Francis Fukuyama On The War

One of the independent aggregators pointed me to a brief essay by Francis Fukuyama Preparing for Defeat, which is his take on the Russo-Ukraine war. I never quite understood why there is a Francis Fukuyama, and indeed, along the line of Elon Musk's remark about Sen Sanders, I maybe thought he was deceased if I thought about him at all. The basic problem is that in 1992, he published The End of History and the Last Man in response to the Soviet Union's collapse, "which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government".

To which I have two responses. The first is, "So you're gonna quit your job and retire, right, if there's nothing more to be said?" The second is, "Tell that to Osama bin Laden." To the first, he's occupied academic sinecure after sinecure at foundations, councils, institutes, and centers-for in the three decades after he announced there was nothing more to say, and as far as I can see, he's at least made some kind of living continuing to say it. To the second, there have clearly been continuing versions of one kind or another for Soviet-era communisim, and in particular, China continues new permutations of big-power centralized authoritarianism. As to Fukuyama's continuing career, the first line of his essay says a lot:

I’m writing this from Skopje, North Macedonia, where I’ve been for the last week teaching one of our Leadership Academy for Development courses.

Which means that as a talking head, he's a C-lister. But his essay is at least a provocative example of cognitive dissonance. He begins with a few fairly perceptive points, although they're neither special nor unique:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. . . . Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

. . . The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize.

. . . There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point.

But here's where the cognitive dissonance kicks in:

The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.

I can speak only to Trump, as my knowledge of the others has been minimal. How has Trump ever expressed anything like "sympathy" for Putin? Most recently he's been criticized for having in the past called Putin "smart" and "a genius", but the general assessment of Putin's current state of mind is that, for instance as former Secretary of State Rice has said, he isn't the person she knew when she worked with him. As of now, Trump's position is,

“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.

“We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all. As everyone understands, this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president.”

And indeed, even leftist Hollywood spokespeople like Trevor Noah understand this:

"No one was ever ignoring Donald Trump’s calls. ‘Cause if you ignored Donald Trump’s calls, you didn’t know how he would respond. Maybe he’d send an angry tweet, or maybe he’d just, like, ban your country from everything. You don’t know.

"That’s why I bet, in these situations, Biden actually wishes that he could hire Trump to step in as ‘President Wild Card.’ You know, just keep everyone on their toes. ‘Cause if Trump was calling, you best believe the UAE, they’d be racing to pick up the phone."

The fact is that Trump, however you assess him, has already played in an entirely different league from Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, or Marine Le Pen, and in fact he played effectively. Putin was smart enough in fact to wait until Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine, and on one hand there's an emerging consensus that this is the case, and on the other even an emerging buyer's remorse. Trump's version of populism worked, and its replacement is failing terrribly.

What I think Fukuyama misses is that Ukraine is just one theater of an ongoing war that started around the time of the Wuhan lab leak: I would call it the Plebe War, or the Great Plebe War, which pits established and corrupt elites against the broad working class, which includes the bourgeois middle, but not the gentry. Ottawa and Kyiv have both been the sites of recent battles; Kenosha and Portland farther in the past. Fukuyama, even if he's a faded member, is nevertheless of the gentry.

It's worth noting that Biden's policy was effectively to look the other way at Putin's intent at first, while when forced to impose sanctions, to make lemonade out of lemons by using them as an excuse to impose massive fuel price increases on the working class, which was always his policy objective irrespective of Putin. Fukuyama seems blissfully unaware of this. History is still happening.