Tag: China

Still “watching the world wake up from history”

Recently, I dusted off a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992. What I found is that, despite the derision the idea of history’s end has received over the past few decades, Fukuyama’s book is in retrospect a surprisingly prescient work that helps to make sense of the current period.

Recently, I dusted off a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992. Despite the derision the idea of history’s end has received over the past few decades, Fukuyama’s book is turned out to be a surprisingly prescient work that helps to make sense of the current period.

The end of history

The first part of Fukuyama’s argument is well known. Basing himself on Hegel and, especially, the interpretation of Hegel by the German philosopher’s student Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama argued that history wasn’t just a bunch of events that happened one after the other. Instead, history advanced in a progressive direction. The outcome, or natural endpoint, of history was liberal democracy, the kind enjoyed by citizens of the United States, France, and other countries.

While Fukuyama was criticized for positing the American model as history’s outcome, he never did so, instead seeing liberal democracy more broadly defined, as some kind of parliamentary system that allows for citizens to express their desires politically and a market economy economically, all accompanied by the rule of law.

In 1989, when Fukuyama first wrote the essay that later became the book, liberal democracy was obviously triumphant. The Berlin wall had just fallen, the Cold War had ended, and the NATO alliance was the victor as the Soviet Union bowed out of superpower status. China was convulsed by uprisings, and the Communist Party there only maintained its grip on power through sheer brutality. Over the course of the next three years, Communist states fell quickly and dramatically, the culmination of what political scientist Samuel Huntington later declared “the third wave” of democratization.

History’s rebirth?

In the intervening years, however, the picture became muddied. Some of the post-Soviet states went through a period of “democratic backsliding,” in which they reverted to autocracy, as did Venezuela and a few other states. After 9/11, another of Huntington’s ideas, that the world would cease to be torn by ideological divides and would become defined by “civilizational” struggles. seemed to take on new credence. Two of the “civilizations” Huntington outlined, the Islamic and the Western, appeared to be the world’s major faultline, while the “Orthodox” (the Orthodox Christian states of the former Soviet Union and several of its allies) seemed to be only slightly less antagonistic.

The Arab Spring of 2011 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, as well as the less antagonistic relationship between the Muslim and Western world (note, especially, the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab Muslim states) essentially put the clash of civilizations theory to rest. But there was another challenge to Fukuyama’s “end of history” theory.

For Fukuyama and his reading of Hegel through Kojève, history didn’t progress in some sort of pre-ordained and mechanical way as it does in the Marxist interpretation of Hegel. Instead, liberal democracy is the end state simply because it works better than any other model tried. By spreading out decision making both economically and politically, it allows people to participate in the affairs that interest them and avoids disastrous mistakes of policy like those the Soviets often made. The then-rising “China model” of authoritarianism challenged the theory, however.

The China model

Disappointed that government wasn’t “getting things done,” especially in the early 2010s, many western intellectuals looked to China and saw the benefits of an authoritarian state. Perhaps, they wondered, by limiting the mess of democracy, technocrats in China were able to move their society forward rationally and impartially, elevating only the best people to leadership through a meritocratic model. “I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Daniel Bell said at an Asia Society discussion entitled “Can the China Model Succeed?”

Then the pandemic happened, and, for a while, and despite ample evidence that the Chinese authorities mismanaged the outbreak from the beginning (despite heroic work done by Chinese doctors and scientists), Western public health experts began to fawn over China. Greg Ip argued that the “Zero-Covid” policy “held lessons” for others in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Public health experts from Duke and UC-San Francisco wrote in Time that China’s response was “100 times better” than that of the United States.

The late 2010s were a bad time for liberal democracy, with the chaos of Trump’s presidency followed by the similar chaos of Biden’s presidency, unable to deal with crime or inflation or virtually any other problem the U.S. faced; Brexit in the United Kingdom; anti-liberal democracy parties elected into governments in a host of Western democracies, including Brazil; and so on. But then things changed.

1991 redux?

In 2022, around the world, people began again fighting in earnest to free themselves from tyrannical systems. As the year began, Russia invaded Ukraine.Though most everyone thought Russia’s invasion appalling, they also expected Putin’s onslaught to succeed relatively quickly. Then the Ukrainians took history into their own hands. Surprising the world and, perhaps, even themselves, the Ukrainian people united together to issue a forceful response to the Russian aggressors. Instead of quickly annexing Ukraine, Russia was forced into a long slog.

Russia had expected the various factions in Ukraine, constantly fighting each other – as the current political factions in the United States fight each other – would fold. Instead, they put aside their differences and began to save their country.

As the Ukrainians inspired the world, the Iranian regime arrested and murdered a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini for the “crime” of not wearing her hijab “correctly.” The evil act proved the spark that set off the Iranian tinderbox: across Iran, women, and then men, rose up, demanding an end to their oppression. Across the nation, the morality police and other regime thugs responded in the harshest ways possible, gunning down protesters – women, children, men – in the streets. And yet the Iranians keep fighting: in the streets, on TikTok, on Twitter, everywhere, they fight. Even the Ayatollah’s own niece condemned the regime, signaling a total loss of legitimacy. Backed into a corner, the theocracy has just announced it would abolish its morality police, and now even the hijab law is under review.

The people of Iran are still fighting, likely for liberal democracy.

And now, even China, the prize of the authoritarian model, has erupted in protests unheard of since 1989. As demonstrations raged against the harsh “Zero Covid” police that so enchanted Western technocrats months ago, Chinese authorities cracked down, with videos flooding social media platforms depicting the barbarity. And now, China has begun to back off, easing restrictions. While it’s unlikely that the Communist Party will fall anytime soon, the luster of the China model has been removed.

There is no civilizational struggle and the authoritarian model is not a path anyone wants to follow; those who live under it do so until they have a chance to overthrow it. Despite the detours, we’re still at the end of history.

The other part of Fukuyama’s argument

Part of the reason some have rejected the “end of history” thesis is because of the problems that have become so common liberal democracies, as mentioned above. But these are issues that Fukuyama mentioned in his book (though, not the original article, suggesting that many of those disparaging the book never read it). Challenges that we face are challenges listed in the End of History: income inequality, political decay, and the fraying of social bonds, and the human need for recognition.

A sizable portion of End of History is dedicated to a discussion of thymos, the human need for recognition. Thymos was the impetus for much of history’s forward movement, according to this understanding of Hegel. The fact that some are so driven for status and recognition that they would fight and kill for some cause led to the acts of valor (or butcherie, depending on the moral viewpoint and the actions carried out) that caused war, revolution, and so on. Fighting against oppression is often caused by an injury to one’s thymos: Fukuyama gives numerous examples, including a speech by Vaclav Havel, in which the latter describes the injury to his self-esteem done by Czechoslovak communism.

The question Fukuyama posed about the future of liberal democracy: what happens in a system where thymos isn’t, and can’t be, a motivating factor? Will society become composed of “men without chests,” satiated consumers with no will to fight? As Alexis Carré notes in Foreign Policy, Western Europe, long stable and under the defense of the United States, has weapons but no warriors.

Given the discussion of thymos and the quest for recognition by others, it is hard to understand why so few have made the connection between End of History and the current period in the Western world, in which identity politics, including white identity politics, has come to the fore so prominently. Even those not consumed by identity overtly have become quite tribal in their partisan allegiances. Keyboard warriors, unable to fight on the battlefield, rage-type on Twitter. Is it any wonder that one of the biggest controversies of the day revolves around who gets to say what on a social media platform? 

The book suggested the general dynamics of this world decades ago.

History is still over, and Fukuyama’s work has been vindicated. Regardless of any challenges, the liberal democratic system has proven itself to be the best system possible because it best meets the needs of those who inhabit it. No other system, looking back centuries, has been able to outlast it. Where there is no liberal democracy, people are fighting for it.

As Jesus Jones put it, we’re all still “watching the world wake up from history” in China, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, and other places where it’s not fully over. The rest of us, residing where history still lies dead, have to solve the challenge thymos poses in liberal democracy.

Biden’s tweet reveals dangerous policies

For the duration of former President Donald Trump’s term, the news media constantly highlighted his low-brow, stream-of-consciousness tweets. Given that they represented a direct insight into the inner workings of an American president’s thought process, they were dangerous. President Biden’s tweets, not written by the president himself, come from his communications team and are vetted by the “adults in the room” widely perceived to be missing during the Trump administration. These more traditional presidential statements represent a different type of problem: the administration’s actual policies.

Take, for example, Biden’s tweet yesterday, March 11:

The Biden team's tweet. Someone wrote, on behalf of @POTUS, “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”
President Biden’s March 11 tweet, representing official policy of the United States.

 

Someone wrote, on behalf of @POTUS, “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

Since this Biden tweets are official, vetted policy, not stream-of-consciousness ramblings, this tweet might have been worse than anything Trump ever thumbed.

We will defend “every inch” of NATO territory, Biden says, but we won’t fight Russia in Ukraine. Why? Because a direct fight between NATO (one has to assume Biden also means any direct fight between the U.S.) and Russia “is World War III.” This gives rise immediately to important questions. Does Biden really mean that the U.S. will participate in World War III over Poland but not Ukraine? We’ll endure a nuclear winter for Estonia, but not non-NATO Sweden? (Another obvious question is why Ukraine was never admitted to NATO, given that it gave up nuclear weapons only after the U.S. and UK signed off on a guarantee [PDF] that its territorial integrity would be protected.)

Beyond the questions of NATO and non-NATO, why did the president and his administration think it was necessary to say – again – that the U.S. would not fight Russia in Ukraine? Perhaps that is the strategy of the administration, and perhaps there is some logical merit to it. But what is the point of saying so publicly? Why announce to the world, to Putin, that the U.S. has already decided not fight Russia in Ukraine? Why not leave some ambiguity? Why give Putin this assurance that, even if he were to use chemical, biological, radiational, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons on Ukrainian civilians, America would not step in?

Putin has been making not-so-thinly veiled threats by noting that Russia is a nuclear power, and they seem to have had their intended deterrent effect on Biden. Why else would the American president respond by unilaterally taking any tool off the proverbial table? By disarming? America is also a nuclear power, and a superior one to Russia. We have a triad of air, land, and sea nuclear capabilities. Just one American nuclear submarine would be the world’s sixth largest nuclear power if counted separately, and each is virtually undetectable to the Russians. A single American nuclear submarine could potentially wipe out all of Russia’s nuclear capacity, and there is little that Russia could do to stop it. No one wants to think about nuclear war (except Putin), but taking all military options off the table destroys these weapons’ deterrent effect and makes the use of CBRN warfare against Ukraine more, not less, likely. Biden doesn’t have to threaten nuclear war; he could simply keep quiet or, if asked what the U.S. might do if Russia used CBRN weapons, simply respond, “All options are on the table,” the common refrain of American presidents when presented with such questions.

The implications of Biden’s tweet go far beyond Russia and Ukraine. Most obviously, it is highly unlikely that Putin will be content to stop with a victory over Kyiv. If he wins there, he’ll move on to other states. Beyond Putin, how are statements like this understood in Beijing? If a fight between nuclear powers “is World War III” and must be avoided for all states with which the U.S. has no mutual defense agreement, what does that mean for Taiwan? There has been no mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Taiwan since 1979, when the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty was replaced by the much weaker Taiwan Relations Act, which only requires the U.S. to provide Taiwan with weapons. Beijing knows that, aside from a military confrontation, the United States has very few options to deter aggression by China. While the world has mobilized to punish Russia through devastating sanctions, the same would not be true after a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Vietnam, or elsewhere. Russia has oil, but China and the western world are far too economically intertwined, and the U.S. is currently far too dependent on China’s economy, to entertain any fantasy of punishing Beijing economically.

There are a remarkable number of countries who are U.S. allies with whom we have no mutual defense treaty. We only have actual defense pacts with the NATO states, most of the western hemisphere (though notably not Mexico), the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. There is no mutual defense treaty with Israel, our strongest Middle Eastern ally, constantly under threat, including from Russian-backed forces in Syria. Nor is there any defense treaty with Sweden, Finland, the already-mentioned Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, or a host of other strategically or morally important countries.

Apparently, the U.S. will not fight militarily for any of them, at least not with Russia or China.

A single presidential tweet raises all these questions. But the tweet is not isolated; it is part of a larger problem that pervades the whole Biden administration, which seems to think that an unjust peace is better than a fight for American security, democracy, and the sovereignty of small states. All these beliefs were implied by Biden’s continuation of Trump’s plans to “end the forever war” in Afghanistan, as well as in many other instances, including Biden’s desperate attempt at an Iran nuclear deal – with Russia as the guarantor.

In 2024, we need to find someone who is neither from the “end forever wars” wing of the Democratic Party or the Trumpian populist or “national conservative” wing of the Republican Party. The former rejuvenated the Taliban and handed Afghanistan over to it before its green light by tweet to Moscow and Beijing; the latter actually supports Putin as an “anti-woke” role model.

America – and the world – deserves better.

Image: 2021 stock photo of U.S. President Joe Biden speaking at a NATO meeting. Patrick Semansky/AP