Fukuyama Predicts The End Of America

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:03]It's both painful and humiliating to watch the media coverage of Donald Trump's recent visit to Beijing because it amply demonstrated America's decline as a great power relative to China.

[00:00:16]Prior to the summit, expectations were very low. Trump was in a weakened position, beset by inflation and declining popularity.

[00:00:25]>> Is this Francis himself? Yes. I'm kind of interested in this take. Is this the end of history guy? Listen, I think it's important to understand this, okay?

[00:00:33]Francis Fukuyama is very very misinterpreted. When he said that we had reached the end of history, he was not saying that neoliberalism was a flawless system and no change would ever be needed from this point forward. What he was saying was that history had frozen.

[00:00:48]It's almost a Marxist argument. He was arguing that following the end of the cold war, the dialectical forces operating on the west that allowed it to change and grow over time had halted.

[00:01:00]That the existence of the Soviet Union and the tension geopolitically between the US and the Soviet Union was a dialectical pressure that allowed the US to advance. There is a legitimate argument to be made that if it wasn't for the Soviet Union, um the Civil Rights Act either wouldn't have passed at all or would have taken much longer to pass. There was a pressure internationally. You know, the fact that we were competing with another superpower meant that we had to put on a good face for the rest of the world. And it did look bad to a lot of the world that we were fighting so tenaciously to prevent black people from having, you know, equal rights. Uh but in the absence of a Soviet Union, maybe we would have just shrugged and gone like, you know, whatever sucks. Not like there's another casino in town, right?

[00:01:41]The extent to which the Soviet Union put this pressure on the United States is like widely debated. I don't think that it was like the single force operating.

[00:01:50]I think we would have had the Civil Rights Act eventually anyway. I think it would have taken a little longer maybe.

[00:01:54]Um but uh it's a it's an argument worth exploring. So what Fukyama said when he said we've reached the end of history is like the forces are now grinding to a halt. We are now in stagnation and that stagnation will eventually self-destruct because people will get bored. And that is what happened, right?

[00:02:16]Like neoliberalism did kind of congeal and then fail to make arguments for its own existence and then imploded because enough Americans got bored and decided to blow it up.

[00:02:28]You know, you're crediting the Soviets with something black Americans did. Don't you don't need to [ __ ] break your back reaching to misinterpret me.

[00:02:38]Black Americans protested for the right.

[00:02:40]You might as well say, "Well, black Americans didn't do it. LBJ did. He's white." No. Come on. It's it's a it's a a tandem of forces. It's a an intersectional alliance of interests.

[00:02:54]Soviet Union, you know, they put pressure. So like Mark Fischer said in his book capitalist realism, I sure mean he said a lot of things in that book, but yes. Yeah. To an extent. Yeah.

[00:03:05]while seeking Chinese help in getting out of the Iran trap that he had created for himself. She on the other hand had forced Trump to back down in his trade war the year before with China showing strong export growth in the face of Washington's relatively weak response.

[00:03:25]>> Soviet what aboutism just wasn't a serious factor from what I can tell. I don't think it was whataboutism. It's like uh how do I how do I put this?

[00:03:35]During the Cold War, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa were emerging power blocks that the Soviet Union and America fought over for influence. And it did look pretty bad to the world that we were like spraying black people with fire hoses.

[00:03:56]Um, this might not be a pressure that Americans would have acceded to if we felt like there was no other game in town, but the Soviet Union did like have a better pitch there. Not because they weren't racist. The Soviet Union literally like ethnically displaced portions of their own population, but they were, at least in this respect, better at propaganda, mostly because the Soviet Union didn't have free press and we did. So the world and American journalists were allowed to comment on the racism of American police and society. Whereas in the Soviet Union, it's not like there were a bunch of Soviet era journalists critiquing Stalin for his handling of ethnic migration.

[00:04:33]Right? So in this respect, the Soviets kind of outbasted us, but you know, they put pressure either way.

[00:04:44]And so it was. Trump returned to Washington with very little to show for his visit. Only two agreements on opening Chinese markets to US products and no political help in the Middle East. China did agree to buy 200 Boeing aircraft, fewer than expected, but it failed to follow through on similar promises in the past. The White House also claimed that China had agreed to purchase 17 billion in agricultural products, but China has not confirmed this. This did not prevent Trump from claiming that they did quote great trade deals and that the meeting was quote a great success.

[00:05:26]It was the optics of the meeting that demonstrated how far Trump has fallen in Chinese eyes. Trump was not met at the airport by shei, but by a lower ranking official. He was seated on the podium in a chair that made him look smaller than she, a slight that could have been avoided had Trump's state department not sideline the protocol officials whose job it is to look after these things.

[00:05:52]The worst part of the visit was Trump's constant sycophancy exclaiming that she was a great leader, really a friend, someone from central casting. He hadused again and again about how beautiful and impressive China was. As in previous interactions with various dictators, Trump seems to have thought that they would be impressed by the same kind of praise and flattery that he himself reveled in. She for his part failed to reciprocate any of these assertions of friendship stating merely that the United States and China should be partners and not rivals.

[00:06:33]The most significant issue arising out of the summit was obviously Taiwan.

[00:06:38]Taiwan had just uh been promised a 14 billion.

[00:06:42]>> This dude's cooking. Well, I mean he is um he is a smart guy. I think one of the big takeaways from this era is just that neoliberalism is a dead-end ideology because it almost immediately forgets the need to self-justify. Uh neoliberalism defers way too much power from the political class to the corporate class and as a consequence the people in charge whose job it is is to convince people to not riot forget to do their jobs properly. If you can't convince the people beneath you that you're doing a good job leading things will eventually implode. Even kings and emperors had to convince the people beneath them that they were doing a good job leading. Weak kings and weak emperors, people who were perceived to be incompetent, typically, you know, faced way more civil strife and unrest because people felt like they could get a better deal by getting them ousted and replaced with somebody else.

[00:07:34]>> Arms package voted on by Congress earlier in the year in advance of the summit. Uh it was held up and there's no indication that delivery will resume anytime soon.

[00:07:46]She told Trump that the future relations with Washington would be conditioned on the level of US support for the island.

[00:07:55]A light seems to have gone on in Trump's head that Taiwan would be what he called a very good negotiating chip in trade negotiations with Beijing. In other words, you trade an ally security for economic advantage. Trump made other dismissive remarks about the island and he also repeated his assertion that Taiwan had so stolen semiconductor technology from the United States, something that is simply not true. His failure to say anything about Taiwan's security stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden's clear assertion that the United States would act in the defense of that country.

[00:08:36]Donald Trump is a politician who is unable to see the world in anything other than personal and self-interested terms. He was furious after his return at the suggestion that Obama was treated with more respect than he was using the occasion to assert that quote nobody respects Obama and that in any case Obama was a divider. The Chinese media has been talking for some time about the United States being a declining power.

[00:09:08]She apparently brought this up with Trump directly by expressing the hope that the two countries could avoid the thusidities trap in which a declining America tried to block the rise of a rising China rather than seeding power and world leadership gracefully.

[00:09:26]Trump immediately interpreted shei as agreeing with him that America was in decline under Joe Biden. But it was great again now that he was president.

[00:09:37]As usual, Trump reserves his greatest anger and hostility for his domestic opponents and not the leaders of the world's great dictatorships.

[00:09:48]The truth of the matter, which the Chinese understand very well, is something of the opposite. American decline is a direct product of Trump's rise since 2016.

[00:10:01]It is as if Trump had decided to do everything in his power to weaken the United States visa v China. He has polarized an already polarized country as no previous president. He's cut funding for basic scientific research and attacked American universities which are the best in the world. He has gotten the United States involved in a an unnecessary war in the Middle East and has depleted stocks of advanced American munitions which could be useful in a conflict in East Asia. He and his colleagues have openly stated that their domestic opponents, the Democrats, >> it is a very cozy video. You're not wrong. the narrative national decline, you know, delivered in an ASMR voice, >> are a far greater threat to the future of the United States than either China or Russia.

[00:10:53]Trump has also systematically sought to undermine the US alliance system.

[00:10:58]>> It's nice to listen to a bit of sanity backed by a bit of nature sounds. Yeah.

[00:11:02]I do worry though Fukuyama is a smart guy, but I I really and maybe this is my limited imagination, but I really I feel like many people will be able to understand why things went wrong and how they went wrong, but will not be able to articulate a solution because all of the potential suggestions sound too radical.

[00:11:25]You know what I mean? It's kind of like how it used to be if you asked a climate scientist what could be done to prevent uh global warming, you know, the global temperature from hitting 2 degrees CC above pre-industrial norms, they would give you a bunch of like legitimate explanations and reasons why it should be done and like ways to prevent it and so on. But now, if you did that, they would just look at you with tears in their eyes and shake their head. Not because we couldn't do it. We could.

[00:11:52]It's just it's not like doable. To prevent us from hitting 2° C above pre-industrial norms would require at the very least overwhelming political upheaval and violence. And they know that's not feasible. So they don't even bother saying it. Like at this point we're fighting for scraps at the upper margins of what 2.5° C.

[00:12:11]Likewise when it comes to like repairing democracy, I really don't think a lot of liberals, even good liberals, Fukuyama is a good liberal. He believes in liberalism. I don't think they understand or at least don't agree with me or wouldn't agree with me on how far you would need to go to fix this. You know what I mean? He's a neocon though.

[00:12:32]He's not really a neo He's not really a neocon.

[00:12:36]He was He's been a bit disillusioned. I don't know. You can't really be a neocon really ideologically but also critique the uh neoliberal you know uh I guess hamstringing of America because if so you'd be critiquing your own ideology.

[00:12:54]He has shifted >> disparaging allies while heaping tariffs on even the closest traditional friends and threatening to grab the territory from Denmark, Greenland, a loyal NATO ally. He claims that the United States under his leadership is now respected as never before.

[00:13:17]Actually, something close to the opposite is the truth. There is agreement among America's friends and rivals that the United States has become something of a rogue state that is contributing to global instability and disorder as well as something of a laughingtock.

[00:13:36]Trump has made made Xiinping's life enormously easier in a way that was reflected in his behavior during the summit. America under Trump has been engaged in such a determined process of self harm that China does not really need to do anything other than sit back and watch it unfold.

[00:13:57]Trump predicted that China would not attack Taiwan while he was the president. And he may be right about this. She does not want to get in the way of a declining United States. But he may be forced to act quickly if the United States finally gets a president who wants to reverse this long-term trajectory.

[00:14:20]Thanks for listening. Please subscribe to the Frankly Fukuyama YouTube channel.

[00:14:25]You can I find this quite charming. Can you blame me?

[00:14:32]What is Western civilization? Who knows, man? Who knows?

[00:14:37]better at self-promo than you are. No kidding. He posts cute selfies on Instagram, too.

[00:14:43]Not trying to be contrarian, but this comes across kind of like the Mark Carney speech. Well, the difference is that Mark Carney is a hypocrite.

[00:14:49]Fukuyama isn't in power. He's identified the problem for decades now. Mark Carney will, you know, moan or or or or like bemoan the end of the pretend world order, but then like do nothing to fix or address it. The flannel shirt was nice. The flannel shirt was very nice.

[00:15:08]He seems to have a a a keenness for them.

[00:15:14]Carney's speech was basically just saying we could do a capitalism without America. Yeah, it wasn't. It really wasn't. It was it was exceptional in how candid he was in his awareness that the global world order had always been like a fake, like an artificial construct.

[00:15:29]But he didn't offer any solutions to it other than, well, I guess we're on our own without America anymore.

[00:15:36]you know. Yeah. Everyone wants to save capitalism. You're not getting it, man.

[00:15:40]You're not getting it.

[00:15:43]It's [ __ ]