11 itself a quarter of america is today too young to remember this attack. and yet our country, our politics, our world is so deeply defined by it. and as we watch the americans pull out of afghanistan this summer, the 13 americans killed in kabul, only two of them were old enough to be out of diapers on the morning of 9/11. that s remarkable. yes, my children were not alive on 9/11. they have grown up in this world defined by it. in so many ways. how? explain to us. because a quarter of our audience maybe doesn t even know, how has the world changed. ? so people of our age grew up and were marked by the end of the cold war. and we were reading books called the end of history, we won, right?