Putin has almost had to throw, as I said before, a really hard punch, simply to convince people who may even now not be fully convinced that this is a turn toward a darker world of force, of bullying, of great powers simply throwing their weight around for what they want and crushing small countries. So the question is whether the democracies have enough confidence left, after all the blows that they've taken in the last 15 or so years, to realize that the threat is very present. I think what this has finally made impossible is any illusion about the inevitability of the world progressing toward a more democratic, more interconnected, more cosmopolitan, better place. Francis Fukuyama wasn't the only one who suffered from that in the early 90s. But I think maybe what it's ended is a sense of any illusion about democratic inevitability. So it does feel more like a last nail than a first, certainly. And what other tyrants around the world have been getting away with. And what China has been doing in Tibet, in Hong Kong, in Xinjiang province, and is threatening to do in Taiwan. In some ways, it's different in degree but not in kind from what Russia has been doing to Georgia, to Ukraine, to Belarus, and to Syria for years now. It’s been coming in Ukraine since-you could almost say-2004, and the thwarting of the Orange Revolution, and certainly since 2014, with the success of the Maidan Revolution, but which led to the first Russian assault on Ukraine. It's not as though this is a sudden punch in the face that no one saw coming. Packer: We've been on a downward trajectory in the prestige and the influence of democracy for a good 15, maybe even 20 years. How would you think about this moment, not in relation to the future, but in relation to the world of the last 30 years? ![]() It's a moment in which the metamorphosis of the certainties into illusions has visibly been completed. And this set of certainties has been turning into illusions for a good number of years now, starting in a way with 9/11, and the failure of the Iraq War, going through the horrible failure of the Arab Spring and the fate of Syria, and the Great Recession and a whole bunch of other things-including, obviously, the way in which democracy is coming under threat within its heartlands in the United States and other places.īut it feels as though Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a final nail in the coffin of that old worldview. I grew up with an optimistic sense of what the future would look like: that it will be more democratic and more tolerant, that the Internet would connect people more, that deep forms of bellicose nationalism were really an anachronism. Mounk: For me, there's a question about what the meaning of the invasion itself is for how we will understand the last 20 or 30 years. ![]() I think the next few weeks are going to tell us a lot more about which of those two outcomes we'll look back on when we think about the invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues to look on with horror, but in a sort of state of passivity or paralysis. Xi Jinping sees it as an outrageous move that Putin got away with, and that they-and other autocratic and kleptocratic states who have been in informal alliances-are emboldened and begin to act with more and more impunity and audacity. The other way it could go is that this is a moment that Putin wins, and doesn't really suffer enough to regret. And I don't mean guns-blazing “fight” I mean seeing this as the greatest threat to our interests, which really are very close to what our values are, or should be. So that would be one way to mark this moment, looking back: as the moment when, essentially, the democracies got serious and realized that this was a fight that they couldn't keep avoiding. The moment when not just the Western democracies, but all democracies realize that they have to put up a struggle-to see this as a concerted threat to what we care about, and that it's not going to stop in Ukraine. Either this will be the moment when Western democracies realize that there's a new Cold War-which is very hot right now in Ukraine, but which has been building for years, in the form of great power autocracies that have become more and more bold and energetic, using threats and force to get what they want. I think it could go one of at least two ways. There's something profoundly disturbing and astounding about the sight of tank columns, airborne assaults, and ballistic missiles in Europe. As much as I expected this-I never thought Putin was bluffing-I'm also shocked by it. George Packer: It's very hard to know, since the moment has just begun. ![]() What do you think the lasting significance of this moment is going to be? Yascha Mounk: We're recording this as Russian troops are closing in on Kyiv, as Putin has launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine.
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