Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Interview with Stanford Professor Francis Fukuyama about Trust and the Future of Democracy. In the limited time we had, we covered a whole lot of subjects. He is a much sought-after expert and a prolific writer. The New York Times wrote about him:
“After a dalliance with postmodern literary theory at Yale, he transferred to Harvard’s Ph.D. program in government, where he wrote a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East. Early in the Reagan administration, his friend and fellow neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz hired him at the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. It was during a later stint there, in the George H.W. Bush administration, that Fukuyama wrote “The End of History?”, which was originally delivered at an academic conference organized by Bloom. Published in the journal The National Interest with commentaries by a half dozen leading figures, the essay (which was grounded in a reading of Hegel’s abstruse philosophy of history) landed like a bombshell, “outselling everything, even the pornography,” one Washington newsstand owner reported. For some, it was one of the most important foreign policy essays since George Kennan’s famous “X” article, which called for the “containment” of Soviet Communism. For others, it was dangerous Cold War triumphalism.
Francis Fukuyama about liberal democracy:
“Russia, along with China, have been putting forward an argument that liberal democracy is an obsolete system. It doesn’t work, it’s not delivering for its people, and that their authoritarian governments are more effective in doing that. And I think that if Putin is defeated in Ukraine, it’s going to prove that he’s actually not this clever strongman that knows what he’s doing, but he’s actually an incompetent fool that’s also violating human rights, causing damage on an unimaginable scale. And that is obviously going to reduce the appeal of that kind of strongman politics. So I do think that the conflict in Ukraine is going to have consequences that go far beyond Ukraine itself. If he’s successful in grabbing part of Ukraine and holding onto it and incorporating it into Russia, it’s going to validate other countries doing that. The one that obviously people are worried about most is Taiwan or China has territorial claims on it. But there’s others in other parts of the world and we’re already seeing violence in Central Asia, you know, between Azerbaijan and Armenia. So there’s a lot of stimulus that a successful Russian attack on Ukraine is going to have for these other conflicts.
The interview with subtitles in English, French, German, and Spanish is published on the YouTube TrustTalk channel. Below is only the video with English subtitles
Afghanistan has been all over the news in the past weeks. The reason was far from positive. The Taliban unexpectedly returned to power, just at the time that the last international troops were being withdrawn from the country. The final chapter of twenty years of international engagement became the most tragic one, as countries tried to evacuate their citizens and the Afghans that had worked for them. In TrustTalk we talk to Jorrit Kamminga, an associate fellow of the Dutch Clingendael Institute who spent 16 years in Afghanistan and has recently published a Dutch book about twenty years of the Netherlands in Afghanistan. With him, we explore the various layers of trust that existed in the past twenty years. From the national parliaments of donor countries and the international military coalitions to the Afghans on the receiving end and the new interim government of the Taliban.
On the interview question: “The withdrawal of the US and its Western allies from Afghanistan and the consequences that may have on trust by Europe and Asia, let’s think about Taiwan and the disputed Japanese Senkaku Islands, the trust they have in their US ally. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell Fontelles wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times, and I’m quoting him, “any partnership needs capable allies and political trust.” So my question is, can we still trust the US as an ally?”,
Jorrit Kamminga replies:
I think in recent years, the Trump administration has been a big wake-up call right for Europeans. And you now see that the Biden administration is basically continuing many of the policies of Trump. Like just look at the migration policies, for example, and you can also see it in the recent deal, the US, Australia and the UK signed, which I think was also quite a surprise for many people. And this was the deal about strengthening stability in the Indo-Pacific region, as China is expanding its military might and influence there. So that in a way was a message to China, primarily, but there is also a message in there for the European Union and for NATO that basically says, like, we don’t really need you to advance on our collective security. So can we still trust the U.S.? Well, I guess, yes, of course, I hope, yes. And we should continue to trust the US because we continue to be dependent on the US for our military and security missions abroad. And that is also the biggest story I think of the past 20 years in Afghanistan. And you also saw it in the recent reactions after Biden got elected. The reactions from NATO and the European Union were immediately inviting basically Biden to rebuild transatlantic relationships, transatlantic ties because we think that these ties are important, that they matter. So that means actually that we need to trust each other. There’s simply no choice and in Afghanistan, we’ve recently seen it also in the evacuation efforts. There was a strong dependence on the US there. And yeah, we’ve always depended on the US. So I think it’s quite also ridiculous to suddenly hear people talk about, for example, the need for a European army. We’ve seen that in recent weeks. Well, there’s probably a real need for a European army in terms of efficiency, etc. But you should have started to talk about that 20 years ago, and not at the end of one of the longest international missions in Afghanistan.
Listen to the full interview on the TrustTalk podcast website, or on all major podcast platforms, or, bleow, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
Buy the book by Jorrit Kamminga, “Je wordt bedankt, Bin Laden, 20 jaar Nederland in Afghanistan”
