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In a strange way, the most interesting story about the Trumpian revolution because they have the energy, they have the anger, but there is no future project.
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And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. Look, I always do my best here to try and tell you what's coming up in this conversation to give you some orientation, but some conversations are just impossible to summarize, and they that is nearly always the case with one of my absolute favorite podcast guests, Ivan Kashtev. Ivan is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Humane Sciences in Vienna, where I'm also a non resident fellow this year. He is the founder of Central Liberal Strategies in Sophia. And as you will know if you've listened to past episodes with him, he is just one of the most interesting generative thinkers in the world. And so I thought I should have him on towards the end of 2025 to pass this year in review to try and help us, help orient us in understanding what state the world is in and what we might expect for 2026. We talked about Trump and how his revolutionary administration may or may not be getting its gears sanded up. We're talking about the state of Europe and how it can respond to this moment. We talk about China and why it is that the world seems to be getting accustomed to the idea that China may be the preeminent power over the next decades. We talk about 17 other super interesting things. Believe me, just listen to this damn conversation. Now. In the last part of this conversation, we talk about artificial intelligence. It's one of the areas where we have an interesting disagreement. Ivan saying that the prospect of AI is hanging over this political moment and really influencing people's actions, really leading to a lot of anxiety, even as it hasn't had that big an impact on the world yet. I kind of take the opposite stand. I think it's actually starting to change the world in big ways. But a lot of people are in denial about it and it's striking to what extent it hasn't yet reshaped our politics. So that's an interesting disagreement that we get into. And then Ivan makes his predictions for what the Future holds in 2026. You won't want to miss that part of a conversation and you won't want to leave the year of 2025 without feeling that you're supporting one of your favorite podcasts. So Please go to yashamonk.substack.com the good fight for a last 25% off deal in this calendar year. That means that it's about a dollar a week you can afford that, you can help us build the podcast into something even more exciting next year. Go to yashamonk.subsec.com thegood fight thank you so much for listening this year. Thank you for spending your time with us. The podcast has grown a lot this year. Our audience has grown a lot and we're really, really appreciative of every single week. One of you have a great new year and see you for an exciting set of conversations we have coming up in the beginning of 2026. Ivan Krastov, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, Ivan. We're recording this at the end of the year 2025 and I thought, how do I round off the year for myself and how do I round out the year for the podcast? And I thought the obvious way to do that is to have conversations with two people who have most helped me think about the world and give orientation in very disorienting times. And so I'm having one conversation with our friend and colleague Francis Fukuyama and one conversation about you. That is a kind of year in review. We can start in many places, but I guess the natural place to start in some ways is the White House House. You said on an earlier episode of a podcast this year that the Trump White House was a kind of revolutionary movement and that part of the revolution is that you always self radicalize and that you yourself don't really know where you end up. It feels as though the Trump White House has been self radicalizing, but perhaps in the last few months it's also been getting stuck. How do we think about what is going on in the heart of American power at the moment?
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I'm sure that you'll know better because one of the interesting story about this kind of a revolutionary dynamics is that better be where the action is. This is very much basically how you feel it and how basically people reacting to it. But he started what was important for this one year was the speed. If you go back, you have the feeling that in January you were transferred from a normal train to a fast train and everything start happening very fast. And everything was happening very fast, but it was not very clear where is the destination. And what you basically, in my view saying when you say that you have the feeling that he's stuck, is that people in a certain way get puzzled where the train goes. Funnily enough, it was very fast, it was very radical. But what is the objective? And this is in my view starting to paralyze also Trump himself because he was so much jumping from small issues to another small issue that he lost the grand narrative. There is not a big story anymore that he's telling. And from this point of view, even if you see the national security strategy, this is much a kind of a transcript of his mind than a kind of a story for the future. This is much more story of what he had done than of what he's going to do. And I do believe this is this kind of sa. And the second is that, interestingly enough, for this one year, a lot of things has happened. But neither the fears of many of the people who believe that this is the end of the world, not the hopes of his supporters, turn true. It's true about economy. You have the tariffs and many liberal economists said this is where the inflation is going to break, and it didn't. And then his people who said they're going to be the tariffs and basically all the manufacturing jobs are going to come back, and they didn't. So, strangely enough, you have a lot of things happening, but nothing really changed on the level of how people perceive their life. And probably this is what people also called pick Trump. The possibility that probably this energy that he came with have been exhausted without being very much clear what is the next thing that he can do.
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That's interesting. Part of it is that the speed. I've asked us two things. The first is that so many things were happening at the beginning that it felt like the moving fast and breaking things in the famous Silicon Valley parlance, and they were going somewhere. And now that we've had more time to take stock and to assess what they were doing, it looks more like a toddler that can also run around and rake a lot of things and moving fast, but it's running in a circle and there's no particular directionality to it. The other thing is that it does feel as though the speed with which the administration is doing things has slowed down a little bit. And it feels right now, and I'm very aware of the risk of being premature here, because we would have said one thing in March 2025, another thing in June 2025, another thing now. And the story may still look very different in two or three years, but it looks as though some of the restraints on the government are perhaps holding better than it felt like in March or April of 2025. It may be the Supreme Court will rule, rule tariffs unconstitutional, at least in the way they were passed. That is not certain, but that is what many legal experts expect based on the oral arguments in that case, the administration certainly has played with slow walking. Its response to adverse legal rulings in some cases has deported people who were already in planes when judgments came down in ways that they, I think, deliberately did to breach the line a little bit. But they haven't yet really just straight up ignored a court ruling. There's now the prospect of Democrats winning back the House of representatives in 2026 and being able to limit Trump's power in some other ways if they regain control of at least one chamber of Congress. So do you feel like the Trump revolution has slowed in those ways as well? Is that premature? What should we expect for the coming 12 months?
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Listen, many things, of course, can change because this is also how people react here and there. But in my view, he exhausted a lot of the energy that came with him in a lot of petty fights. In a strange way, the most interesting story about the Trumpian revolution, because they have the energy, they have the anger, but there is no future prose to project. And this future project could be totally utopian. You can like it or dislike it, but this allows you to have a story to basically focus only on the big things. But because of the fact that he is who he is, because of the narcissistic nature of the leader, which became the narcissistic nature of the regime, suddenly, what happened in this one year? First, he aged in front of our eyes. And listen, revolutions, they don't like aging. When he entered because of the energy, he was kind of a old, young man. He was very, very energetic. He's doing this, he was doing that. And suddenly now the camera starts capturing him sleeping, not being there. And this is changing the perception also of the people, of the people around him. I was just in the last week working with the colleagues from the European Council of Foreign Relations on the global survey that they do. And this is 21 countries in the world, 11 European, but also China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa. And it's interesting when you compare with a year ago to see also how the world starts to see him differently, paradoxically. And because the date is going to be public on January 15, I don't want to go much on this. But there were two things about this one year. If you read it from the point of view of the global public opinion, not from the American public, that is striking. This is the year in which everybody was talking about Trump. But now, when you see the data, everybody has the feeling that the next 10 years are going to be the Chinese decade for one year, because we have this every year. You're going to be surprised to See how suddenly, first, people basically get convinced that China is having the upper hand. And secondly, the rise of China is not scaring people anymore.
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Oh, wow.
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This is the interesting story in the data.
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And is that because the view of America has become so negative that they think of China as a relatively better alternative? Is it because the views of China have gotten more positive? Is it that they've just gotten used to the idea? What do you think has changed?
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This is an interesting. You're asking a very, very. I don't believe. Listen, of course America loves some parts of the globe. For example, South Africans surprisingly change very much their mood on the US but something very important has changed. And during the Biden period, you have this kind of both the fear but also expectations of a much more bipolarity coming back. The United States confronting China, you're going to have the great power confrontation. And when Trump came, there was this inertia that basically this is what is happening. So the paradox of this one year is that Trump was extremely polarizing in the domestic politics, and it was very much about polarization, but he was very much depolarizing when was coming to the international politics, exactly because of the fact that the tariffs had been for everywhere. He was making the deals with the Chinese, he's making the deals with the Russians. So suddenly, for many people, China first is becoming the other name of multiple worried. It does not mean that America is declining, that America is going to be ousted. But suddenly China stopped to look as kind of a dangerous and aggressive. Many of the international relations people are going to see the rise of China is going to push these countries and these publics to look for America. Suddenly you have public opinions like India warming up to the Chinese, which traditionally had been in a conflict. And I do believe this is quite interesting because we were so much focused on Trump not seeing how all these things had been changing. And part of it was the Chinese managed to stand up to him without basically looking particularly aggressive. Nevertheless, that they were. And also because in a strange way, he managed to disorient everybody else. For example, if you see the European perspective, when Trump came to power, European leaders, they knew that they're going to have a tough time. So they were intelligent enough to know that it's not going to be the Trump one, but they believed that the United States, China confrontation is so important that he's going to need Europe. And suddenly, basically, you end up with a situation in which if you're going to read also in the security strategy, you're going to see that suddenly every Region is on its own. There is not this big frame. And I'm saying this because probably this is part of the story that so many things happened, the speed was so big, but at the end of this one year, you have much more feeling of exhaustion than the feeling of a kind of a major achievement on the side of the administration for the objectives that they have been putting for themselves.
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So how do you think this is going to play out? I want to come back to the United States, but let's stay on this question around China for a moment. It's striking that over the course of the past year, you think attitudes have become more accepting of China playing this major role going forward, in part because for many parts of the world, China is going to pose an even bigger problem. When you're sitting in Europe and you see the fact that the United States is now putting on significant tariffs to Chinese goods, that is going to lead to even more competition from imports from China. You know, it's going to get harder and harder for China to export, for example, car technology to the United States. Well, that is going to be a massive problem for the German car industry. So if you're sitting in Berlin or Paris or Vienna, you should have been thinking at the end of 2025 that the challenge from China, not necessarily because China is doing anything in particular wrong, is way bigger than it was a year ago, and yet it seems to be the opposite. Is it that actually when you are a medium power like Germany or France now are, the idea of a kind of multipolar world system is more appealing because you think you're going to have more room for maneuver? Do you think that being less concerned about China is rational? Or do you think that this is shortsighted and not understanding the nature of the challenges that we will now be president?
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This mode, of course, has changed. Any crisis can change this. But in a strange way, the decline of the American power and the rise of China is perceived by many as a rebalancing. And one thing that, in my view, Trump basically got wrong is when he focused totally on trade and economy only. Basically, we're not going to talk ideas, and to be honest, even we are not going to talk much more about war and other things. Suddenly, he started to compete with the Chinese on their own game. And you cannot win on this. 50% of the manufacturing production of the world is coming now from China. And secondly, China's managed to basically stand to Trump without basically looking hysterical, without looking aggressive. They pushed him. And also they create this sense of predictability so look at Europe. On one level for sure, Europe is very much threatened by the Chinese shock. Exactly what you're talking about. They're going to be more and more cheaper goods that are going to come to the European market. And what Macron said during his basically visit to Beijing, we don't have an option. We should come with tariffs in order to save our industries. But because of the fact that Trump so strongly confronted Europe, Europeans are going to be much more careful than ever before, because basically, they said, can we really afford being in a kind of ideological fight with Washington, a military confrontation with the Russians and in economic war with China? And I do believe this is happening in many parts of the world suddenly. And I do believe this is typical for the middle powers. My view, Middle powers has three characteristics. First, they're very ambitious. So in the moment of disorder, they start to see opportunities much more than risk, because they're very ambitious, because they're very much also status obsessed. And in this more disorderly world, you have a much more way to assert your status. Secondly, room for maneuvering is critical for them because to be a middle power, it means hedging. And in this world in which America is very loud and very present, but it is not a disciplining power, hedging is easier. It was much more difficult to hedge. When you have this major ideological confrontation, you should take sides, you should say who you are, and so on. And thirdly, also because Trump himself basically was trying to engage in every conflict around the world and try to play a role, suddenly you have kind of a new, not simply middle powers, but new middlemen position coming. You have now countries that have become a type of professional mediators. Look at the Qataris, look to the Emirates, look to Saudis. In a certain way, you have these days, more mediators than disputes. So this kind of a position is also, in my view, very much also strengthened by two characteristics of the Trump diplomacy. First, Trump believes that in order to solve a conflict, you should not know much about it. No, no. But that's saying this, to be honest, there's a certain level of sympathy.
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Well, sometimes it is true that you can lose a forest for the trees. That when you're in on details, actually, the reason for this conflict was that in 1375, you know this.
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You basically know very much what cannot happen. And you need an outsider to do this. So from this point of view, there is probably some truth in the fact that, particularly if you want to break a status quo, not so much basically to close a deal. And outsiders can help. But secondly, because of the fact that he's doing through non professional diplomats, personal friends, business persons, sudden world became very monarchical. Suddenly when you see the relations between the great powers, almost with the exceptions of the Chinese, you have the feeling that it's not the states but the families negotiating. So Mr. Vitkov and Mr. Kushner are meeting Mr. Dmitriev, who is close to Putin's family. In both cases, the ministries of foreign affairs read the news to understand what was negotiated. And I do believe this kind of a 19th century FL flavor is also critically important. This personalization of power, which of course was also very much in my view fueled by the role of the social media which allows this to happen, this anti institutional vibe. It allows many things to happen, but at the same time you start to forgetting what exactly has happened.
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The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com We've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now. Get up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional measure. At blinds.com rules and restrictions apply. That's very interesting. Where does that leave Europe? There's been a lot of talk this year about Europe's weakness. The phrase you used a little while ago, that Europe is currently an ideological confrontation with the United States in a military confrontation or proxy military confrontation with Russia and an economic confrontation with China shows how embattled the continent is. I tend to have quite a pessimistic view of of both the current state of Europe and of the extent to which European political and intellectual leads have understood the stakes of the moment. There's an assumption in the European public, which I've seen in a number of opinion polls, that what will France look like 25 years from now, 50 years from now? What will Germany look like 25 years from now, fifty years from now? More or less like today, except a little bit worse. And I'm really not convinced that that future exists. That is a realistic prospect for how things might go. But perhaps I'm overstating the point. Perhaps being a middle power or collection of middle powers, depending on whether you think of Europe as an entity or you think of Germany and France and so on as separate countries, will leave you a lot of opportunities in this new multipolar world, perhaps you can figure out some way to have a military alliance with the United States, but where you rely less on American predominance and of having a bunch of trades with China, where perhaps you figure out tariffs on certain things, or 10 or 15 years of crisis when your industry has fallen behind, allows you to find new areas of economic strength where you can compete. How dire is the situation of Europe shaping out to be in this new, more monarchical, more multipolar world, more transactional world, perhaps, that you are laying out?
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Listen, it was said that Europe is the most vulnerable part of the world these days. And of course, this is also a problem because it is the wealthiest. So as a result of it, this combination of vulnerability and wealth, which means that everybody is trying to see what they can get out of you, is quite clear. And of course, if you go on the opinion polls and our polls is the same, Europeans themselves are the most doubtful about Europe. And this creates a situation in which European project was really prepared for a different world. And now this world has disappeared. And then on one side, you have Russia in a war, and basically it was never secret. The Russia sees the very existence of the European Union as an obstacle to its foreign policy objectives in Europe. And then you have the American president who is basically saying the same. He's saying what is not a nation state does not have a legitimacy to exist. And listen, if you're a European, just a citizen or leader, you're really shocked because Europe has went through too many kind of a disintegration, that the cost of all this kind of unraveling is very high, particularly when you have an aging population and when you have a stagnated economy. And secondly, normally when you see about the future, you think about not what is going to happen. Only Nostradamus knows what is going to happen, but you basically have a view that you know what is not going to happen. You have the idea of certain things that cannot happen. And what is the kind of at the core of the current crisis is for the Europeans to believe that the United States and Trump is going to side with Russia over Europe on the Ukrainian crisis, of the things that is just destroying all the assumptions on which your world is based. I remember that somebody saying that we don't know what was going to happen in the world if it was Khrushchev and not Kennedy being killed in 1963. But for sure we know that Onassis was not going to marry Mrs. Khrushchev. And listen, and even this is not kind of true anymore. Suddenly you have the feeling that all these solid assumptions where you can have a crisis of the relationship, you can have problems here and there are not there. And from this point of view, European Union really starts to, in many respects, to resemble the Habsburg Empire, which was basically surviving only to the extent that you can convince all others that the existence of the empire is of their interest. And we have the feeling that we are losing this momentum. But this is also an interesting what can happen. And for me, this is the Most interesting about 2026 now, because of President Trump and his very much ideological politics. One of the things that is happening is that you have political parties that have been very much encouraged by what is happening in the United States. They see the, the relations with the Trump administration as political strengths. So my question is, what is going to happen if the Democrats are going to win the Congress? Because then Europe is going to have a really interesting choice. On one, the Trumpians should hope that Trump is going to stay for a long time. Otherwise they can expect that if European politics is going to be defined by American domestic politics, anytime the Democrats are going to come, it's going to be a bad time for them. Is this a possibility then, between even some of the far right parties and the mainstream parties to renegotiate some basic consensuses on Europe? What is going to be the European Union, for example, the single economic space, what basically we're going to change and not. And from this point of view, for me, the end of 2026, the beginning of 2027 probably is going to be the most critical moment of this, because the strength of the Trumpian right is very much also related to the strength of Trump, not because you do not have domestic reasons for the support of these parties, but because only the existence of Trump allows them to be the European player and not simply a player in different countries. And don't forget, many of these parties don't dream anymore about exiting the European Union. They want to change it. So from this point of view, what we know is that European Union probably is not going to survive in the institutional form and also part of the ideological form in which it was born. But the major renegotiations of the European Union was going to be very much the result of the relations with the United States on one level and Russia on the other.
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Well, One change during 2025 is that and at the beginning of this year, you had a fresh labor government that was already having a bad start, which was still in the saddle sufficiently recently that it looked like it might get its problems under control. You had in France a political system that was an obvious strain, but that there still seemed to be relatively good prospects of some kind of coherent moderate candidate emerging for the presidential elections in 2027. And you had a fresh government in Germany with Friedrich Merz, Perhaps that happened a few months into the year. Now, at the end of this year, you have Nigel Farage's Reform Party leading in the polls. Now in the Westminster system, you can get a big majority with 32%, 33% in a fragmented party system, by the same token, if you lose 5 or 6 percentage points, you can suddenly go from a projected majority of seats to being a minor player. But certainly, according to Karen Polz, Nigel Farage would have a majority of his own in Westminster whenever the next elections come. You have Jordan Bardela in France leading opinion polls very clearly for the first round, where he would get about 33 or so percent of the vote and the next run up candidate would get 16%. And leading in matchups for the second round of the election against virtually every competitor, relatively narrowly against some more center and center right candidates like Edouard Philippe, very clearly against any candidate on the left. And you have in Germany, an alternative for Germany and AfD, the most radical of right wing populist parties in major European countries, which does not look like it's about to govern nationally, but that is either even with or ahead of the Christian Democrats in most national polls and may for the first time enter government in some state parliaments in East Germany, may, depending on how things go, even have an absolute majority in some of those state parliaments after elections that are due to happen in 2020, say. Now, one question around this is about transatlantic relations, because I've been saying over and over after the national security strategy by Trump was published that a lot of European mainstream outlets want to make this ideological battle between the United States and Europe. But I think it's an ideological battle within the United States and within Europe. The Democratic Party does not agree with national security strategy. Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor for Joe Biden, who was on my podcast in February or March, does not agree with a national security strategy. And by the same token, there's many people in Europe, many who are spokespeople for the kinds of parties which may be in government in London and Paris and perhaps eventually Berlin in the next years, who absolutely agree with it. So one question is, is this going to be the new basis for transatlantic understanding? Is the problem we're facing with breakdown of a transatlantic relationship or is it a shift of a transatlantic relationship onto very different ideological terrain? The second question that obviously poses itself looking at those opinion polls in Britain and France and Germany is where are we at in this, I think apocal struggle with authoritarian populism? Are we just losing across the board? Does this family of political parties still continue to rise unabated? And should that temper any optimism we might take from the fact that Democrats look like the poised to retake the House of representatives in 2026?
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Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com listen it is yesha Very, very good set of questions. And the most important is that on one level I don't believe the Cold War and post Cold War west can be restored. This type of a relationship between Europe and the United States that was typical for the last 30 years. And this is for a very simple reason. It was based on the fact that regardless of who is coming to power, these relations are not changing dramatically. And now we think I agree totally with you that the very dynamics of the relations between the United States and Europe are very much defined by the domestic politics on both sides. On the right you have an alternative project. So not the west as the free world, not the Cold War west, which was quite universalist and centered on the relations between United States and Europe, but the idea of the civilizational Western Europe and this is very strongly seen in the security strategy that basically now the west is a kind of a Christian civilization, it's a white civilization. The story is how stable this project could be. And here there's several issues, some of them also the irony of history. Listen, if you see why America and Trump America is so kind of unhappy and curious with Europe is that Europe has become Americanized. All this basically talks about multiculturalism and much more open for migration. This is the ideas that basically normally are associated with America. And also funnily enough, United States have been founded as an alternative exactly to this old Europe of nation states, of closed nation states. It was the new world. So now in a strange way, I do believe that the Trump administration very much looks like a migrant who has went to Convent in 50 years from Europe, had a life, don't like anymore the place in which it is looks back and said but what happened to the country from which I come from? I want to go back and this is not the same country anymore. And I understand all this story, but I don't believe that you can easily make this civilizational alliance because this civilizational alliance also is based on the fact that America wants to be present ideologically in Europe, but it wants to reduce its military presence, its financial commitment. And the story is that Europe basically should spend more and more on defense and being able to defend on its own. And here is the second part of the problem that you are very much touching on. We are going to have a much more militarized Germany. At the same time, we're going to have a Germany which is very likely that one day AFD is going to become in government, how this is going to change Europe. Because the problem is that all these far right parties that we are talking about to different level, all of them are sympathetic to some of the major agenda of the Trump administration, particularly when it comes to immigration, particularly when it comes to the national culture. But on the other side, historically, they're in a total competition with each other. I don't believe that Mrs. Lupin is going to be particularly happy to know that in the next five years, if we're going to see the projections that we have, the defense budget of Germany is going to be three times higher than the defense budget of France. And this is the interesting story because one of the things that was also important for me is that the problem with Trump is that he's a nationalist on one level, but let's put it he's a nationalist without history. You're never going to listen to right Putin.
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There's these famous stories of him giving interviews. And I think when Taka Carson interviewed him, the first hour was just a history lesson about all of the ways in which Russia has been wronged and Russia needs to regain its grandeur and so on. It's very hard to imagine Trump giving a one hour history lesson with the same knowledge and conviction.
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But it's even not knowledge. He does not believe that history matters in a certain way. What is interesting about Trump is that he's not interested what happened before he was born. And honestly speaking, he's not interested what is going to happen after he's going to be away. It is always going to stay with me. When he was reporting of his conversation with the Chinese president and he said she told me that he would not invade Taiwan while I'm in office. So from this point of view, you have this extremely important difference in the time frames. On all level you have Putin, but you have also Xi who think in terms of centuries. And this is Absolutely excessive. You have the Russian president asking the archives from the 9th century to be brought to him. He wants to see the original documents. He's meeting archaeologists in order to understand where the Russians come from. And on the other side, basically you have the president of the United States who said, I'm not thinking in terms of centuries, I'm thinking in terms of weeks, because the world is so fast. And this creates a problem because all these nationalists on European side, they also have three interesting characteristics. All these parties, of course, are very much driven by a major demographic anxiety, dramatically changing population, the fact that you don't believe that your country is home anymore, because home is a place that you understand and you believe that you understood and you don't have this feeling anymore. But at the same time, when you see their projects, most of these voters for the far right parties, they're immigrants on their own, but they want to migrate to the party. They are not dreaming for different economic model. They're dreaming for different demographic and kind of ethnic composition of society, which is very different to be achieved. And this is particularly different to be achieved because the demographic change is so dramatic. And this is what, in my view, is driving this party, but is also paralyzing them. I'm going to give you one figure, because if there was one thing that really struck me in the security strategy of the United States was this half page devoted to Africa. In the year 1900, 25% of the population of the world was living in Europe, and between 8 and 9% was living in Africa. If the projections of the United nations are right, in the year 20, 106% of the population of the world are going to basically come from Europe and 40% are going to come from Africa. And then you end up with this strange security strategy that is trying to put Africa in the footnote and telling to Europeans, basically, be who you used to be. But listen, it is not easy to be who you used to be because the demographic decline, low fertility rates, and the failure of the government to address this issue is there. So this society is already remade. And instead of trying to understand basically how you can govern them and what you achieve, what you cannot achieve, this dream that we are going to be better back where we were, is not going to work. And paradoxically, if you see American history, this is not working also. Because even the very idea of white, which did not exist in Europe before the emergence of America, this was an inclusive concept. The white emerged because Bulgarians like me and Jews and Italians and all these Irish, they were not White in the eyes of the Germans and in the eyes of the Englishmen. So as a result of it, instead of focusing on how to redefine the world to allow us to function and to govern the societies, we go with this kind of a very strong nostalgia. And in my view, there is a difference between nationalism and nostalgia. And the real drama of Europe is that you have a national sentiment, but you do not have the national economies anymore. And this is why, when we talk, what is going to happen? Listen, imagine that European Union is going to disintegrate and you're going to have a nation state. How exactly Bulgarian nation state is going to look like, what is going to be Bulgarian national economy, what kind of protectionism we can have on the level of the state, how this is going to compete with anybody. So this kind of, in my view, major contradiction between the fact that in Duluth we have more and more these great spaces, these civilizational states which are talking about, and then the offer coming from the United States go for fragmentation in Europe, and then basically we are going to get into civilizational alliances. I find this really disturbing.
- [41:48]
B
Let's pick up for a moment about this idea of demographic anxieties that you've talked about a lot. And there's two elements of this, right? One is just immigration. And we've seen that in the United States the the choices of the Biden administration that led to a huge influx of migrants across the southern border was probably one of the reasons why Donald Trump was able to win reelection in 2024. There was a very detailed article in the New York Times a few weeks ago, really going into some of the choices that the Biden administration made and why it made them. And the whole thing is a little bit of a train wreck. Reading it, obviously, in Europe, I think there's very strong reasons to think that the expressed preference of a population for many decades to have more control overboard and to have less immigration and the inability or the unwillingness of policy elites to deliver on that preference is one of the huge reasons for the emergence of those right wing populist parties. I think in the field of studying populism, it used to feel like there's a lot of interesting new things coming out every year because it was such a fresh field, I think at this point. And the number of really new ideas is rapidly diminishing. A lot of it is kind of going into the same field. But there was a really good article published, I believe, in 2025 by somebody called Lauritz Gunther, I believe, who was talking about A cultural representation gap. And one of the things he showed very vividly is that in 2013, the opinion of the average German voter on immigration was to the right of the opinion of, of the average member of parliament for the Christian Democrats, which was then the most right wing party in the Bundestag. And so there's a huge gap between the views of the average voter and the views of the most right wing party in the Bundestag. And so what happened? Well, that space got filled by the alternative for Germany and immigration remains the most potent recruiting ground for those political parties, particularly in Europe. But as you're saying, there's also a deeper question, which is the question number one is how do you deal with that? How do you enforce borders? How do you make sure that you don't keep giving this huge electoral present to the populace? But the deeper question is why is it that populations around the world seem unable to replicate themselves? By the way, that has historically happened, which is through having children and raising the next generation of citizens presence within the country. And this is a deep problem in Europe. Throughout Europe, particularly in southern Europe, particularly in Central Europe, but throughout Europe, it's a huge problem in the United States at this point. But it's also a problem in India where the population has now fallen below the replacement rate. It's also a huge problem in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but has about 1.6 children per woman. And of course it is gigantic problem in East Asia. China is definitely going to be one of the dominant powers over the next 10 or 20 years. But if it wants to be a dominant power in 50 or 100 years, it needs to get under control. The huge problems that it has with depopulation, how is that going to play out? Are these countries going to find ways to encourage citizens to have more children? Are we just going to see worldwide depopulation? What do you think?
- [45:09]
A
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- [47:18]
B
I mean, what's the nature of a conspiracy theory that's saying.
- [47:20]
A
I'm going to tell you immediately basically what the Russian propaganda is saying, because the Western guys do not have children. They don't want us to have children. So as a result of it, they're coming with all this feminism and with all this basically gay rights. Part of the anti gay propaganda in many of these countries is about fertility rates. And this is the explanation. But the story is that you can do this, you can spend a lot of money on basically trying to give incentives, economic incentives for young couples to have children. And that does not work. There are countries like Hungary where around 5% of the GDP goes for policies which are very much targeting the demographic decline. And the results are not incredible. So you don't simply have only the problem of demography, but you do not have a response. You have a problem and governments don't know what to do about it. Secondly, the story that basically we have these less children. Many people say that this is where technology is going to help and here comes AI is going to help us and you have the technological solution of these demographic problems, particularly with the care for the old people. But on the other side, technology is the other threatening factor. We hope for technology when it comes to demography, but we also start fearing technology and particularly artificial intelligence. So it is not simply that you are afraid that you're going to be replaced by people coming from Africa, the only place where you have a kind of a strong demographic growth. You're also afraid that you're going to be replaced by robots. And secondly, this is combined with the second factor, and this is suddenly the concentration of wealth and the development of technology created the prospect of the individual immortality. You remember this famous conversation between Putin and Xi in which they were talking about people living up to 150 years and the transfer of organs. But in a certain way this creates the idea that you are probably going to have some immortal few that can basically earn the immortality pay for it. But most of the people are going to be mortal again, and we are going to be slightly with this type of immune inequality that cannot be breached. This is like the world of the ancient Greek mythology, a few immortals which are defining basically the life of the mortals. And before we believe that, okay, we are mortal, we're going to die, but there are certain things that are going to remain, and one of them was our nation. I'm going to die, but my children are going to be there, and their children, and they're going to be a cult. And then no children. You have mortality of the individual and then mortality of the nation. And the last point is demography, because in a certain way, the major fear of the demographic change is not simply that they're coming people who are going to take your job, but they're going to come people who are going to outvote you even more. There is the fear that the government is going to select who is going to come based on the idea for whom they are going to vote. And this is one of the kind of a major obsession when it comes to these demographic changes. And this is why we have, in my view, destabilization of a very understanding of what is political community, who belongs, how to do it, what is the identity. And I'm always asking, giving this simple example, there is a restaurant in Vienna which is an Italian restaurant. It was shown by a German journalist, a friend of mine, who was basically founded as an Italian restaurant by the Italian owners, but after that it was bought by somebody else. And now you have a non Italian owner. All the waiters have never been in Italy and does not speak a word of Italy. They don't know where Italy is, but at the same time it has Italian music and Italian menu. So the story is, is this an Italian restaurant? And funnily enough, it is an Italian restaurant for me, but probably it's not an Italian restaurant for the Italian who wants to go there and who believes that he probably can talk to somebody who comes from the same place. And this kind of a major story of identity, this clash between two different ideas of majority in democratic politics. One, the historical majority that make the nation and the other, the majority that is born on the night of the election, which can be very different in its ethnic makeup. I'm saying this because probably the first person who experienced the clash between these two majority was the first president of Poland, who in 1920s, he was elected, he survived probably two weeks, and he was killed because the nationalist who killed him, he said, listen, you voted with the votes of the minorities, with the Jewish and the Ukrainian votes. You cannot be the president of Poland. And in my view, this kind of a tension between migration, democracy, remaking of nations is critically important. And this is why this civilizational discourse does not help you, because this is basically telling you, let's defend. But it is difficult. On the other side, Mr. Trump has a point and he's capturing certain very real anxieties, particularly in Eastern Europe, because East Europeans, much more than in the west for us, ethnic homogeneity of the state was the lessons of the 20th century. People said that people had been always moving in Europe, but The difference between 20th and 21st century was that in the 20th century, people had been moving in Europe, people had been killed in Europe, but the result of it was unethically homogeneous states, particularly in the East. Look at Poland, look at Hungary, look at the Czech Republic. In a certain way, this was a transfer of minorities, this was the killing of the Jews, it was basically the expulsion of the Germans. And I'm saying this because suddenly what we are seeing in Europe today is unmaking of this kind of ethnically homogeneous states. And then who are the migrants? Are Bulgarians in Germany? Part of the problem for Trump are only basically migrants coming outside of Europe. And then of course come the problem of Islam. And this is also interesting because in the kind of imagination of the American far right, Russia is a white Christian nation. Probably somebody should tell them that this is the European country with the biggest Islamic population. And if there is a really place where Islam is very powerful, this is Chechnya. So as a result of it, I do believe we are basically living in a world in which policies are much more written by anxieties than by ideologies or by kind of any type of solution oriented strategies.
- [54:40]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of of the podcast. What a better way to end the year than to listen to Ivan Kostov trying to make sense of the state of the world. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about artificial intelligence. How big an impact is it having on people's perceptions of the world? And how big an impact is it having on the actual world? We have an interesting divergence of views on this. And then Ivan offers his predictions for what is around the next historical corner. To listen to that part of the conversation. To feel good about yourself as we round out 2025 to support our continued growth, please go to yashamunk.substack.com thegoodfight for 25% off your first year of subscription, that means you're only paying about a dollar a week to listen to two full episodes of A Good Fight and to help us us keep growing in the new year. Thank you so much for the time you spend with us this year. Thanks so much for your support. Have a wonderful new year.