"I Thought Money Could Tame Him"... Fukuyama Admits His Misjudgment After 30 Years

Fukuyama: "For Trump, Being Wealthy Was Not Enough"

"We May Be Trapped in a Cyclical System of Self-Destruction"

Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist at Stanford University known to the public for his book "The End of History," has admitted that he misjudged U.S. President Donald Trump. Previously, Professor Fukuyama characterized President Trump as someone obsessed with fulfilling his 'economic ambitions,' but now asserts that Trump's ambitions were even greater than he had anticipated.

In an interview with The New York Times (NYT) on August 31 (local time), Professor Fukuyama revealed that he had misjudged President Trump some thirty years earlier. Fukuyama had mentioned Trump in his 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man."

At the time, Fukuyama described Trump, then a real estate mogul in New York, as "someone who could satisfy his economic ambitions within liberal democracy." It was an optimistic view that the positive functions of the free market system could absorb even the aspirations of ambitious figures like Trump.

Professor Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University. Stanford University Website

However, Professor Fukuyama stated on this day, "Back then, I thought that these (newly emerging moguls) could choose to become extremely wealthy rather than tyrants," adding, "But what I failed to recognize was that, for Trump, simply becoming wealthy was not enough."

Once regarded as a leading scholar within the American neoconservative camp, holding an optimistic view of the establishment, Fukuyama's perspectives shifted following the Iraq war and the 2008 global financial crisis. Speaking to the NYT, Fukuyama said, "Everything changed in the first decade of the 2000s. I parted ways with the neocons because of the Iraq invasion, and after the 2008 financial crisis, I revised my longstanding beliefs."

He further explained, "The conviction that promoting democracy justifies the use of military force led to the Iraq war, while the faith in market autonomy gave rise to the financial crisis."

Fukuyama argued that a crisis of liberalism began after the Iraq war, stating, "We may be trapped in a cyclical system where, after experiencing an era of peace and prosperity brought about by liberal democracy, we become bored and attempt to dismantle the system ourselves. When authoritarianism and war exhaust us, we may find ourselves saying, 'Ah, maybe we should return to liberalism after all.'"

Meanwhile, Professor Fukuyama is recognized as an American political philosopher, and his 1992 book "The End of History" is regarded as a landmark work that accurately predicted the rise of Western hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.