TRANSCRIPT: The rise of a leaderless world: Why 2025 marks a turning point, with Francis Fukuyama
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can find extended versions of my conversations on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, we are taking a look at some of the top geopolitical risks of 2025. In short, this year looks to be the one that the G-Zero wins. As long time listeners will know, the G-Zero world is an era when no one power or group of powers is both willing and able to drive a global agenda and maintain international order. And we have been living with this lack of international leadership for nearly a decade now.
But in 2025, the problem is set to get a lot worse. We are heading back to the law of the jungle, a world where the strongest do what they can while the weakest are condemned to suffer what they must. And the former— whether states or companies or individuals— can't be trusted to act in the interest of those they have power over. It's not a sustainable trajectory. But it is the one we're on. You may be surprised to hear that I don't consider Donald Trump to be the top risk. No, he's not the cause of the tumultuous world we find ourselves in, but rather a symptom of it. Helping me work all this out is renowned Stanford political scientist, not me, Frank Fukuyama. Let's get to it.
Frank Fukuyama, it's really good to see you, my friend.
Frank Fukuyama:
Good to see you too, Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean it's good. We've got a political scientist on political scientist and you're well thought of as one of the world's best. I had a lot I want to talk to you about today, but I wanted to start with the macro. I've been talking a lot about how we're reverting to the law of the jungle. That it feels more like what I call a G-Zero world. And I'm wondering, as someone who's been thinking about this for a lot longer than I have, how do you think about where the world order is going right now and why?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, I think that it's actually a much more confusing world order than we've seen in my lifetime because it's not organized really ideologically, although ideology still plays a role. The distribution of power is actually quite confusing because you now have a lot of middle range powers that are independent actors. And then I think this is something you pointed to in your global risks report, but one of the most uncertain factors has been the United States because the United States for many decades has been basically an exporter of stability. Not everyone believed that, but there was a larger world order that had been established by the United States and it was very powerful, particularly in that 20 year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and let's say the financial crisis in 2008. But now the United States is in the process it looks like, of checking out, and so it's going to be, I think very turbulent.
Ian Bremmer:
Is the United States checking out or is it deciding that it wants to create its own rules for its own benefit? I mean, what I mean by that is, I mean China over the last 20 years, we wouldn't necessarily say they were checked out, but we would definitely say that they didn't want to play by the West's rules. Is it fair to say the US is sort of essentially embracing more of what the Chinese have been doing for the last couple of decades?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, it's complicated because the liberal world order that we seem to be moving away from was actually created by the US in its own self-interest because we were the biggest trading power and it benefited us to have open markets and free trade and so forth. And we've suddenly decided that we don't really like that. And actually the model that seems to be in the back of Trump's mind is a much narrower one where all the great powers basically try to maximize their own welfare, not according to any particular principle, and they don't invest in anything like a general global public good. So you are... Yeah, I mean that is kind of the definition of the jungle isn't it?
Ian Bremmer:
It feels that way. And I mean the jungle obviously is a more dangerous place if you're at the bottom of the food chain. The jungle works out pretty well sometimes if you're at the top. Is Trump getting some of this right from his perspective?
Frank Fukuyama:
Yeah, I guess it's a kind of question of long-term and short-term self interest because I think most of us recognize that having this liberal world order and not trying to gain immediate advantage was probably in our long-term interest. For example, he suggested that we should have hung onto the oil fields after we liberated Kuwait or Iraq in 2003. That would be something that would be to our short-term advantage. But if you think about the precedent that would set for other big powers that wanted to do something similar, I'm not sure that that would be such a great thing for the US. So maybe the real contrast is between short-termism and investing in a longer term stable system, and that's what we seem to be moving away from.
Ian Bremmer:
I want you to be right. That feels like the sort of thing that gets you a more stable long-term international order. I'm wondering if from the perspective of a country that feels like it's the most powerful and will be the most powerful for a long period of time, and that seems to be Trump's perspective, if he's right about it. If he were right about that, would it then be true that America deciding to set the rules the way it wants to would actually have long-term advantages for the Americans, if not for other countries?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, yeah, I think that's generally the case. I think that the people that really support international legal orders and rules and so forth are always smaller, weaker countries because they don't have the military, economic, cultural power to look after themselves. And quite frankly, the United States did not restrict itself to the use of force or economic sanctions when it had the power of doing it. So it wasn't a consistent supporter of what we call this rules-based order. But it certainly matters less if you think you're powerful. The problem I think, is that we're not as powerful as we were. I mean, I think that in terms of GDP and this sort of thing, we're still doing okay. But we are politically extremely divided. We don't have a strong bipartisan consensus on what role we want to play as a country in the world, and therefore we may not be able to simply use our might to get our way in the way that we were used to thinking we could.
Ian Bremmer:
So on the one hand, the United States right now is entering this weird period where the US has a more consolidated leadership, and so many of its allies seem to be weaker, their governments are weaker, they're fragmented. You saw what just happened with Trudeau, South Korea, Germany, France. I could see how that might make Trump feel like actually this is exactly the time to implement that sort of policy. Tell me why you think that's not true.
Frank Fukuyama:
I think that one of the dangerous things about this present moment is that Trump and the Republicans may be overestimating the degree of unity. He did not win a huge mandate in the November election. Congress is still, I mean the Republican majority in both houses, but especially in the House of Representatives is very, very narrow. So they do not have the kind of mandate that let's say Franklin Roosevelt had after 1932 or Lyndon Johnson had after 1964. It's much more tenuous and the polarization of the country means that the first misstep that Trump takes is going to probably trigger a lot of internal turmoil. So we may not be as strong, but the danger is that Trump will think we're strong and he will try something. I don't know, invading Panama or Greenland that he actually thinks will be easy but will turn into quagmires.
Ian Bremmer:
I think he can beat the Danes. I'm less worried about that one, but I take your point.
Frank Fukuyama:
Even Denmark. If he actually does this without the consent of Denmark or the people in Greenland, that's going to set a pretty difficult precedent for other countries to start following. So again, it's this long-term vision that seems to be lacking right now in this incoming administration.
Ian Bremmer:
But I'm wondering if you were Trump, if you were trying to implement the policy that he is stating and knowing where China is right now, economically not doing as well, but absolutely over the past decades catching up on the US, investing massive amounts in nuclear capabilities, building up their military, becoming dominant in transition energy and critical minerals and supply chain, if you were Trump, is the right thing to do to hit China as hard as possible now when they're comparatively weak and before they can pose as much of a threat to the US?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by hit them. If you mean raise tariffs and wage economic warfare, I'm assuming that he's going to do some version of that. I think that he'll find in that realm that he actually doesn't have the kind of clout and that China has been preparing responses that he may not be anticipating. So it may not be so easy for him to get away with trying to exploit this moment as you say.
The much more worrisome thing is in the strategic realm because I have no confidence that he knows what he's doing in that respect. I don't think that he takes overt military threats all that seriously. I don't think he spent much of his life thinking about defense policy or military preparedness. I think he's tried to run away from conflicts, and I don't think he was very willing to use American force in his first term. He did a little bit in Syria, but I think reluctantly, and I think that's really a danger because all of those factors that you talked about, instability in South Korea, uncertainty with NATO allies, I think might actually tempt China or Russia to take advantage of the situation. And there, I'm not sure what the response was going to be.
Ian Bremmer:
I was talking primarily about economic tools though broadly defined. So more of an economic decoupling between the two countries, broadening out what you think of as national security, relevant sectors, export controls around tech, all of that kind of thing. Do you think right now we are heading towards a new Cold War but this time between the Americans and the Chinese?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, I guess as I would interpret your question, are we going to continue decoupling so that it's not simply in these areas like semiconductors and strategic materials, but across the board so that our farmers are no longer so dependent on Chinese markets. We're not so dependent on TVs and consumer goods and that sort of thing. And that would make the situation much more similar to the economic relationship we had with the former Soviet Union. And I think that we probably are heading for something like that because I would be very surprised if Trump simply stayed with the kind of Biden level decoupling that was limited to these particular strategic sectors because I think he's much more ambitious about that and thinks that China's a much bigger economic threat and the Chinese have a lot of ways of responding to that.
Ian Bremmer:
If that happens for four years of a Trump administration, and that's all we can really project at this point, what do you think happens to other countries? Do you think the Europeans will end up becoming essentially a bloc with the US against China or as they did with the Soviets or much less so? Do you think that there will be the Gulf States, for example, ditto, much less so. I mean, how do you think... because a Cold War, of course is not just about the relations between the two superpowers, but also about the broader geopolitical landscape.
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, I think that the Europeans up until the last three years had illusions that they could be vaguely on the side of the United States when it came to human rights and democracy, but they could still trade with China. I think they've mostly given, especially, I mean the critical country here is Germany who has such large investments in China and also depends on the Chinese market to sell their automobiles to such an extent that they were trying to hold onto that economic relationship. And Angela Merkel was still pushing for this Europe-China investment treaty.
I think they've given up on that, and I think that that means that they will increasingly realize that they have to be pulled into a North American economic bloc. The thing I think that the Russia invasion of Ukraine demonstrated however, is that there are all these new alignments and there's a very large part of the Global South most important, India, that isn't going to be in the American camp. They do want to counterweight against China, but they also don't want to give up on any of their economic ties with that whole bloc. And so I do think that in that respect, there is going to be this Cold War-like realignment.
Ian Bremmer:
Let me ask you about Russia, the other country is sanctioned on. So I mean China's relationship with Russia has clearly been more aligned of late, but not like what we're seeing between them and North Korea, them and Iran. How are you thinking about the threat that Russia today and its allies pose to the global order and how should America respond to it?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, I think the critical phrase you added was "and its allies" because the thing, I think that Russia right now is actually quite weak. And we could be surprised by Putin falling I think the way we've been surprised with other facade dictatorships. But I think what's really new and very troubling is that there's a genuine alliance. I mean, back in the days when we're talking about the Axis of Evil, at the time of the Iraq invasion, that was a very loose kind of paranoid phrase because Iran and North Korea had nothing really to do with one another. But today it's a real alliance where they're actively collaborating, they're selling each other weapons, they're sending troops from one country to another. China has not been fully involved because it does want to protect its trade relations with other democracies, but I think they're doing everything they can quietly to support the Russian war effort. And that may become more visible over time.
Ian Bremmer:
And I mean one would expect if you are right, if we are right that we're going to see more decoupling between the US and China and the Europeans and other close US allies are likely to align more with the US, then essentially China has no reason not to be much more public and much less constrained in the support that they provide for Russia. Do you think that's true?
Frank Fukuyama:
Yeah, I think that's probably right. I mean, the one thing about China right now is that I believe that Xi Jinping is not the kind of reckless risk-taker that Putin is. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East, and the argument was that under the former communist leadership, they were actually very, very cautious about international engagements and threats of force. Putin has blown that up, totally sending troops to Syria, to Venezuela, all over Africa. But I don't think that Xi is like that. And so he may still be a little bit constrained by the general appearance of not wanting to seem too much like a bully in Africa and Latin America and other places, because even if Europe and America stopped buying Chinese EVs, they've got huge markets in other parts of the world that might be affected by overly aggressive Chinese behavior. So I do think that that remains an area where Xi is going to be cautious.
Ian Bremmer:
So Frank, I want to take a step back because everything that you and I are discussing so far, not really the direction we would want the world to be heading. Where did we get it wrong? I don't mean you and me, but I mean leaders and the dynamics we've had in this evolving post-Cold War environment. How did we end up on this trajectory?
Frank Fukuyama:
Well, if I could refer to the last book I wrote on liberalism, I think that there I pointed to two distortions, what I believe are distortions of liberalism that that then produced a big backlash. So the first one is what we call "neoliberalism." It was this period of kind of uncritical worship of markets that really destabilized things. I mean, we didn't have financial crises up until the early 1990s because we had a lot of constraints on the way that banks and financial flows moved through the world. But all of a sudden we got periodic really big crises and rising inequality, the deindustrialization of the American heartland. We thought Americans were going to tolerate that up until the middle of the next decade when it turned out that that was fueling a big domestic backlash. So that was one part of it. And then I think the left has gone off in a different direction culturally where it has bought into a form of identity politics that in the end can be just as polarized.
I think that liberals today underestimate the degree to which some of the identity-based politics that was practiced by Democrats was one of the reasons that people ended up... a lot of these working class people ended up voting for Donald Trump. And so I think both of these contributed to the deterioration of the common belief and the legitimacy of liberal principles. And then to that, I would add we're living in a really weird world in which a kind of neo-mysticism has re-emerged and the faith in modern natural science, which was really a key foundation of liberalism really ever since the Enlightenment has really been seriously called into question. And a lot of that is due to technology because you get these technologies that basically allow anyone to say anything they want, and the authority of established sources of credible information have really deteriorated. So you put all that together, and I think you get the kind of world we're entering into right now.
Ian Bremmer:
How much of a representative democracy is the United States today?
Frank Fukuyama:
I guess that I am not that worried about the future of democracy. I think that what the real threat is is the erosion of the liberal part of liberal democracy. So the liberal part really is the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, all these constraints on executive power. And I think that that's what Trump is going to threaten in the first instance. Appointing Kash Patel to run the FBI is not a vote in favor of a neutral enforcement of a impartial rule of law. But I do think that there are probably limits to how far he can push that, and I suspect there will be some backlash if he really tries to misuse that power. The democracy part, I think is not nearly as threatened as the liberal part because Republicans just won pretty decisively the last election. But once you start eroding the liberal respect for law and rules, you will start eroding democracy eventually.
That's what's happening in Hungary and a lot of these other authoritarian places. The one other thing that I have been particularly concerned about is that in addition to those two misinterpretations of liberalism, there's a third one which really has to do with what I would call excessive proceduralism. You can't build anything in the United States right now because there are way too many rules. And this is something that Nick Bagley at Michigan has written about. That liberals want to use government for their own social justice and other purposes, but they believe that legitimacy springs from procedures.
And I think that what's happened is that we've lost sight of the need of governments to actually deliver concrete results. And that's particularly a bad problem in my state of California where it's really, really hard to even build things that liberals want, like transmission lines and solar farms and offshore wind. And I think that part of the impulse towards more authoritarian government is that people are just fed up with all the rule of law constraints on doing stuff. I mean, the one really worrisome country right now is El Salvador where you had a really impossibly high murder rate and then know Nayib Bukele gets elected. He basically jails most of the young male population of El Salvador. And then the crime rate drops by 90%.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, he's the most popular democratically elected leader in the world today.
Frank Fukuyama:
And the thing that's really scary is that I don't see another democratic leader in the rest of Latin America that's been that effective. The country that comes closest is Colombia that really did kind of get their violence problem at least a little bit under control. But it's out of control in Ecuador and Mexico and plenty of other places and rule of law democratic countries don't seem to be able to deal with this terribly well. And that's what I think fuels a demand for authoritarian government. I think we think about this wrong. It's not like some of these leaders wake up in the morning and say, "Well, I'm an authoritarian. That's my framework, and I'm going to be an authoritarian when I come to power." They think, "I want to do something, and here are all these judges and courts and bureaucrats that are standing in my way and I can't get done what the people elected me to do." And that's what leads to this authoritarian impulse to go around the rule of law. I think that's one of the big challenges that liberal democracies are facing today.
Ian Bremmer:
Well, I mean at some point, you and I are political scientists, but I mean, I'm unprepared to allow a theory to get in the way of the well-being of human beings. And I mean, I have to tell you as much as I would like to see rule of law and more proceduralism in El Salvador, I mean, the fact was that the drug violence, the gang violence, I mean in this country was overwhelming. And the solutions that were being provided by the Americans and the Europeans were completely out to lunch. So I mean, if I were someone sitting in El Salvador wanting to do the best for my country, I think I'd probably be a little nicer than Bukele in the way I implemented. But I'm not sure my policies would be so radically different. Is that fair?
Frank Fukuyama:
Oh, it's absolutely fair. I have a number of Salvadorian friends who are committed liberals and believers in liberal democracy, but they can take their families out for a picnic on Sunday in the park after Bukele arrested all these people. And that's why he got such an overwhelming majority in... when he was reelected for an unconstitutional third or whatever, second or third term. I actually think that people in the democracy promotion community, which I've been very much embedded in over the last several decades, don't appreciate the need for results.
Ian Bremmer:
Results.
Frank Fukuyama:
They're still committed to this kind of proceduralism. And I think that was the mistake that the Democrats made in the last election. I mean, they focused on Trump's threat to democratic procedure, which is there's no question that he is a big threat to that procedure. But most voters care about results and they cared about inflation and gas prices and too many immigrants and that sort of thing. And they're much less concerned about the niceties of "Did you actually follow all the rules?" And I think that that's kind of the challenge that many liberal democracies are facing right now.
Ian Bremmer:
Frank Fukuyama, wonderful to see you again at GZERO World.
Frank Fukuyama:
Thank you for having me.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars, otherwise don't do it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts? Tell your friends.
