Have you had experience of being cast as pro-Putin for expressing unease about some of the Western measures against Russia?

Immensely, and painfully. But let’s be clear, my pain is neither here nor there when you have atrocities, murders, a whole country being devastated by Putin’s armies. Who gives a damn about how I feel about my treatment by people on social media?

Back in 2001, I labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal because of the murder of 250,000 people in Grozny, Chechnya. It was in a Senate meeting of the University of Athens, which was discussing the motion for awarding an honorary doctorate to Putin, who had just become president of Russia. And I was in a minority of one opposing it. So having gone out on a limb, having condemned Putin, it was a bit surprising to be lambasted by several commentators as “Putin’s useful idiot.”

Was the charge against you based on your blaming Nato expansion for the current crisis?

The most pertinent criticism that I received was that I was “Westsplaining” — this is a version of “mansplaining” — that I was being condescending in the way that I was telling Eastern Europeans what’s in their interest. Now, that is a very serious accusation. Because we do know that mansplaining is something that we men often do.

While I’m not claiming to have the monopoly of truth, I do believe that as a European, as a citizen of the world, I have the right to, for instance, comment that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian power was built on a bedrock of animosity between the West and Russia, and that Putin exploited the humiliation of the Russians — at the hands of Nato, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund.

Don’t forget how in the Nineties, even the reformers — liberals, neoliberals in Russia — were crushed by the West, by the International Monetary Fund, forcing Russia into an awful default in 1998 that caused the life expectancy of men in Russia to drop from 75 to 58. It was a catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe. And Putin, being a KGB strategist, utilised that pent-up frustration of Russians against the West in order to build up his horrid empire.

Is your argument that without Nato expansion in Eastern Europe we would not be in this position?

My point is this: there was an agreement between Gorbachev and George Bush Senior that Gorbachev would let Eastern Europe go its own way, on the condition that Nato would not expand eastward. We know that; this is well established. Given that Putin was pushing Russia back towards a re-militarised stance, and Nato and Russia were always going to develop an enmity between them, is it not a good idea to have a neutral zone between the two? Do we really want Russian nuclear weapons and Nato nuclear weapons to be side by side? For me, the neutrality of Eastern Europe is not a second best, it would be first best. It will be good for the people of Eastern Europe, it will be good for Nato, and it will be good for Russia, to minimise tensions to the extent that we can do that.

But in any case, I am perfectly willing to accept an Eastern European progressive who says to me that I’m wrong. What I find intolerable is the lack of tolerance — that I’ve been told, “butt off, you’re a Westplainer in that you even have an opinion about what should be happening in Eastern Europe”. This is not a good foundation for Europeanism.

They do say that when war begins, the truth dies very quickly. But it’s not just truth. It’s a capacity that we have in the West to have a civilised, rational debate amongst ourselves.

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Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

What about the sanctions against Russia — do you support them? 

Well, it’s always the case that when sanctions are slapped on a dictatorial regime they hurt the people, not the dictators. Especially in the case of Putin. Putin has a war chest, which is quite large. And he doesn’t care about the plight of Russian people. But let me be clear on this. I’m not against the sanctions. Watching the atrocities coming out now — the towns, the villages that the Russian army has vacated — watching the devastation on the coastal areas of eastern Ukraine, I can understand why people say, “look, we simply do not want to trade with these people — we’re not going to let them have access to their yachts, and to their money, and all that,” that’s fine by me.

I think that, in the end, we are going to have a lot more suffering — as a result of price increases, especially electricity prices — among the poor in Western Europe. I believe the dollar as the reserve currency is being placed under immense pressure. So I think that the American administration is going to live to regret the cutting off of the Central Bank of Russia from the dollar payment system.

But none of that matters really at this very moment. Because what matters is the war. Freddie, what keeps me up at night is that people are being killed. And what I want us to work for, all of us — and let’s iron out our differences: how can we have an immediate cessation of fire and a withdrawal of Russian troops?

What appalls me about those who purport to support Ukraine and who are attacking my position, is that they seem to be seriously considering the possibility that Ukraine is going to win the war and overthrow Putin. Now that’s completely pie in the sky. Anybody who believes that is jeopardising the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as we speak.

At best, you’re going to have a stalemate. Now a stalemate is terrible for the people of Ukraine. Because we know what Putin is going to do. He’s going to do what he did in Grozny. He’s going to raze to the ground areas that he needs to abandon. The Ukrainian army has been very heroic, and I applaud them for having resisted. But they cannot win the war. Do we really want this painful, murderous stalemate go on and on and on? Do we really want to invest in regime change in Russia that is instigated by the United States? Whenever the United States has tried to regime change we’ve had complete catastrophe. Look at Afghanistan, look at Iraq, look at Libya. And this is a nuclear power. Do we want to play with this fire, with this nuclear fire?

We should have an immediate ceasefire. President Zelenskyy, to his credit, has now adopted the proposal that I’ve been making from day one: that we should have an agreement between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin — of course, with Zelenskyy, and the European Union participating — that makes a very simple trade, a deal. Russia withdraws from Ukraine, in exchange for an end to the sanctions and a commitment, by the West, that Ukraine is going to be part of the West but not part of Nato.

Does that include being part of the EU?

Putin wants a way out. I think that the United States and Zelenskyy, together, and the EU, must give him a way out. If he can be seen to have won a victory — something that he can present to his own people as a victory (“I have ended Nato’s eastward expansion. I went to war to stop Nato expanding and I succeeded”), I think that we have a moral duty to give him this way out. Now, I can’t guarantee that he will take it. But the West can offer him this way out, to stop the killings.

A few weeks ago, giving an off-ramp to Putin might have proven popular. But it feels like the situation is different now. We’ve had a full-scale withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kyiv, and there seems to be increased confidence that something like a full-scale defeat might actually be in sight. What’s your reaction to that?

That’s madness. There is no way that the Ukrainian army is going to defeat the panoply of the Russian army in Mariupol, in the areas between Crimea, and Donbas. All power to them if they can do it. I don’t believe that Zelenskyy believes it. I don’t believe that anybody actually believes it. Yes, it is wonderful that Putin did not walk into Kyiv unopposed. It’s wonderful that he’s been given a bloody nose. This is the time to sue for peace.

Look, the West did that after the awful civil war in Yugoslavia. You’ll recall Srebrenica. We had atrocities galore across Bosnia. And not just in Bosnia — in Croatia, in Ukraine, in various areas that were devastated by the original civil war within Yugoslavia. And yet, under the auspices of the American President, the West sat down with Milosevic and they created an imperfect peace for Bosnia, which has been holding since then. Was that a mistake? Should we have continued the bloodletting, hoping that one side would completely annihilate the other side? I don’t believe so.

There’s talk of really escalating the amount of military hardware being sent to support the Ukraine war effort. I’m presuming from what you’re saying that you’d be against that?

While the Ukrainian army is resisting, I think we have a moral duty to support them militarily. Not me and you personally, but I’m not going to criticise the West for sending weapons to the Ukrainian resistors. But the whole point of resisting is to come to the point where we sue for peace. We can come to an agreement that leaves everybody slightly dissatisfied, which is the optimal agreement. Where, for instance, Ukraine stays out of Nato, it stops arming itself. Maybe there can be a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Crimea can be discussed in the next 10 years or so.

Such an agreement could also be augmented with an understanding that Ukraine would not be prevented from entering the EU. Well, that agreement goes hand-in-hand with ending the arms race on both sides. Because who knows, maybe Putin tomorrow is going to be supported by the Chinese military? Do we really want that kind of escalation?

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Putin has made Nato stronger

By Edward Luttwak

Something’s happened quite suddenly where to speak like that is now seen as a betrayal.

It’s what happens when war begins: we lose our head. Warmongering becomes cool and mainstream. Now, I have no doubt that there are cooler heads around Europe who are despairing. But they can’t speak out. I can see it in Germany, I can see it within the government of the Federal Republic: there are people who are besides themselves. They are pulling their hair out. Because if they speak out they will be immediately taken to task by the warmongers who are having a field day.

This is why it’s important that we band together to bring a modicum of rationality back to the debate and to focus on the only thing that matters at the moment. It’s not money. It’s not trade. It’s not natural gas. It is human lives in Ukraine. How can we stop people from dying? Because if they continue — the ones who put the theoretical right of Ukrainians to be members of Nato above the life of people in Ukraine, and above the opportunity of Ukraine to prosper as a Western democracy, which is inside the EU and outside of Nato — we’re going to be creating a quagmire that will ensure two things. Firstly, that thousands of people will die who could be saved, and secondly, that Ukraine is going to be a desert.

Do you observe that the people leading this warmongering, as you call it, would mainly describe themselves as liberals?

Yes. I can see that. But it’s not the first time. I remember when the United States were about to invade Iraq, even Left-wingers like Christopher Hitchens, a man that I admired all my life, became liberal imperialists. He was gung-ho about invading Iraq and spreading democracy. If you think of the early 1960s, it was JFK who initially showed a degree of enthusiasm for taking over Vietnam.

I do fear that it’s not just some liberal imperialists or liberal supporters of victory — of war until the final victory is achieved, as if it is possible to imagine invading Moscow. I feel that there’s something else there: a missing ingredient. Follow the money. The United States is a very complex economy. And it’s not homogeneous. Segments of the American economy are suffering as a result of the war, with the increasing price of oil. I believe Silicon Valley is not happy, because they’re being put in a very difficult situation. Even the banking sector, Wall Street, can’t really be enjoying what’s going on.

But if you are selling weapons, you are having a party. You have Olaf Scholtz, the German Chancellor, about to order 100 billion euros worth of American equipment, because the Germans are not making the stuff. If you are providing fracked oil and gas from New Mexico, from Minnesota, from Texas, you are looking at the new deals that are being struck between the European Union and the United States for LNG (liquefied natural gas), and you are rubbing your hands with glee. Because what was a dying industry in the United States now suddenly has been given a huge lease of life. This is not a conspiracy. If you have liberal imperialists, and you’ve got people that are going to make a lot of money out of this liberal imperialism, and you bring these together, you have a very powerful constituency in favour of maintaining the conflicts.

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Putin is following the Bosnia playbook

By Philip Cunliffe

A lot of people will listen to what you’ve just said and think that it is verging on conspiracy: evil Americans in suits sitting around board tables, trying to create wars in order to profit from them. 

There’s no conspiracy; nothing of what I said is conspiracy. It’s the truth that if you’re selling arms, you are making a lot of money. If you’re selling oil and gas that is fracked in the United States, you are making a lot of money. We know that.

It’s not causation though, is it? It’s one thing to observe that, but those people aren’t in charge of making the decisions.

Of course. Because why didn’t they do it ten years ago? They would have had an interest in doing this ten years ago. Nobody forced Putin to invade. It wasn’t Nato’s fault that he invaded, even if Nato created circumstances for him to be powerful, in my view. It was Putin’s criminal choice to invade Ukraine. And that gave rise to military resistance by the Ukrainians, which I applaud. And then on the coat-tails of these developments that have nothing to do with them, people come in with particular axes to grind, political ones, and financial agendas. So the whole thing acquires momentum. This is not a conspiracy theory. That is, I think, a solid rational analysis of what was going on.

How, then, should we treat the very popular and successful president of Ukraine? He has been incredibly effective at generating international attention. Should we support him? Should we be critical of him?

We should be critically supportive. Look, I followed Zelenskyy’s career. It was interesting that he was elected on a platform for making peace with Moscow, and for sidelining the oligarchic and ultra Right-wing elements within Ukraine. We have to note that. It’s also true that he failed in doing this to a very large extent: the oligarchs that he was going to wage war against effectively had him. His reign has not been easy. And the oligarchs managed to maintain their control over the country, some would say, forcing Zelenskyy to succumb.

The neo-Nazi Azov battalion in Mariupol and so on maintain their swastikas. I’m sure that Zelenskyy wanted to get rid of them, but he couldn’t. But none of this matters. Because when a country is invaded, I feel a natural duty to support the people who have been invaded and to support their leader — even if it’s somebody I would not have voted for, had I been one of them.

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How Western elites exploit Ukraine

By Arta Moeini

But what about this overt campaign by Zelenskyy to encourage more direct Western military intervention?

He’s the leader of a country that is being invaded: it is perfectly natural for him to be calling upon the rest of the world to come to their assistance. I’m sure he would have loved it if Nato waltzed in, even though I’m sure he understands that it would bring us to the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe. It is his job to ask for us to step in.

But to his credit, he’s done something else as well. He’s embraced the neutrality solution. And he is participating in discussions with Russians, and negotiations. Let’s face it, the European Union is a figment of our imagination. We’re so fragmented, we are a non-player, really. It’s only the United States that can provide Zelenskyy with the backing he needs in his negotiations with Putin.

What people object to about that is that it has the whiff of people making decisions for smaller countries over their heads. What the people of Ukraine want is neither here nor there.

My own country would not exist if we didn’t have such an arrangement back in the late 1820s. We were under the Ottomans for 400 or 500 years. We had our own revolution, our own resistance against the Ottoman armies. In the end, how did Greece come about? It came about because the great powers — the English, the French, and the Russians — sat down with the Ottomans. And they said: “Greece becomes an independent state, it’s a kind of buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and the West”. And we were given a chance to exist.

What is your message, then, to people who object to the invasion of Ukraine but also feel deeply uneasy about the West’s involvement? How should they react when they are called Putin supporters?

Be kind. I don’t think you should antagonise anybody these days, because there is so much antagonism already. Maintain your cool, support the Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s armies. Do not succumb to the silence of militarism and perpetual war. And always keep your eye on the trophy, which is immediate peace, withdrawal of Russian troops — and a neutral, democratic Ukraine that we all help get back up on its feet.

Some people are seeing this war as further evidence of the demise of the liberal world order; you seem to see in it an opportunity?

Vladimir Putin is at the centre of a global anti-liberal campaign waged by authoritarian great powers like Russia and China, but also by a number of populists that have arisen in democratic countries, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or our Donald Trump. Putin said very explicitly that he thought liberalism was an obsolete doctrine. And a lot of conservatives in the United States have actually (they’re backing away from it now) said they like Putin; they like the idea of a strongman that could cut through all the liberal nonsense they saw going on in their societies. With this invasion of another democratic country, Putin has created a certain amount of moral clarity. The biggest advantage of a liberal state is the fact that it’s not authoritarian. It’s not a dictatorship; it doesn’t kill people; it doesn’t invade neighbours. Putin’s demonstrated what the alternative to liberalism is.

So you see in this war the possibility of “a new birth of freedom”. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think that our liberal democracies have gotten very complacent over the last 30 years. After the fall of the former Soviet Union, we had this extended period of peace and prosperity. And I think that especially younger people who grew up in that world, where they didn’t experience either the violent conflict of the twentieth century, or the dictatorship of a communist regime, began to take liberal democracy for granted. They assumed that this was simply the way the world was, and nobody could threaten that. And as a result, they weren’t willing to actively defend democracy where it was under threat. And I think that’s one of the reasons that Putin thought that he could get away with this invasion: because he thought that the United States is internally very divided, that Europe really doesn’t believe in much of anything anymore. One of the nice things that has happened is the unity that’s been expressed within the Nato alliance, especially in Germany, where they basically revised 40 years of Ostpolitik.

But the reality is that it’s a nationalist battle, isn’t it? 

I don’t think you can be in favour of liberal democracy unless it’s embedded in a nation. I don’t think there’s an abstraction called “liberal democracy” that people fight on behalf of; they fight for liberal institutions in their country, and they fight as a result of national pride, and because they like the institutions. I remember distinctly — I’ve been to Ukraine many times since 2013 — walking around Maidan Square: you feel like you’re in a free society because people can come and go as they wish, they can criticise the government, they can vote for opposition parties. There was a freedom that you could experience in Ukraine prior to this invasion that you couldn’t experience in Russia. That’s really what made Ukrainian nationhood different from Russian nationhood: Russians had to live with this centralised dictatorship and Ukrainians could live with a very similar culture, but in a free society.

Is there an outcome where, while the West becomes more assertive, it continues on the road of becoming essentially less liberal — because it’s more effective to assert your competitive advantage in a more Chinese or East Asian-style society?

No, I think that the real alternative is to correct some of — what I would regard as — the excesses of liberalism that have driven some of the opposition to liberalism itself, and I think that exists both on the Right and the Left. It has nothing to do with accommodating a more Chinese type of regime. But really the important choices are within what we’ve understood to be the liberal tradition, and I think that’s true on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, you had a kind of economic liberalism that evolved into what’s now called neoliberalism, which was a kind of worship of the market and a denigration of the state, which led to a kind of globalisation that put economic efficiency above all other social goods and led to a big increase in inequality. Globally, it led to a deterioration of a lot of public services; everything was just seen to be an expression of private interest. That needs to be walked back. On the Right, you had a vast expansion of the idea of personal autonomy. One of the good things about a liberal society is that it protects personal autonomy, but our autonomy is not unlimited. We are creatures that want community: we want to share values with other people. When you have a liberalism that is like an acid that destroys any prior sense of community: that’s something people don’t really like. When it undermines a sense of nation, and the ability to feel patriotic: that’s a problem liberal societies have had.

One example of this is the debate around free speech, which you observe has become more problematic in the past few years. Do you now see that being able to be reversed?

Some of the biggest threats to free speech are not actually those that are being done by governments, particularly governments in the democratic world. The real problem is a private one. Big internet platforms like Google and Facebook have been amplifying material that is toxic — often conspiracy theories — because what they’re primarily interested in is not the broader democratic community. They care about their bottom lines. A big concentration of private power has contributed to the toxicity of a lot of the discourse in modern democracies. And it leads to these real conundra, because there’s then a call for the government to regulate their activity. So in Germany, they have the NetzdG law that criminalises publishing false or fake news. And that’s where you get into real danger, because it’s not clear that the government is the right regulator of that kind of activity. But it’s not clear either that these large platforms should simply be allowed to make these determinations on their own. Right now, for people on the Left, the leaders of Google and Facebook are sympathetic to their agenda. But imagine if a Rupert Murdoch takes over Facebook, or some equivalent character on the Right, and has that kind of power to amplify certain messages and suppress others.

One of the deeper themes in your work that stretches right back to the End of History — you talk about the Greek word thymos in that book — is that there’s something about polite, liberal democracy in its perfected sense that doesn’t answer some deep questions in the human soul. Do you now think we are predisposed to prefer war to peace in some way?

Not under all circumstances. But there is something that drives us in that direction. Thymos is usually translated into English as spiritedness. You could call it pride, or the demand for respect or recognition. And I think that a great deal of politics is really not about contest over material goods, it’s really a contest over respect. So you think about something like gay marriage or the Me Too movement, these are fundamentally dignity issues where gays and lesbians want to have their unions celebrated as having equal status to heterosexual unions, or women want to be treated with the same respect as men. And this is not really governed by economic calculations. It’s governed by a different kind of desire that oftentimes works at cross-purposes. If you think about what’s going on in populist politics: this kind of demand for respect was very much driving the whole upwelling of voters that voted for Brexit and voted for Donald Trump. It’s really the more educated, more cosmopolitan people living in big cities like London, or New York, or San Francisco, that tended to vote for progressive parties, and then people living in smaller communities in the countryside with more traditional values that voted for populists. There’s an economic division there. But there’s also a respect division, because those more educated people tended to look down on the others that didn’t share their particular kind of cosmopolitan worldview. And a politician like Donald Trump was quite brilliant in understanding how much resentment there was, and could play on those resentments. That’s defined a lot of our politics in recent years.

You don’t actually differ that dramatically from some of the more populist thinkers — only while they felt these impulses were virtues or important things that needed to be accommodated, you seem to think they are dangers. Is that fair?

No, I don’t think that’s right. I think that any human striving depends on this sense of pride. This is true at an individual level. If you didn’t want to be recognised as a great pianist, or a great writer, or baseball player, or football player, or whatever, you probably wouldn’t strive for excellence. All of us want the attention and the respect that comes with great human achievement. But the greatest criminals in the world are driven by that desire to stand out. Donald Trump realised that he could be noticed by everybody for saying completely outrageous things that didn’t make any sense in a more narrowly rational way, but they excited people and it got him attention. This desire for respect and recognition is the basis of good behaviour and it’s the basis of bad behaviour. But it doesn’t fall within the economic calculus associated with classical liberalism.

What about the instinct to want to belong to a culture that you recognise as your own, and that you feel at home in. Is that something that the liberal world needs to accommodate better?

It really depends on what that community is based on. In today’s world, if you simply base it on race, or ethnicity, or on a single religion, it isn’t going to work — because our societies today are too diverse, really, to have a single point of reference. But people have a very deep social instinct: they want to have something in common, they want to conform to social norms, they believe in their national identity. And I think the key trick is to make that national identity compatible with liberal values. So it should be based on things that can be accepted by people regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity. That kind of community is going to be thinner than one that’s based on a single, let’s say, religious belief. But I think that it can still be built. The classic one was the Republican community coming out of the French Revolution: it was based on the French language, literary tradition, even a culinary tradition. Someone like Léopold Senghor, the great Senegalese poet, could be taken into the Académie Française because, despite the fact that he’s a black man, he writes beautiful French. That’s my understanding of what a liberal national identity is. You need that identity, but it also needs to be an open and accessible one that accommodates the actual diversity that exists in your society.

So you’re arguing for a pushing back of some of the excesses of liberalism: less ultra-individualism, more of a sense of community, a sense of virtue. In a European context, you’re sounding like a conservative.

If to be a European conservative means that you still believe in the importance of nations, then I would probably categorise myself that way. You need nations, for very pragmatic reasons. The nation is the repository of legitimate violence, basically. This is the old Max Weber understanding of what a state is: a legitimate monopoly of force. And right now, there isn’t an alternative to the nation as a locus of power that is, at the same time, controlled by institutions like the rule of law, and democratic accountability. Therefore, you’re going to have to deal with a world of nations. The European Union sought to get beyond that. In theory, you could have created a federated Europe that behaved more like an actual nation, but what you ended up with was something that wasn’t really that. And when push came to shove, like during the Euro crisis, it fell apart it. There wasn’t that sense of European solidarity between, let’s say, Greeks and Germans.

In this latest book you discuss the preconditions for a confident liberal democracy — its institutions, its rule of law. Are you worried that confidence has now gone in Western countries?

I worry about that more in the United States than in most parts of Europe, because our polarisation has become really intense, to the point where a lot of people on the Republican Right are willing to actually abandon some really important aspects of institutionalised democracy: a pretty strong majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, based simply on a manufactured lie by one person. That’s a really big threat. Liberalism does not accommodate all forms of diversity. If you have a particular party or force or political movement within your society that rejects some of the foundational principles of liberalism, you can’t deal with that. And I think we do face that kind of threat in the United States. It’s ironic, because the United States was always seen as the ur-liberal country. But actually, it’s safer in most parts of Europe, where there’s a greater degree of political consensus.

So does that mean you’re less optimistic about the future for the US?

There are scenarios for the 2024 election that could be very, very nasty, and involve actual violence. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I think it’s a real danger that, as an American citizen, I’m quite worried about.

Your phrase, “the end of history” is constantly quoted back at you, but it quite accurately describes a period of history. What are we to call the next period that’s coming?

I don’t know what it’s going to look like. A lot of it will depend on the outcome of this war in Ukraine. Because if Putin, who has been so central to the anti-liberal world order, succeeds, then that period is going to look much more authoritarian. On the other hand, if he’s humiliated, forced to back down, then it’s going to look much better for liberal societies around the world. But even if the latter materialises, and he is forced to back down, there are plenty of other illiberal forces out there in the world. There’s China, which is a bigger challenge in a sense, because they’re a more powerful country, and more successful in many ways than Russia has been. There’s all the Venezuelas and Irans and Syrias — these would-be authoritarian or actually authoritarian countries that have ambitions. There’s going to be plenty of struggle left, even if we win this one in Ukraine in the short run.

And your bet, for the record, is that we are going to win that one in some form?

The only reason I think liberalism is going to survive all of this the history of the last 300 years. Liberalism arose after the European Wars of Religion because people realised that fighting over which sect of Christianity you followed was not worth it, and therefore we should have religious toleration. It then got challenged by the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And after those two bloody world wars, people again said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting over which nation is dominant, maybe we should come up with a more tolerant system.” And we’ve now gone through another cycle where we have taken liberal principles for granted. And now people are striving for more. So maybe we have to go through another cycle of witnessing the alternatives to liberalism, before we come back to saying, “Oh, well, maybe, tolerating diversity is not such a bad thing after all.” It’s not as bad a cycle as the previous ones. Maybe we might get a little bit inoculated by what Putin has done in Europe.

It’s like a necessary war of some kind?

I hate to say that any war is necessary. But that’s the way it’s worked out in prior centuries of human history.