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Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. His books include Is it Tomorrow, Yet? After Europe, and The Light that Failed: A Reckoning, which was co-authored by Stephen Holmes.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev explore how Donald Trump is—and isn’t—similar to Mikhail Gorbachev, the impact of the Trump revolution, and whether we’ve finally reached the end of history.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: The last time you were on the podcast, we spoke about what Trump's election might mean for the new world order. Even though we understood that election to be a very important turning point at the time, perhaps we may have underestimated just how much impact it would have on a host of issues—from world trade to the relationship between the United States and Europe. Help us think through this moment and what it means.
Ivan Krastev: My general feeling is that we’re facing a revolutionary government. It’s a revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court. That’s why it’s so difficult to recognize its revolutionary nature. But in my view, the most important things about a revolutionary government are threefold. First, you're not running the revolution—the revolution is running you. Which means you enter a certain kind of action, and you get radicalized by the minute. I doubt even Trump fully anticipated what he was doing. He knew what he wanted to achieve, but he was also constantly responding to what others were doing to him.
Secondly, speed is critical. Normally, when you talk about a revolution, you're talking about direction—what you want to achieve. But when you're living through a revolution, speed becomes the overwhelming thing. I doubt Trump was even fully aware of this, but it certainly played a role.
And this is my last point: in every revolution, there is always more than one revolution. In a way, you have the revolution of the radical populist conservatives, you have the masses, but you also have many other actors who see the momentum and believe they can shape it. That’s what’s happened here. What’s interesting is that because Trump can be everything at the same time, that allows for the change to be so profound—but also so difficult to figure out.
Mounk: That's a really interesting point. It always stuck with me that when people tried to explain someone like Viktor Orbán in Hungary—who was a leader of the democratic revolution in 1989 and then turned to illiberal democracy when he was re-elected as prime minister—they had trouble understanding it. It felt like he was a traitor to the cause he had once championed as a young man. You always argued that we can better understand developments in Central Europe by disentangling the 1989 revolution. One of those constraints was liberal democratic, but another was anti-colonial—against the Soviet Union—and a third was a kind of national-conservative religious one. That makes a lot more sense of Orbán’s trajectory.
While we're talking about 1989, I just had a thought: does it make sense to think of Trump as a Mikhail Gorbachev—or perhaps a Gorbachev in reverse? Is he a figure who takes control of an empire, a hegemon with a lot of power, but who, whether deliberately or inadvertently, dismantles its standing in the world?
Krastev: Recently, when I was thinking about Trump, I came to believe more and more that to understand him, you have to see that he is both anti-Gorbachev and Gorbachev at the same time. On one level, ideologically, he is a classical anti-Gorbachev. Think about it: on one side, you have Gorbachev—the Communist apparatchik, a young man who comes to power after the deaths of three old men who had ruled the Soviet Union. He comes, he turns out to be much more liberal than anyone anticipated. He starts to fall in love with the democratic regimes around him.
But paradoxically, Gorbachev does this because he believes in the power of socialist ideas. The most important thing about Gorbachev is that he destroyed communism precisely because he believed in it. He believed that if socialist ideas could be separated from the sclerotic party-state, they would flourish. He was incredibly popular in the beginning, yet he was also very indecisive. That’s one version of Gorbachev: the internationalist, someone who is, in every way, the opposite of Trump.
But keep in mind—Trump was fascinated by Gorbachev. When Gorbachev came to the United States on an official visit, Trump requested a meeting. There was even a prank where someone dressed up as Gorbachev and went to Trump Tower, and Trump went to meet him. In a strange way, there was a fascination on Trump’s part with Gorbachev. And here comes Trump as Gorbachev—not as the anti-Gorbachev. What’s important is that both of them believe that the only way to change your country is to change the world.
Secondly, in order to understand Trump as Gorbachev, it's important to see how Gorbachev was perceived by the East European communist elite and the old Soviet elite. Remember Igor Likhachev, one of his colleagues? These people saw Gorbachev as someone who was breaking the Soviet state. Divorcing the party from the state led to incredible chaos, and the economic crisis deepened under his rule. In fact, the worst shortages and the longest queues for goods happened in the late 1980s. Secondly from the perspective of orthodox communists, Gorbachev also betrayed the Soviet Union’s allies.
If we follow this comparison closely, we’ll see that, in a way, Trump is negotiating the partition of Ukraine much like Gorbachev negotiated the unification of Germany. Gorbachev used the negotiations to show the West what else the Soviet Union could offer outside of Germany. Similarly, Trump seems to say to the Russians, I'm just using Ukraine to show you what kind of great friendship we could have in the Arctic. At the end of the day, Gorbachev did manage to change the world—but the result was that the Soviet Union disappeared and the Soviet system collapsed.
Here’s the key difference: Gorbachev didn’t like the Soviet Union as it was, but he believed in the strength of socialist ideas—which turned out to be wrong. And, to be honest, the best analysis of Gorbachev’s failure wasn’t produced in the West or in Russia—it was produced in China. The Chinese were obsessed with understanding why the Soviet Union collapsed. The Chinese leadership produced a six-part documentary that was discussed in every party organization. For the West and for all of us in Eastern Europe, the end of communism felt like a historical inevitability due to the regime’s economic non-competitiveness. That was Frank Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. But for the Chinese, it was a series of policy mistakes.
I bring this up because there’s something interesting about Trump. I’m not sure how much he truly trusts the American system. I think he has a kind of catastrophic feeling—that America is the biggest loser of globalization. And in his mind, his main task is to make America the winner of de-globalization.
Mounk: Let’s go back to this idea that, in the Western reading, the Soviet Union was sclerotic and doomed to fail—that Gorbachev was seen as a kind of tragic hero because he believed that through his reforms, he could save the Soviet Union. But he failed to see what he perhaps should have seen: that the Soviet Union was beyond repair. Any attempt to reform it would, in fact, begin the process of its collapse. So, he ended the “evil empire,” which, from a Western perspective, was a heroic act—even if, to him, it was a tragedy. That’s the strange irony of Gorbachev. I guess what brings us to the United States today is this question: is the United States similarly sclerotic? Some of the people around Trump seem to believe that. They think the established institutions and the old order are so irredeemably broken that nothing is left to preserve. That’s when you make a revolution—when you think reform is a lost cause, and the system is so far gone that the risks of radical change seem minimal.
But is that analysis actually correct? If not, what happens? Will the United States’ institutions push back and reassert themselves, perhaps even emerge stronger from this crisis? Will there be a kind of institutional revenge? Or is history more contingent than that? Was the Soviet Union, as the Chinese came to believe, not really irredeemably lost at all? It was because of Gorbachev's actions that it fell apart? And perhaps the United States could have persisted, but the revolutionary Gorbachevian and anti-Gorbachevian government of Trump is going to break it.
Krastev: This is very important because the most interesting aspect starts when you see what happened through Chinese eyes. And the Chinese perspective was very interesting because the Chinese elite, like the Soviet elite, didn't believe in the success of the system anymore. They saw their system as sclerotic and losing, but what was very important was what they believed were the advantages and disadvantages of the system. For Gorbachev, the advantage of the system was the socialist ideas. And you should remember how many people—particularly on the European left—were seeing this as the moment in which socialism would now be divorced from the Stalinist legacies and so on, and would flourish.
The Chinese communists believed that the best thing about communism was the strong party-state, because the strong party-state can achieve things. And with that, you can make socialism. But if socialism is not something worth making, then probably you can try to use the party-state to make capitalism. This is, in a way, what they did. But for them, keeping the strength of the state was critically important. From this point of view, what is happening in the United States is very interesting. This also creates a way to understand the particularity of the Trump revolution if you compare it with the 1970s.
If you read Huntington’s book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, this is critically important. Because he looks back at America—there was a lot of turmoil—and back then, many people were saying that the system was beyond repair. And you’re going to see this kind of radicalism back then, on the left. This is the moment when trust in American institutions really started to decline dramatically. But what was interesting—and Huntington was very good at pointing this out—was that the criticism of American institutions and American policies was made from the point of view of the American ideal. Rebels in the streets were saying, you didn’t fulfill the promise. And then Huntington made this very important point. He said, if that is the case, then the American Dream is not a lie, America is just a disappointment. What I don't see today is criticism of America from the point of view of the American ideal. In a certain way, I have the feeling that for a lot of Trumpian supporters, the very idea of the American Dream now is something that is not worth fighting for, for many reasons.
On the right, there is a lot of reluctance to accept America as the immigrant state. And on the left also—but also on the right—there is a very strong kind of anti-capitalism, and particularly anti-oligarchical capitalism narrative. So from this point of view, when it comes to how they perceive their country, Americans remind me much more of East Europeans and Soviets in the 1980s than of the American rebels in the 1970s. And here is the story of institutions—what institutions can do and what they cannot do. I don’t believe that the major question is what you think about the American state. And strangely enough, Trump shares the view of the American state that comes from Silicon Valley. He gave Musk the story that the only good public official is an algorithm—that it is the American state that is making America lose.
It’s very difficult because, in a strange way, what we see all over the world is just the opposite. The relationship, of course, between the market and the state is changing. But the weak state and the small state is no longer the ideal in the way it was some decades ago. This is why I find this inconsistency. Do you have an alternative idea of the state? Do you believe that this new digital state, which is going to be much more AI-friendly and so on, is the one that American society is demanding?
Listen, I don’t know the story with Gorbachev. We’re having this conversation because we know how it ended. Probably it could have ended differently. Funnily enough, Gorbachev believed that aligning with the West was also the only way to save the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union after the end of communism. Because what was going to keep the Soviet Union together if it was no longer a communist state? Honestly speaking, people like George Bush Sr. were very loyal in the way they treated this. Remember his famous “Kiev Chicken” speech, in which he went and told Ukrainians: Don’t get independence. Stay where you are. But the Romanian-French philosopher Emil Cioran used to say that history is irony in motion. In a certain way, normally you feel betrayed—but you never know who is going to betray you.
Mounk: I'm really struck by your point about the state, and I want to return to that. But I was even more struck by this idea that nobody is criticizing what is happening in the United States today in the name of American ideals. And that, I think, seems right to me. One point that people have made for a long time now about Donald Trump and his movement is that, in some ways, it's quite European. It is a much more European hard right than it is a traditional American right in key respects. If the currency of the Trump movement is to be “based,” the least based thing is to have a kind of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington naïve view of American ideals, of goodness in the Constitution, of restraint and good manners, and so on. So the MAGA movement is, in many ways—even more than it is an attempt to own the libs—a radical refutation of the kind of conservatism that someone like John McCain represented.
Now, on the left, of course, we've had this movement for a number of years that argues the shortcomings of America are not simply injustices that need to be worked out as the arc of history inevitably bends toward justice (as it was, in some ways, meant to do from America’s cradle—a sort of older left-wing view), but rather that the definition of America is not 1776; it is 1619. The definition of America is not the ideal that was laid into its cradle, but rather the shortcomings that have characterized it all along. If we have a competition between two political forces that have concluded that the American ideal is fraudulent and can’t be realized, that does start to feel like sclerosis. It does start to feel like the end of a project.
Now, perhaps it’s premature. I think a lot can depend on whether the opposition to Trump takes a position of defending American ideals and defending the American Constitution of rediscovering the value of some of those ideas, or whether it goes the other way—towards seeing the second incarnation of Trump as another irrefutable piece of proof that those ideals were always naïve.
Krastev: This is very interesting because one of the major questions that was basically scaring everybody in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of the Union was, why was nobody fighting for it? This whole idea of a great betrayal was based on the fact that nobody was dying for communism. It was a communist country. These were people who had been speaking and acting in the name of that system for decades—and suddenly, nobody was willing to die for it. Nobody was really ready to risk anything for it. It happened, and nobody understood how it happened.
I'm saying this because there's something important happening today—and when we talk also about the end of the international order, I ask myself: Wasn't that international order, after World War II, also based on the existence of four exceptional states? Not exceptional in the imagination of their own citizens—here, I agree with Obama that every nation-state believes itself to be exceptional—but rather, four states that were perceived as exceptional in the eyes of everyone else after 1945.
Two of them were the Soviet Union and the United States, because they were the ones who owned different versions of the future. And both were ideological states—one believing that the future was democratic capitalism, the other that it was communism. In a strange way, the fact that both sides believed history was on their side probably also helped prevent the Cold War from becoming hot. Because if you believe history is on your side, you don't need to die now—you can wait. You fight tomorrow. You wait out the other side. It was this combination of nuclear weapons and the belief that history was on your side that served as one of the major pillars of peace.
But there were two other states. One was Germany—which was cast as the absolute villain. And the other was Israel—the newly created state of the Jewish people, the ultimate victim. All four of these exceptional statuses, in a way, have now disappeared. The Soviet Union has disappeared, and Putin’s Russia is anything but a country based on the idea of a universalistic project. They don't want to transform the world. Putin would probably be happy to run the world—but he doesn't believe that Russia is the future of the world. He's much more concerned with defending "Russian civilization," as he defines it, than with any kind of universalism.
Mounk: And he probably sees himself as defending himself against American universalism.
Krastev: Totally, totally. He's also extremely, extremely tough on Soviet universalism. If you listen to his speech two days before he started the full-fledged war on Ukraine, it was one of the most anti-Soviet speeches that you can read. The major story was that Soviet universalism betrayed the Russian people. Russian people are the biggest victims of the Soviet project.
Mounk: That, by the way, is an interesting point. Because there's this famous line that Putin sees the downfall of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. And it makes him sound more nostalgic for the Soviet Union to Western audiences than he actually is. He's nostalgic for the imperial dimension of the Soviet Union, but not for its internal organization or for the self-limiting role that Russian nationality played within the Soviet Union.
Krastev: Totally. Listen, there's a historian, Yuri Slezkine, who wrote this beautiful article some decades ago describing the Soviet Union as a communal apartment. Where basically different ethnic groups had a room of their own, and the Russians were controlling the hallway, the toilets, and probably the kitchen. But the most important story—and here it gets interesting—is that while the Russians were dominant in the Soviet project, the Soviet project was also organized around the fear of Russian nationalism. As a result, Russia was the only republic that didn’t have its own Communist Party. There never was a Russian Communist Party during the communist period, except for the last two years. And there wasn’t a Russian government either. There was a Ukrainian government, a Georgian government, but no Russian government.
So from this point of view, Russian nationalism allowed others to feel “Russian” in a way—if they spoke the language, for example. It was a much more imperial identity. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian nationalism was a latecomer. It was very weak. Russians started to really envy the Balts, the Georgians, and others who had traditional nationalisms.
Now, going back to these exceptional states: Germany was exceptional in two ways. They committed the ultimate crime—the genocide, the Holocaust. But they were also the ones who were willing to take responsibility for it. And as a result, Germany became the country that symbolized the failure of classical nationalism, militarism, and so on. Peace became part of the German identity. It’s interesting to see how all the wars we have today—whether Russia’s war in Ukraine or the war in the Middle East—are becoming crises for Germany’s postwar identity. Germans felt guilty for what they had done to the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Soviets, but suddenly, they can no longer feel that way when the Russians are the aggressors. And they also felt guilty for what they did to the Jews. But that guilt also makes it very difficult for them to take any critical position toward the state of Israel, even when others accuse them of not doing so. So in my view, all of these exceptional states are no longer exceptional.
Trump was the last one to say that American exceptionalism is not America’s strength—it’s America’s vulnerability. By the way, Obama began this idea himself. He said, we’re more of a normal state. But the story that America should have a mission of its own—and all these American presidents, whether on the right or the left, who shared the idea that America doesn’t have an ideology because it is an ideology—is not true anymore.
The major story with Trump is: America is the victim of its exceptionalism. America is the victim of its idealism. America is the victim of the American Dream. The only thing that should be exceptional about America, in his view, is American power. And I believe this makes the world fundamentally different. Because it’s not just international institutions—it’s that this idea of exceptionalism used to discipline the politics of the international order.
Mounk: Even American power, for Trump, doesn’t need to be exceptional in the traditional sense. He opposed the idea of America as a world policeman. He wants America to be predominant in its sphere of influence, and he wants that sphere of influence to be large, and that dominance to be felt heavily. But he’s perfectly fine with giving Ukraine, effectively, to Russia. Perfectly fine with giving Taiwan, effectively, to China. So even in that sense, he’s thinking of America as a much more classic, non-exceptional superpower—dominant within its regions, but not the exceptional, global power that structures the world. So—with apologies to Francis Fukuyama—are we living through the end of history now, and it just turned out to look rather different from what he expected?
That is, in 1989, the universalist project of communism had failed. The project of fascism had failed. Liberal democracy stood alone as the victorious universalist project. And so it looked like that would be the worldview to shape the future indefinitely. If what we’re seeing now is the end of American exceptionalism, which also means the end of American universalism—and there is no universalist alternative—then what comes next? The Communist Party of China doesn’t believe in world revolution the way the Soviet Union once did. Putin may want to be more influential and recreate a new Russian empire, but he doesn’t want the world under Russian control. He certainly doesn’t want Russian ideals to structure the world.
If you’re right—that the strange thing about this moment in the United States is that neither political side is promising to restore American ideals or American universalism—then is the end of history actually coming in 2025, rather than in 1989? And does it consist not in the triumph of liberal democracy, but in the passing away of universalist ambition?
Krastev: Listen, you can call this the end of the long 20th century. You remember, Eric Hobsbawm talked about the “short” 20th century—starting in 1914 and ending in 1989. It was an age of extremes. But what we have now is a world that is more interconnected than ever. We know each other better than ever. And paradoxically, it is our interconnectedness that led to the crisis of the idea of universal humanity. Isn’t it ironic that the philosopher we associate most with universalism, Immanuel Kant, was famous for never leaving his small town of Königsberg? In a way, it’s easier to believe in universal humanity when you don’t actually see it—when it’s just a project of the imagination.
One of the most interesting things about Trump, from this perspective—and this is very different from the American tradition—is that he does not believe people are equal. And he does not believe that states are equal either. When he talks to Ukrainians, he basically says, You’re a smaller state. Russia is a bigger state. Russia is stronger. Why do you believe you should resist your fate? To me, this is very strange. Because the entire foundation of American ideology was that people are equal, states are equal. And suddenly that idea of equality is gone—and people are ready to accept it.
That’s why the drive for universal recognition—which was, in my view, a very important insight of Fukuyama’s book—is something people can’t just laugh off. You can’t understand the world if you don’t understand that impulse. But now, we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. And sometimes, coming from a very small country in the middle of nowhere, when I look at the American conflict—especially between the radical left and radical right—it looks to me like a clash between golf courses and university campuses. Both sides have a strange idea of equality, but it's an equality that only applies within their space. That’s where Trump comes in. Because people see the world as very unequal—economically, culturally—and that’s why they’re ready to trust him. We’ve reached a point where only the cynics can be trusted.
And when you ask whether the “end of history” has ended—listen, Fukuyama was very clear: the end of history was never meant to be utopian. He believed people would be married to democracy, but not in love with it. It would be a post-heroic society. Do you remember that on the second to last page he mentions a guy called Donald Trump? Because he's asking this very simple question: Is the recognition you're basically getting as a successful real estate businessperson and so on enough? To what extent can a post-heroic society fulfill this kind of idea of ultimate recognition that history was giving it?
So, funnily enough, I do believe that the second part of Fukuyama's book is even more relevant to what we're doing. And this is not The End of History, but The Last Man. And in a strange way—which I do believe makes the Trumpian government very interesting—it is this very strong sense of apocalypticism which is present there. Even when we talk about utopians like Musk—technological utopians—even when we talk about people who are very much betting on individual immortality, on the other side there is a very strong sense of catastrophe. From this point of view, by the way, even when you look at Ukraine and how they’re treating Ukraine, this is interesting to look at for Europeans, and particularly for Poles. For Poles, everything that is happening is very much about the lessons of World War II. It’s very much about Munich all over again.
If you listen carefully to Trump—and I do believe he's very genuine when he talks about his fear of World War III—for him, Ukraine is the fear of the lessons of World War I. It's about sleepwalking. And somebody like Peter Thiel, in my view, very well conceptualized it. Because if there is some strong concept—one that I believe is not going to be reflected—Trump is not the person who is going to read a book, he’s not even going to listen to an audiobook, it’s not how he gets it. He’s reacting. For him, he's not simply part of a reality show, but for him, life is a reality show. But this type of mimetic apocalypticism that comes from people like René Girard is very important for them. They believe something that is just the opposite of Fukuyama. Fukuyama's major intuition—by the way, coming from modernization theory, coming from Hegel—was: the more similar we become, the less risk of war and destruction.
Mounk: That's very interesting. I want to return to your point about the state for a moment. A different way of casting that question is perhaps going to this point about sclerosis. There are some ways in which the American state obviously was becoming sclerotic. There's a big debate at the moment in the United States about the inability of the American state to build. Why is it impossible to build high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles, when China has built dozens or hundreds of high-speed rail lines over the course of the last 20 years? Why is it impossible to build housing in areas of opportunity like Los Angeles or New York in a way that then locks people out of opportunity and is a huge reason for why people feel that the state is not delivering for them in all kinds of ways?
There's a deeper sense of sclerosis in terms of the attitude towards institutions. You go back 30 years in America and people trusted Congress, they trusted the Supreme Court, they trusted the local government, they trusted universities, they trusted corporations. Today, trust in all of these institutions is significantly reduced. Interestingly, actually, people trust Silicon Valley companies—which are often the bogeyman of the left—more than many of these other institutions. But trust across the span has gone down. It’d be very hard to imagine even a radical Republican president attacking Harvard and Columbia and those institutions in the same way 20 or 30 years ago, because they had broad trust and support in the population. And one of the reasons why the administration is able to do that now is that there isn’t broad trust and respect in those institutions. Less than 50% of Americans have any positive feelings about them, and those are highly concentrated in a partisan way.
If you look at this broader sclerosis of American life, it forces you to ask a question that I've been struggling to answer for myself over the last few months, one that I feel really torn on, which is: What would or what should happen after Trump? Let's assume that he rules for four years, becomes quite unpopular, doesn’t manage to capture the electoral institutions in such a way that the playing field in 2028 is too uneven for the opposition to have a chance to win, and we get some Democratic president. This is a set of assumptions which may prove to be wrong, but let’s assume that for the moment. How should they think about what to recreate? Should we be trying to recreate any part of the status quo ante? All parts of the status quo ante?
It feels to me like the answer must lie somewhere in between those extremes. But what elements of the old system can we save and recreate? And what elements of it were so ripe for plucking that any attempt to put them back in place is bound to fail?
Krastev: I’d be lying to you if I said I even have the illusion that I have an answer. But I can just go on thinking along the lines that you suggested. First, if this is a revolution, revolution changes the identity of all players. No political party or actor is going to get out of the revolution the way they started it. You can have Lenin after Kerensky; you cannot have Kerensky after Lenin. It is a totally different story. The Democratic Party is going to be as dramatically transformed by the Trumpian revolution—for good or for bad—as the Republican Party is.
Then comes the story of what happens to the state. And this is a really interesting story, because in my view, the biggest failure of the Democratic Party is their deep belief that they can recreate the Rooseveltian type of big state that is trusted. From this point of view, I’m sure that in 10 years, people are going to look at the COVID experience as a much more important part of the political change the world is going through than we are talking about now.
Listen, it’s not about this or that COVID policy. But during the COVID period, three important things about the state and our lives became very clear. The first is that everything that was previously perceived as impossible became possible. In one day, both the dreams of the right and the left were fulfilled. You remember, if you're basically a radical green person, you’re dreaming of a day when all planes are going to be grounded and stop polluting the planet—but you never believe it can happen. And then COVID came, and they were all grounded. They were all grounded overnight. If you’re a right-wing radical, you’re dreaming about a country in which nobody crosses the borders—there are no immigrants. And again, you don’t believe it’s ever going to happen. And then, it happened overnight. The borders were closed. I’m saying this because the first thing COVID did was make possible and thinkable things that, until yesterday, were perceived as impossible—even if they were desirable.
The second thing that happened was the crisis of the idea of science. In my view, one of the things we’re seeing is not simply an attack on universities, but the fact that science was as important for the modern state as God was for the monarchical states of the past. The legitimacy of the state was coming from science. But the problem with science—particularly at the level we’re at now—is that science functions because scientists disagree with each other. It was very difficult for people because COVID came, and then doctors started to disagree with each other. And suddenly, science—even though it was successful, even though we had vaccines, even though the crisis was, in a certain way, contained—delegitimized the state by the very way it works: through disagreement and constantly-changing hypotheses.
Mounk: Was the problem that scientists disagreed, or was the problem that science was used as a slogan to shut down disagreement? Which is to say, among actual scientists, there was disagreement throughout COVID—as there should be, as discoveries emerged and hypotheses evolved. And I think you’re right that there’s a question about whether science caused the pandemic. There’s a question about whether, again, gain-of-function research actually was the original cause of all of this, which would impact our assessment. In terms of scientists springing into action, making these incredible vaccines, helping us get out of the crisis—I think you’re right that, at some level, science should be knighted for what it did.
But the problem to me seems to be that “Science” with a capital-S became this kind of slogan—an argument from authority. You can’t disagree with my proposition about how society should be run during the pandemic, or how we should think about the virus's origins, or whether you need to stay six feet apart from me—because “Science” has given the answer. Often, some scientists themselves—but especially public health authorities, mainstream journalists, and so on—invoked this capital-S “Science” as the ultimate proof of what was correct, in a way that didn’t require argument and actually went against what genuine scientific spirit would demand.
Krastev: I totally agree with you. But don’t forget—in the way the modern state tries to use science, particularly in moments of crisis, it’s like how the old monarchs used the idea of God and religion. Because you need something to legitimize your authority. You need science to tell me why I should trust you and not myself. Of course, in my own country—Bulgaria—the most famous slogan during COVID was, everybody decides for himself. That was a real, strong individual response.
But what happened is also that the state, in order to get the loyalty of the people, did something incredible. It almost promised people immortality. You remember—every single death, even of a very old person, was perceived as almost a crime. I believe that this prospect—we can take care of you, we can save you from everything, we can save you from death but only if you trust us—worked for a while. It worked for six months. After that, it produced a major backlash, which in my view was very important for the rise of the far right. Not only in America, not only for Trump—you see it everywhere in Europe.
Here, I think it's very important to understand what I see as the failure of the Biden presidency, because Biden was not a trivial president. He came in as a transformative president, and he believed that he could recreate or resurrect the Rooseveltian-era state. And that was a state that could care for people, that could build things, that was about re-industrialization. For him, the COVID experience was what convinced him that this could be done. But I believe Wolfgang Streeck, one of the important German sociologists on the left, made a point that I take very seriously. The classical trusted state of the 1930s in America under Roosevelt—or of the 1950s and 60s in Europe—was based on the idea that it responded to and took care of human needs. But today, it must take care of human desires. And the most important thing is that while the market is taking care of your desires, the state cannot. Because I want the state to treat me as a very specific personality—but the state, in order to be fair, must treat me like everybody else. We’re no longer ready to live with that.
The market has taught us that we have very specific needs, personalities, and desires. And we now see it as repression when the state treats us all as equal. By the way, I mean “equal” in not a very inventive way. This lies at the heart of the crisis of trust in the state. Plus, the fact that the modern person is constantly being asked to have opinions about things for which they have no personal experience.
The real equality of every democratic regime is that our experiences are equal. Not our values, incomes, or talents—but my experience and your experience in democratic politics are equal. And nobody can articulate my experience better than me. But suddenly, you’re being asked to have opinions about things you’ve never experienced and cannot experience. And this created a kind of trust–mistrust game. As a result, democracy became the management of mistrust.
Mounk: We haven’t talked that much, it occurs to me, about the international dimension. How permanently do you think the standing of the United States in the world is going to be altered by what Trump is doing? To what extent is this going to put in place a very different vision of what America is and signifies? I’m interested in that question in the context of East Asia, Latin America, and Africa—but of course, particularly of Europe. Because certainly in Western Europe, and in big parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the continent has relied on the United States as its key strategic partner since 1945—or in some places, since 1989.
It seems that the continent, in many ways, has believed it doesn’t need to do certain things. Obvious things like investing in the military sufficiently to defend itself—but also, perhaps, more tangible things like being at the forefront of technological evolution and industry. Because it would always be protected by a nation that is doing those things. Does this mean the end of 75 years of European–American trust? Could it still be a kind of aberration? If the Democrats win again in 2028, are European statesmen going to go back to pretending everything is fine like they did when Biden was elected in 2020? If not, what does the effective end of the transatlantic alliance signify—both for the United States and for Europe?
Krastev: I believe that the effect on Europe of Trump's presidency is stronger than on any other part of the world, regardless of the fact that I'm sure Europe is not at the center of his interest. The funny story about Europe is that we managed to create a kind of society which was very much preconditioned on American security guarantees, on cheap Russian gas, on open Chinese markets. And all this has disappeared in a period of almost less than a decade. I don't believe that the relations can be the same, regardless of what is going to happen. Which does not mean that the United States and Europe are not going to be allies or that they cannot work together. They're going to work together one way or another. But everything is changing. Although, Europe is going about it in a funny way because we start to talk about sovereignty and so on as if this can be born overnight. The technological dependency on the United States is not going to disappear, regardless of what Trump is doing.
But also, suddenly, Europe cannot tell itself the story that it used to. Europe before was looking like the laboratory for the world to come. Probably this was a laboratory built on American money, but we were the laboratory of the world to come, not the Americans. We are going with the postmodern state. We have basically much more social spending. So, in a certain way, the idea was that even America is going to become much more European.
There was a moment in which this was very much discussed. Suddenly we Europeans felt very lonely. When Trump was elected, the European Council on Foreign Relations did a survey in 21 countries—11 European countries and 10 of the biggest countries in the world: India, Brazil, Turkey, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia. There were three simple questions among others: Do you believe that Trump is good for America? Do you believe that Trump is good for your country? Do you believe that Trump is good for peace? Almost everywhere outside of Europe, people were saying, yes, Trump is good for America. Trump is good for my country. Trump is good for peace. Of course, it was only in Europe—and particularly Western Europe and also South Korea—that people were ready to say no.
I'm saying this because suddenly Trump came and he's surprising and he's striking and nobody likes the disruption that he caused. But he's a type of leader that the other part of the world understands easily. And there is something very strange about Trump, which I do believe people are going to get puzzled by as time goes on. Everybody looks at him as a classical American nationalist. But through this lens, there are certain things that you cannot understand—for example, his view on land. For the nationalist, basically, land is sacred. Land is given by God to nations. When he was developing his idea of basically Gaza becoming a major resort, you see that Trump sees land through the eyes of real estate. Strangely enough, if you're going to ask Trump how to improve the world, probably what he's going to tell you is it's about gentrification. Rich people are going to go into bad neighborhoods, and poor people are going to go somewhere else. And some of the poor people are going to become richer.
And, for example, when he talks to the Ukrainians, this is a great lesson in misunderstanding, because Ukrainians said, we need the guarantee that you're ready to defend us. They imagined the world like the Cold War, in which you're defending us because we are a democracy, we are allies, and we are not going to allow Russia to do this and that. And Trump said, yes, we could be ready to defend you, but do you know what? Your best defense is if you're going to give us your mineral resources and your pipelines and your infrastructure, because the only way to stop the Russians from destroying infrastructure is if they know that it's American infrastructure. And the only way to convince Americans to defend your infrastructure is if they believe that they are defending an American company. I will say something that is not easy to say. When I was watching what happened in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky, I had the feeling that it was also a clash between two different television programs. On one level, it's a reality show, and on the other, it's a much more kind of classical heroic narrative. One is speaking the language of the nation, and the other is basically speaking this making-a-deal story.
In addition, even when we talk about defense capabilities, Europeans talk about money. Germany is going to spend so much money, etc. But listen, when you talk even to the most unimpressive captain in the army, they're going to tell you, budgets don't fight wars. People fight wars. This is the major issue for European society. The biggest success of Europe was that it made war unthinkable for the majority of Europeans. Now the biggest vulnerability for Europe is that war looks unthinkable for the majority of Europeans.
Mounk: I have two thoughts about this. The first is that one strange aspect of Europe is that Italy always feels like the country of the past, and turns out to have the politics of the future. You go back to the medieval city-states and they feel in some ways like remnants of ancient Rome or ancient Athens, but they prefigure in certain ways the rise of modern democracy. You go to Mussolini, he obviously prefigures the rise of fascism. I mean, you get to Berlusconi in the 1990s. Again, he’s sort of laughed at and looked at with pity, and Italy is sort of treated as a strange aberration. But he in many ways prefigures the rise of right-wing populists who are ideological—but even more so, right-wing populists who are in certain ways non-ideological, like Donald Trump.
Now, conversely, you might say that Europe as a whole has sold itself as the continent of the future. And there was a real moment in the 2000s that I think you were alluding to, when there were—I don't know how best-selling the books were—but books that got a lot of attention in intellectual circles and political circles that were arguing that really Europe and the European Union is the model of the future. The African Union in some ways was modeled on emulating some of that. There’s always been a movement of highly educated Americans who thought that Europeans are really so much more civilized than us here and we should emulate them. Europe did feel, quite recently to some people, like the continent of the future.
But it's in some ways turned out now to be a model that may not be defensible—a model that was reliant on the external support of a country like the United States. The most obvious way is in the military sphere, where I certainly think that Germany—where I grew up—always had this sort of disdain for those American cowboys who were so obsessed with the military budgets and the guns. This was based on the complete willful ignorance of the fact that Germany could afford not to spend money on its military and not afford to have a large army because we could always rely on the United States coming in to defend us.
Think of the show Borgen, about a kind of center-left, somewhat technocratic, idealistic prime minister who breaks with a governing coalition because she's not going to compromise on immigration. It was meant to make her look like the politician of the future, and the populists in the show were these kind of troglodyte old idiots. You go back and look at Borgen now and it feels very old-fashioned. It feels like a lost world, even though I think some of the later episodes are less than 10 years old. So there is something to that in Europe. The question is, what is European self-invention going to look like? There are the obvious answers, which is that the continent needs to spend more money on its military because it can't rely on the United States anymore, and it needs to invest in infrastructure because it needs to have more economic growth. And the Germans need to go back to having trains that actually run on time—because at the moment their trains are less punctual than Italian ones, which is both an economic and an identity crisis.
All of that seems fine, and I don't disagree with any of it. But it doesn't add up to a project, and it doesn't add up to a vision. And the larger question to me is whether Europe can recognize that it has become a museum continent—that it lived in a fantasy of gradual and gracious decline, in which it could absent itself from history without having to pay a high price for that. In which, even if you are not one of the forces that shape history, you can have a good welfare state and nice bicycle lanes and a decent life for your citizens.
But if you don't shape history, history shapes you. If you're not at the forefront of technological development, you're not going to be able to defend yourself no matter how much money you spend on the military. And if your fate is determined by outside powers and your economy is not at the cutting edge, the decline in your welfare states might turn out to be much more precipitous and much more economically painful than you recognize. But I don't get the impression from afar—I'm in the United States at the moment—that that lesson has arrived for the European public, or even less so, that anybody has a vision for what it would take to change the fate of the continent.
Krastev: Listen, I'm not famous for optimism, but one of the most interesting books in Europe was written in 1978 or ’79. Raymond Aron wrote a book called In Defense of Decadent Europe. And of course, back then, it was very much about French politics. The French left was coming to power. This is basically what happened with Mitterrand and others. But don't forget, decadence does not necessarily mean decline. The paradoxically interesting story is that Europe is going to look for a new identity for sure. For Europe, the identity based on the Cold War is not there anymore, the Cold War West is over. You're also totally right on the level of security, because we can move money here and there—but, if I'm going to be particularly critical about Europe, even when you listen to the way we talk about Ukraine you have the feeling from time to time that, in the same way we were outsourcing our security to the United States before, now we want to outsource our security to the big Ukrainian army that is going to stay there and defend us against the Russians.
But the most interesting part of the story between Trump and Europe—even between European nationalists and Trumpists—is that Trump's type of nationalism is divorced from history. It is history-free. Listen, what do nationalists normally talk about when they meet? They talk about history and how history was unfair to their countries. Can you imagine Donald Trump talking about history with anybody? So basically the only history he can talk about is his own history—the only kind of history of the American Republic is the first Trump presidency. So in a strange way, his American individualism operates at the level of national ideology. I'm not interested in what was before me. And to be honest, I'm not interested in what's going to be after me.
For Europe, that means: how are you going to reconcile the fact that, in a moment of crisis, all European nations go back to their national histories? And at the same time, in order to stay together, they should have a common identity. Because Europe before was a project, and in a strange way, Europeans can have common dreams, but their nightmares are totally national. You could see it dramatically both with the war in the Middle East and with the war in Ukraine. I find this quite important because history is going to play an important role in the way Europe is going to remake itself.
In the 1990s and the early 2000s, Europe saw itself as a missionary, exactly because we were the future. We were there to tell others how to live. Europe specialized in lecturing others, even more than the Americans. Now Europe feels like a monastery. The only problem of the monastery is: how are you going to defend yourself? Secondly, how are you going to feed yourself? Suddenly, European universalism is going to become universal exceptionalism. Europe will face what happened to Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and even in a certain way, what is happening to America after Trump.
But this is a project that can collapse very easily. Europe also has, in a strange way, the wisdom of old people. When they go on the streets, they're carefully looking at the pavement. And I thought this was important. Many people today are saying, Europe is like it was in the 1920s and 1930s. No, we're not back in the 1920s and '30s. In the 1920s and '30s, Europe was a very young continent and it was populated by ex-soldiers. And now Europe is a much older continent, and it is populated by people who don't believe that they're ever going to be soldiers. So from this point of view, it's about creating your own space. I don't expect this rapid transformation that can happen in other places. I don't see another modernization of Europe.
Mounk: I think you're absolutely right. I think our instincts at least are very similar about what Europe’s event horizon is. In the 1920s, of course, Europe was literally a young continent in the sense that the average age was vastly younger than it is today. It was a continent that still had a completely different self-confidence, as standing at the center of the world. In some ways, of course, it no longer did. The United States by the 1920s was as powerful or more powerful than Europe, but that is not how most Europeans saw it. And colonies, of course, were still very much a going concern at that time. There was a much more fervent nationalism, and the recent experience of war gave some people a sense of victory and confidence, and gave others humiliation and a desire for revenge.
All of that is fundamentally different from today. I think the question to me is whether the assumption that there can be a decent life in decline turns out to be right or not. And I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that in terms of the demographics of Europe, where the population is rapidly shrinking. I'm not sure about that in terms of international relations, because I don't think we've yet fully seen the impact of basically having your fate determined by the whims of much less reliable partners in Washington, D.C.—or worse, by Vladimir Putin and Russia or Xi Jinping and China.
It's not clear to me that it will turn out to be true economically. Germany is a good example of a country that had a very stable economy and is now in serious danger. If the German car manufacturers start to go bankrupt, a lot of the basic aspects of the political economy of the continent are going to change. So I hope that this sort of vision of an old continent that carefully looks at the ground so it doesn't stumble, and whose horizons are perhaps a little bit limiting—but that gets home safe to a heated apartment and has a nice dinner waiting for it—proves to be right. I have less confidence in that than most observers seem to at this moment.
Krastev: To be honest, I'm much more on your side. But it's very important to also understand what we're going to value. We don't know how the world is going to look. From this point of view, what is a competitive advantage or disadvantage can dramatically change. I believe that Europe is never going to be the most dynamic power in the world—exactly because of its democracy, but also its culture. But what is interesting is that when you're looking at some European societies, there is so much invisible change. Did you know that the number of foreigners as a percent of the population who are now living in Austria is higher than in Canada?
Mounk: Wow, I did not know that.
Krastev: This is the story of Europe. In Europe, unlike in America, change is not in your face. America is a place where you basically notice only what is moving. Only what is changing is worth talking about. Europeans change a lot, but Europeans are starting to pretend that the change is much more limited. I'm giving one example on the level of population, but there are many other things that have changed. I believe that different cultures have a different idea of adaptation. As a result, the biggest problem for Europe is trying to pretend to be what it is not going to be. Europe is never going to succeed in the heavy economic dynamism of the United States—even if all of the Draghi report is implemented. And Europe is not going to have the kind of readiness to die in a war that Putin’s Russia has—even if you increase spending here or there.
But I do believe Europe was built on this kind of idea of moderation. We went too far away from this, unfortunately. I'm remember the old film Being There, where the major protagonist was a gardener living in one of the family estates, taking care of his garden and spending all his leisure time watching television with a remote control in his hand—changing the channels anytime he did not like anything in life. So when he had to leave his position, he was attacked on the street. And what he did, facing danger, was try to change the channel. So in a certain way, over the last years—particularly in the post-1989 decades—Europe has changed a lot, but we looked like a person armed with a remote control, who believed that anytime we don't like what we see, we can change the channel. Obviously now we're basically very much doomed to watch either the Trump channel or the Putin channel. And of course, this is changing Europeans.
This leads to a certain reflective kind of resilience. Suddenly you know that you can lose certain things. You know what you want to keep. And probably this is the best chance for Europe. Is it going to work? I don't know. You need political leadership. Also, you need luck. And that’s not easy, especially when you’re depending on so many kinds of uncertainties—starting with the fact that you have so many different member states in the Union.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ivan discuss China’s future, the impact of changing demographics, and what history books will say about Trump. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
