Francis Fukuyama’s Right (about this one thing)
I have a long history of criticising Francis Fukuyama. I’ve met the man—he came to a job talk I gave at Stanford in 2019. He’s a kind and collegial dude. But his analysis frequently errs and his ideas benefit the richest in society.
Nevertheless, I find myself agreeing strongly with the short video he just posted, warning:
Trump is a bully…Trying to placate him with concessions is a fool’s errand. He despises weakness…As an American, I say to my European friends: do not back down. Appeasing Trump with flattery has failed and must stop.
We must all recognize the urgency of isolating the Trump administration, inducing it to halt its growing list of illegal and predatory actions. Greenland should be a site of confrontation, and hopefully the beginning of a reckoning.
It pains me to say this as an American, but the United States is out of control. It has been for a while, but it’s getting worse. Trump and his team are clearly being emboldened by the lack of meaningful consequences, and the political vision they’re pursuing threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. We’re in a “Whose side are you on?” moment, and we can’t afford for the world’s governments to continue blowing it.
The answer, then, is to confront the United States. Isolate it. Sanction it as appropriate, and fight it if necessary. And for the love of god, concede nothing to it.
For rational, moral Americans, the answer is an extension of communities fighting against ICE: Demand that your government restrain itself, demilitarize, take the profits out of war, and hold agents of the state accountable for violating the law…and if you’re a troop, refuse unlawful orders.
The United States cannot be allowed to keep acting lawlessly in a capitalist world-system teetering on the brink of financial crisis, awash in nuclear weapons and precision-guided missiles. Mass global terror is our trajectory if nothing changes.
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz made much the same argument earlier this week, and I spoke in very explicit terms about his warning in my most recent episode of the pod:
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