Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine is fundamentally a conflict between autocracy and democracy. And Russia's eventual defeat, along with China's growing economic travails, has strengthened the argument that liberal democracies with market economies are better than the alternatives.
PARIS – Thirty years after Francis Fukuyama published his famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, history returned with a vengeance. Following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Europe is once again the site of a large-scale war that is so characteristic of the twentieth century that no one expected to see anything like it today. Far from the “clash of civilizations” that political scientist Samuel Huntington anticipated would shape the twenty-first century, Russia wants to eradicate an independent country with a similar ethnolinguistic and religious background. The conflict is primarily about different political systems: autocracy versus democracy, empire versus national sovereignty.
While the war has produced countless tragedies, I believe that it will show Fukuyama to have been more right than wrong. He argued that communism’s implosion had ushered in a world where democracies with market economies would be preferred over alternative forms of government. While Russia’s war of aggression never should have happened, it clearly is an exception that proves Fukuyama’s rule. It has caused enormous suffering for Ukrainians, but they have fought courageously with the knowledge that history is on their side.
Meanwhile, the life expectancy of Vladimir Putin’s regime has abruptly fallen. To paraphrase Talleyrand, Putin’s war is worse than a crime; it is a fatal mistake that other potential invaders will learn not to repeat. It also reminds us that folly is a feature, rather than a bug, of dictatorships. Without political checks and balances, free media, and an independent civil society, autocrats do not receive the feedback needed to make wise and competent decisions.
In Putin’s case, living in a filter bubble has proven exceptionally costly. Russia’s economy is in a deep recession, its fiscal revenues have taken a massive hit, and the damage will continue to mount in 2023 after the European Union’s oil embargo and the G7’s oil-price cap take effect. Lacking cash, Putin has already moved from a strategy of recruiting soldiers for pay to mobilizing them by conscription, undercutting his own popularity and driving hundreds of thousands of educated Russians to flee the country. Making matters worse for him, Russia is losing the war.
Russia’s dismal performance is no accident. After the “end of history” 30 years ago, most dictators learned that the old twentieth-century methods of maintaining non-democratic rule no longer worked. In a globalized and technologically interconnected world, open repression is simply too costly. As Daniel Treisman and I show in Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, most non-democratic leaders have adopted a new strategy: pretend to be a democrat. Hold elections (that are neither free nor fair), permit some independent media (though no outlets with a large audience), and allow some opposition parties, all to create the illusion of a popular mandate to rule.
Putin was a master of this approach for 20 years. But as his regime’s corruption and cronyism undermined economic growth, and as digital and social media began to spread, his popularity began to decline. Mindful of this trend, he swiftly annexed Crimea in 2014, which boosted his popularity for a while. Then, in 2022, he tried to replay this strategy on an even grander scale. But he gravely underestimated Ukrainian resolve and Western unity in supporting Ukraine and imposing unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia.
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Putin has learned the hard way that it is unwise to start a twentieth-century war in the twenty-first century. And other autocratic and authoritarian regimes will heed this lesson for years to come. One certainly hopes that Russia’s Ukraine debacle will deter China from trying to seize Taiwan by force. Senior officials in the Communist Party of China should see that President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power poses many risks to the regime.
Moreover, Putin’s war has also caused substantial damage to the global economy, which in turn has contributed to China’s unprecedented economic slowdown. Chinese elites are probably asking themselves whether Xi ought to have done more to prevent the invasion or cut the war short. That question joins a long list of others about Xi’s zero-COVID policy, his crackdown on private business and the tech industry, and his government’s inability to manage the collapse of a real-estate bubble. In a system as opaque as China’s, it is hard to predict whether such second-guessing will affect the country’s shift toward authoritarianism. But Xi’s mistakes have clearly made the “Chinese model” less attractive to others around the world.
Finally, the past year has underscored the importance of solidarity. During the Cold War, the geopolitical West faced a perpetual, existential threat that superseded internal differences and disagreements. But, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, there was less to unite Western countries, and many succumbed to domestic divisions. Polarization within and between many democracies deepened, with factors such as rising inequality and the spread of social media accelerating the process. Nonetheless, Western societies came together in 2022 when it counted. While many Western politicians openly praised Putin at the start of the year, almost none do today.
That brings us to the most important question for the year ahead. If the war ends in 2023 – as seems likely – will we return to the polarized status quo ante? Or will we find a new common project? We need not look far. As hot as the summer of 2022 was, it will probably be one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives. Climate change is a challenge that should unite not just Western democracies but all the world’s governments. That may seem an unlikely outcome in the near term, but we must not stop working toward it.
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PARIS – Thirty years after Francis Fukuyama published his famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, history returned with a vengeance. Following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Europe is once again the site of a large-scale war that is so characteristic of the twentieth century that no one expected to see anything like it today. Far from the “clash of civilizations” that political scientist Samuel Huntington anticipated would shape the twenty-first century, Russia wants to eradicate an independent country with a similar ethnolinguistic and religious background. The conflict is primarily about different political systems: autocracy versus democracy, empire versus national sovereignty.
While the war has produced countless tragedies, I believe that it will show Fukuyama to have been more right than wrong. He argued that communism’s implosion had ushered in a world where democracies with market economies would be preferred over alternative forms of government. While Russia’s war of aggression never should have happened, it clearly is an exception that proves Fukuyama’s rule. It has caused enormous suffering for Ukrainians, but they have fought courageously with the knowledge that history is on their side.
Meanwhile, the life expectancy of Vladimir Putin’s regime has abruptly fallen. To paraphrase Talleyrand, Putin’s war is worse than a crime; it is a fatal mistake that other potential invaders will learn not to repeat. It also reminds us that folly is a feature, rather than a bug, of dictatorships. Without political checks and balances, free media, and an independent civil society, autocrats do not receive the feedback needed to make wise and competent decisions.
In Putin’s case, living in a filter bubble has proven exceptionally costly. Russia’s economy is in a deep recession, its fiscal revenues have taken a massive hit, and the damage will continue to mount in 2023 after the European Union’s oil embargo and the G7’s oil-price cap take effect. Lacking cash, Putin has already moved from a strategy of recruiting soldiers for pay to mobilizing them by conscription, undercutting his own popularity and driving hundreds of thousands of educated Russians to flee the country. Making matters worse for him, Russia is losing the war.
Russia’s dismal performance is no accident. After the “end of history” 30 years ago, most dictators learned that the old twentieth-century methods of maintaining non-democratic rule no longer worked. In a globalized and technologically interconnected world, open repression is simply too costly. As Daniel Treisman and I show in Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, most non-democratic leaders have adopted a new strategy: pretend to be a democrat. Hold elections (that are neither free nor fair), permit some independent media (though no outlets with a large audience), and allow some opposition parties, all to create the illusion of a popular mandate to rule.
Putin was a master of this approach for 20 years. But as his regime’s corruption and cronyism undermined economic growth, and as digital and social media began to spread, his popularity began to decline. Mindful of this trend, he swiftly annexed Crimea in 2014, which boosted his popularity for a while. Then, in 2022, he tried to replay this strategy on an even grander scale. But he gravely underestimated Ukrainian resolve and Western unity in supporting Ukraine and imposing unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia.
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Putin has learned the hard way that it is unwise to start a twentieth-century war in the twenty-first century. And other autocratic and authoritarian regimes will heed this lesson for years to come. One certainly hopes that Russia’s Ukraine debacle will deter China from trying to seize Taiwan by force. Senior officials in the Communist Party of China should see that President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power poses many risks to the regime.
Moreover, Putin’s war has also caused substantial damage to the global economy, which in turn has contributed to China’s unprecedented economic slowdown. Chinese elites are probably asking themselves whether Xi ought to have done more to prevent the invasion or cut the war short. That question joins a long list of others about Xi’s zero-COVID policy, his crackdown on private business and the tech industry, and his government’s inability to manage the collapse of a real-estate bubble. In a system as opaque as China’s, it is hard to predict whether such second-guessing will affect the country’s shift toward authoritarianism. But Xi’s mistakes have clearly made the “Chinese model” less attractive to others around the world.
Finally, the past year has underscored the importance of solidarity. During the Cold War, the geopolitical West faced a perpetual, existential threat that superseded internal differences and disagreements. But, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, there was less to unite Western countries, and many succumbed to domestic divisions. Polarization within and between many democracies deepened, with factors such as rising inequality and the spread of social media accelerating the process. Nonetheless, Western societies came together in 2022 when it counted. While many Western politicians openly praised Putin at the start of the year, almost none do today.
That brings us to the most important question for the year ahead. If the war ends in 2023 – as seems likely – will we return to the polarized status quo ante? Or will we find a new common project? We need not look far. As hot as the summer of 2022 was, it will probably be one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives. Climate change is a challenge that should unite not just Western democracies but all the world’s governments. That may seem an unlikely outcome in the near term, but we must not stop working toward it.