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FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: Well, unfortunately, this sounds like a cliche, but I really do think there’s a fork here, where we could go in two very different directions. If Putin is successful in his plan of basically unseating the democratically elected regime in Kyiv and putting a puppet government in there, and, if nothing really happens to him to stop that, then we are going to be back in the situation of the 20th century, where military force is used to forcibly change borders. On the other hand, if he gets bogged down, if he starts taking casualties at a rate that is unsustainable for him, he may actually have to pull back in a very humiliating way. And that would demonstrate the solidity of the NATO alliance, the ability of democracies to push back, the weakness of this authoritarian regime. And that might give actually a second boost to the spirit of 1989 and the spirit of democracy. And, unfortunately, at the moment, we don’t know which of these two futures is really going to unfold.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, let’s take them both, first the latter one, if he gets bogged down, and, frankly, if he loses. Most people are saying that he will lose whatever, and that he has torn up our world order. We live in a Putin world right now, win or lose, and there is no return to the status quo ante, which I take to mean there may be no return to a U.S.-led liberal world order, as was created out of the ashes of World War II.
FUKUYAMA: Well, if the second scenario unfolds, I don’t know that that’s really what’s going to happen. It may not be U.S.-led in the way that it was during the Cold War, because I think that our polarization and — leads to a kind of political weakness that hurts our credibility. But Germany, for example, has turned around completely. It’s now got a strong foreign policy. They’re going to double their defense expenditures. There’s a lot of agreement within the NATO alliance to push back. And that could do a lot to restore a kind of rules-based liberal democratic world order. And that is not going to be one that Vladimir Putin determines, and we don’t have to live in his shadow. So I think that there could be some optimistic outcomes. But, again, it really depends on the outcome on the battlefield.
About This Episode EXPAND
Scholar and author Francis Fukuyama discusses whether the U.S.-led liberal world order can survive — and whether America has the moral authority and the will to lead. Should Putin succeed in shredding the world order, will leadership come from Russia, China, or both? Photojournalist Lynsey Addario captured an image that shocked the world and became one of the defining images of the Ukraine war.
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