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.
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.