The World Simply Does Not Trust America - Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion)

The World Simply Does Not Trust America

In much the same way that Americans no longer trust themselves.
Francis Fukuyama
Persusasion, Apr 07, 2026

Back in 1995, I published my second book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.

Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you. The only large organizations in the south were the Catholic Church and, of course, the Mafia. The latter was a direct product of distrust: if you were a businessman, you couldn’t count on the state to protect your property rights because of a weak rule of law; if someone cheated you, you hired a mafioso to break their legs.

In Trust, I characterized the United States as a “high-trust” society. This view has a long history. When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s and traveled across much of the settled part of the country, he noted that America had a high density of civic associations, from bible studies to clubs to mutual aid societies, and that Americans found it relatively easy to work together with strangers in the face of challenges. This, he felt, stood in sharp contrast to his native France, where, he said, you couldn’t find ten Frenchmen who were ready to work together in a common endeavor. In France, there was little of the spontaneous sociability or social capital that he found in the United States. This view of high-trust America was supported, in the mid-20th century, by survey data that showed Americans trusting other Americans to a higher degree than people in France and many other countries.

If I were to re-write Trust today, I would not characterize the United States as a high-trust society. Even as that book was being published in the 1990s, political polarization had started to spread, and Americans began to sort themselves according to their political preferences. That polarization has only increased in the interval between then and now. It has turned into what political scientists label “affective polarization,” in which partisans don’t just disagree on issues, but also come to believe that their opponents are deeply malevolent and dishonest. Social capital still exists between members of the different political tribes, but distrust is rampant across the society as a whole. We don’t accept a common set of facts on issues like vaccine safety or election integrity, and we live by a series of conspiracy theories that inform us that things are not what they seem.

Trust and social capital are built on a foundation of moral virtue. We come to trust people who are honest and reliable, who keep commitments and are willing to offer support even when it isn’t of immediate benefit to themselves. Trust takes time to build through a process of repeated interaction: if we see another person fulfilling their promises and reciprocating favors, we tend to do the same for them, creating a virtuous circle. But a trust relationship that has built up over time can be broken in an instant, if one of the parties betrays that trust and takes advantage of the other player. Just as trust builds on itself, distrust can become self-reinforcing: if we are betrayed, we are tempted to seek revenge against the betrayer.

Trust is also critical in international relations. We come to trust other countries based on their observed behavior, just as we do with individuals. There is no global enforcer of rules or a sovereign to make countries behave. The use of force is constrained only by the expectation that it will be met with a counter-force, in an environment where credibility is the coin of the realm.

That is what makes me extremely worried about the present global situation, and fearful of where our world order is heading.

It is hard to imagine that the current war with Iran and the crisis over the Strait of Hormuz does not represent a fundamental rupture in the North Atlantic security structure. NATO is an alliance built on trust: its deterrent value rests on the belief that NATO members will come to one another’s aid if a member is attacked. This is what happened after 9/11, when a number of alliance members did come to America’s defense in Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO is not an all-purpose commitment to support a treaty partner who has undertaken an offensive war against a third party. Trump is accusing alliance members of betraying the United States by not collaborating with it to re-open the Strait—but no one ever signed up to wage offensive war.

The truth of the matter is that the United States has never been as isolated as it is today. Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, has made some supportive noises in the current crisis, but that was done out of cynical calculation. No sane European leader can think that support for the United States today will be reciprocated by a Trumpist United States down the road. And while American actions have greatly benefited rivals like Russia and China, they can hardly delude themselves that the United States will reliably serve their interests in the future.

Donald Trump has claimed that the United States has never been as respected as it has been under his presidency. Of the very many untrue things he has said in his career, this is among the most absurd. There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present. A successful dealmaker needs to generate a minimal amount of trust that he will uphold his end of the bargain. But reciprocity is a virtue that Trump has never understood or practiced.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

O mundo simplesmente não confia nos Estados Unidos - Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion)

 O mundo simplesmente não confia nos Estados Unidos

Da mesma forma que os americanos já não confiam em si mesmos
Francis Fukuyama, Persuasion (07/04/2026)
INTELIGÊNCIA DEMOCRÁTICA, ABR 7

Em 1995, publiquei meu segundo livro, Confiança: As Virtudes Sociais e a Criação da Prosperidade. Nele, argumentei que a confiança está entre as qualidades sociais mais preciosas, pois é a base da cooperação humana. Na economia, a confiança é como um lubrificante que facilita o funcionamento das empresas, das transações e dos mercados. Na política, é a base do que se chama de “capital social” — a capacidade dos cidadãos de se unirem em grupos e organizações para buscar objetivos comuns e participar ativamente da política democrática.

As sociedades diferem muito em seus níveis gerais de confiança. Na década de 1990, Robert Putnam, de Harvard, escreveu um estudo clássico sobre a Itália que contrastava o norte do país, marcado pela alta confiança, com o sul, onde a desconfiança era predominante. O norte da Itália era repleto de associações cívicas, clubes esportivos, jornais e outras organizações que davam estrutura à vida pública. O sul, por outro lado, era caracterizado pelo que um cientista social anterior, Edward Banfield, denominou “familismo amoral”: uma sociedade na qual se confia principalmente nos membros da família imediata e se tem uma atitude cautelosa em relação a pessoas de fora que, em sua maioria, estão tentando prejudicar os outros. As únicas grandes organizações no sul eram a Igreja Católica e, claro, a Máfia. Esta última era um produto direto da desconfiança: se você fosse um empresário, não podia contar com o Estado para proteger seus direitos de propriedade devido à fragilidade do sistema jurídico; se alguém lhe enganasse, você contratava um mafioso para quebrar as pernas da vítima.

Em Trust, caracterizei os Estados Unidos como uma sociedade de “alta confiança”. Essa visão tem uma longa história. Quando o observador francês Alexis de Tocqueville visitou os Estados Unidos na década de 1830 e viajou por grande parte da área povoada do país, notou que a América tinha uma alta densidade de associações cívicas, desde estudos bíblicos a clubes e sociedades de ajuda mútua, e que os americanos achavam relativamente fácil trabalhar em conjunto com estranhos diante de desafios. Isso, segundo ele, contrastava fortemente com sua França natal, onde, de fato, não se encontravam dez franceses dispostos a trabalhar juntos em um empreendimento comum. Na França, havia pouca da sociabilidade espontânea ou do capital social que ele encontrou nos Estados Unidos. Essa visão da América de alta confiança foi corroborada, em meados do século XX, por dados de pesquisas que mostravam que os americanos confiavam em outros americanos em um grau maior do que as pessoas na França e em muitos outros países.

Se eu fosse reescrever “Trust” hoje, não caracterizaria os Estados Unidos como uma sociedade de alta confiança. Mesmo quando o livro estava sendo publicado na década de 1990, a polarização política já havia começado a se espalhar, e os americanos começaram a se organizar de acordo com suas preferências políticas. Essa polarização só aumentou no período entre então e agora. Ela se transformou no que os cientistas políticos chamam de “polarização afetiva”, na qual os partidários não apenas discordam sobre questões, mas também passam a acreditar que seus oponentes são profundamente malévolos e desonestos. O capital social ainda existe entre os membros das diferentes tribos políticas, mas a desconfiança é generalizada em toda a sociedade. Não aceitamos um conjunto comum de fatos sobre questões como a segurança das vacinas ou a integridade das eleições, e vivemos sob uma série de teorias da conspiração que nos dizem que as coisas não são o que parecem.

A confiança e o capital social são construídos sobre uma base de virtude moral. Passamos a confiar em pessoas honestas e confiáveis, que cumprem seus compromissos e estão dispostas a oferecer apoio mesmo quando isso não lhes traz benefício imediato. A confiança leva tempo para ser construída por meio de um processo de interação repetida: se vemos outra pessoa cumprindo suas promessas e retribuindo favores, tendemos a fazer o mesmo por ela, criando um círculo virtuoso. Mas uma relação de confiança construída ao longo do tempo pode ser quebrada num instante, se uma das partes trair essa confiança e se aproveitar da outra. Assim como a confiança se constrói sobre si mesma, a desconfiança pode se tornar auto-reforçadora: se formos traídos, somos tentados a buscar vingança contra o traidor.

A confiança também é crucial nas relações internacionais. Passamos a confiar em outros países com base em seu comportamento observado, assim como fazemos com indivíduos. Não existe um órgão global que imponha regras ou um soberano que obrigue os países a se comportarem. O uso da força é limitado apenas pela expectativa de que será respondido com uma força contrária, em um ambiente onde a credibilidade é a moeda corrente.

É isso que me deixa extremamente preocupado com a situação global atual e com medo de para onde nossa ordem mundial está caminhando.

É difícil imaginar que a atual guerra com o Irã e a crise no Estreito de Ormuz não representem uma ruptura fundamental na estrutura de segurança do Atlântico Norte. A OTAN é uma aliança construída sobre a confiança: seu poder de dissuasão reside na crença de que os membros da OTAN se ajudarão mutuamente caso um membro seja atacado. Foi o que aconteceu após o 11 de setembro, quando vários membros da aliança defenderam os Estados Unidos no Afeganistão e no Iraque. A OTAN não é um compromisso universal de apoiar um parceiro que tenha empreendido uma guerra ofensiva contra um terceiro. Trump acusa os membros da aliança de traírem os Estados Unidos por não colaborarem para reabrir o Estreito — mas ninguém jamais se alistou para travar uma guerra ofensiva.

A verdade é que os Estados Unidos nunca estiveram tão isolados como hoje. Mark Rutte, o Secretário-Geral da OTAN, fez algumas declarações de apoio na crise atual, mas isso foi fruto de um cálculo cínico. Nenhum líder europeu sensato pode acreditar que o apoio aos Estados Unidos hoje será retribuído por um Estados Unidos sob o comando de Trump no futuro. E embora as ações americanas tenham beneficiado enormemente rivais como a Rússia e a China, eles dificilmente podem se iludir achando que os Estados Unidos servirão aos seus interesses de forma confiável no futuro.

Donald Trump afirmou que os Estados Unidos nunca foram tão respeitados como durante sua presidência. Dentre as inúmeras inverdades que ele proferiu ao longo de sua carreira, essa é uma das mais absurdas. Nunca houve um momento em que os Estados Unidos fossem tão vistos com desconfiança, tanto por aliados tradicionais quanto por rivais, como atualmente. Um negociador bem-sucedido precisa gerar um mínimo de confiança de que cumprirá sua parte do acordo. Mas a reciprocidade é uma virtude que Trump jamais compreendeu ou praticou.

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A letter from a writer in Teheran - Persuasion

A Letter From an Iranian My family is in Tehran. Here's what this war means to me. JUN 21 , 2025 Tehran, Iran on June 19, 2025. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images.) It is hard to avoid the feeling that we are entering a new era in the Middle East. To mark a week since hostilities began, we are publishing two personal essays—one yesterday by our Executive Director, David Hamburger, who found himself in Israel shortly before the war broke out; another today by an anonymous Iranian writer whose family lives in Tehran. —The editors. I am writing from a deep well of grief for my war-torn city, Tehran. It would be a lie to say we didn’t see this coming, especially given the long-standing threats and ambitions of the oppressive Islamic Republic of Iran—a regime that has, for decades, openly sought to annihilate Israel. Even though grief and distress are a giant mass sitting on my chest, they’re not monolithic. They have many layers that hit differently and come with many uncertainties. My entire family lives in Iran, mostly scattered across Tehran. My primary concern is for those in the affected areas. Some were able to leave the city, others stayed behind. Some are too old or ill to evacuate, others are without the means: no car, no money for gas or food. Most banks are closed. If you don’t already have a stack of cash at home, you’re in a dire situation. When I called my aunt after the first strikes on Tehran, which killed several top government officials, she seemed at peace. I asked how she could be so calm in the midst of bombs dropping. Wasn’t she afraid that she and her children might be hit and die? A Letter From An Israeli Shelter DAVID HAMBURGER · JUN 20 Read full story She said, “We don’t want war. But tonight, knowing that the men who’ve held us hostage for forty-six years, who’ve ransacked our country, raped and killed our daughters and executed our men for asking for their basic human rights, are finally getting what they deserve—that brings me peace.” It’s not easy to hear a loved one speaking so plainly about their own death and destruction. But that’s what over four decades of oppression, pressure, and intimidation have done to the Iranian people. They are shocked and frightened by this war, but, somehow, they also feel like justice is being served. War is an ugly business. Whether you think you’re on the right side or the wrong side, it’s never welcome. Most people seem to be falling into two camps about the Israel-Iran war: those who are against it, and those who are satisfied, or even delighted, with Israel’s attack. Among the first group are Western commentators and social media warriors who seem to be going through moral confusion about what sort of regime the Islamic Republic of Iran is. I constantly hear comparisons between what’s happening in Iran and what’s happening in Gaza. Many of them see Israel solely as a genocidal colonial entity on the wrong side of history. They claim Israel has attacked Iran without any provocation, while the Islamic Republic is innocent and must be left alone. But this ignores that the Islamic Republic has terrorized not only its own people but also countries throughout the region, while funding and arming proxy groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Iranian people are stuck in a war imposed on them by their government’s violent rhetoric and actions. I am not pro-Israel in a political sense. I am strongly opposed to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But I also believe Israeli people deserve to live peaceful lives, without having to worry that they’re surrounded by regimes calling for their annihilation. The Islamic Republic has openly called for the destruction of Israel and does not recognize Jewish people’s human rights. How do I know this? Every morning for twelve years I stood in a schoolyard in Tehran and was forced to chant: “Death to America! Death to Israel!” Many of those who hold Israel to a higher moral standard than Iran, while refusing to blame the Islamic Republic for its terrorist activities, are progressives with big hearts and good intentions. But they grossly lack nuance and an understanding of the geopolitical situation, regional history, and the struggles that both Iranian and Israeli people have been facing. They view the conflict through their own limited lens of -isms (which I won’t bother unpacking here). They don’t want to be responsible for another mess on their guilty conscience. Even some in the Iranian diaspora have gotten on board and perpetuated the regime’s propaganda, driven by fear and patriotic rage. I don’t blame them—we humans are emotional creatures, and we don’t want to see people suffering, especially our own. But there is deep complexity here that needs to be reckoned with. Is sudden, intense suffering from foreign missiles more merciful than prolonged, systematic oppression at the hands of your own government? When people have endured decades of oppression, does the source of their potential liberation matter as much as the liberation itself? And who bears responsibility when both action and inaction guarantee someone will suffer? These complexities can’t be captured in social media soundbites or simple slogans. They are the impossible calculations that ordinary Iranians are being forced to make. This brings me to the second group—those who support this war because they believe it will eliminate the Islamic Republic once and for all. They naïvely believe that once the regime is weak enough, people will rise up and come together to elect a democratic leader, and all will be well. Maybe that is the case, but here lies the cruel paradox: can we guarantee that this war, which promises to end suffering, will actually deliver on that promise? And at what cost? There are many recent examples of disastrous outcomes following regime change, such as the invasion of Iraq, the twenty-year democracy project in Afghanistan, and the Arab Spring. Even if we assume that this war has the potential to free the people of Iran from the tyranny of the Islamic Republic, one must think about the fallout. What happens once Israel completes its mission and destroys Iran’s nuclear infrastructure? The fears swirl: economic collapse, scarcity of resources, civil war, partition of the country, the rise of an ISIS-like terror regime, and many more that those with expertise can articulate more eloquently than I can. Or the worst-case scenario: the Islamic Republic remains in power—stronger, bloodier, more emboldened—either by holding itself together or through negotiations with the United States. If that happens, the first thing the regime will do is retaliate against its own people by executing thousands in the name of rooting out “spies.” It will expand its oppressive machine, as it always has, by turning inward and crushing people. This is how the Islamic Republic survives: cannibalism. That’s why I hesitate to put my name on this article. Being born under a dictatorship, fear becomes the fourth element in my blood alongside red cells, white cells, and plasma. If this scenario becomes a reality and the Islamic Republic remains standing, I do not want to put my family in any jeopardy. In the past few days, there have been reports that more than a dozen people have been arrested and one person has been executed for being “Israel’s spy.” Whether those reports are true or not, the fear is surely real. And then there is my final concern. Two days ago, I sent my mother a 3D ultrasound image of my unborn child along with “How are you?” A few hours later, I received a voice message: “Hi my dear. They’re hitting us. We can hear the sound of missiles dropping nearby. But nothing has hit us yet. And what a beautiful baby he is. I can’t wait to come see him when he’s born. Don’t worry. We’re fine.” Since then, the Islamic Republic has imposed a nationwide internet shutdown and communication network restrictions. Even landline calls to Iran no longer work. Nobody really knows when or how this war will end, how many lives it will cost, or what the aftermath will mean for the people, the country, and the region. As I write this last sentence, I wonder… was that the last time I will hear my mother’s voice? The author of this article wishes to remain anonymous. © 2025 Persuasion P.O. Box 21586 2300 18th Street NW Washington, DC 20009 Unsubscribe

Os Estados Unidos acabaram de mudar de lado na guerra da Ucrânia Francis Fukuyama, Persuasion

 Os Estados Unidos acabaram de mudar de lado na guerra da Ucrânia

Francis Fukuyama

Persuasion (20/02/2025)

Mesmo que qualquer pessoa com olhos pudesse ver isso chegando, os movimentos recentes de Donald Trump em relação à Ucrânia e à Rússia representam um golpe devastador. Estamos no meio de uma luta global entre a democracia liberal ocidental e governos autoritários, e, nessa batalha, os Estados Unidos acabam de mudar de lado e se aliar ao campo autoritário.

O que Trump disse nos últimos dias sobre a Ucrânia e a Rússia desafia a crença. Ele acusou a Ucrânia de ter iniciado a guerra por não ter se rendido preventivamente às exigências territoriais russas; afirmou que a Ucrânia não é uma democracia; e disse que os ucranianos estavam errados em resistir à agressão russa. Essas ideias provavelmente não foram concebidas por ele, mas vêm diretamente da boca de Vladimir Putin, um homem por quem Trump já demonstrou grande admiração. Reunidos na Arábia Saudita na terça-feira, os Estados Unidos iniciaram uma negociação direta com Moscou, excluindo tanto a Ucrânia quanto os europeus, e cederam antecipadamente dois trunfos cruciais: a aceitação das conquistas territoriais russas até o momento e um compromisso de não permitir que a Ucrânia entre na OTAN. Em troca, Putin não fez uma única concessão.

Levo isso particularmente para o lado pessoal, pois meus colegas da Universidade de Stanford e eu temos trabalhado arduamente desde 2013 para apoiar a democracia na Ucrânia. Realizamos diversos programas para treinar profissionais ucranianos de meia carreira em habilidades de liderança e valores democráticos. Visitei o país muitas vezes e desenvolvi muitas amizades com um grande grupo de ucranianos inspiradores.

Só para deixar claro, há aqui uma enorme questão moral em jogo. A Ucrânia é uma jovem, frágil e imperfeita democracia liberal, mas ainda assim é uma democracia liberal. A Rússia, por outro lado, é a mais recente encarnação da antiga União Soviética, uma entidade cuja dissolução em 1991 Putin lamenta e vem tentando reverter desde então. Trata-se de uma ditadura na qual uma única palavra errada nas redes sociais pode levar alguém à prisão por anos. Lembro-me de caminhar pela Praça Maidan, em Kyiv, alguns anos atrás, maravilhado com o fato de que a Ucrânia era uma sociedade genuinamente livre, onde se podia criticar o governo, circular livremente e votar em um candidato da oposição (como os ucranianos fizeram ao eleger Zelensky e seu partido, Servo do Povo, em 2019). Nada disso acontece na Rússia, que regrediu a uma ditadura totalitária.

Qualquer acordo de paz “negociado” agora pelo governo Trump e pela Rússia não trará paz. Pode haver um cessar-fogo temporário, mas os russos irão se rearmar e reabrir a guerra assim que se reabastecerem. Eles não têm razão para respeitar as atuais linhas de cessar-fogo e buscarão reabsorver toda a Ucrânia no momento oportuno.

Menos notado em meio à atual comoção está o anúncio do Secretário de Defesa, Pete Hegseth, de reduzir o orçamento de defesa dos EUA em 8% ao ano pelos próximos cinco anos. Isso é exatamente o oposto do que os Estados Unidos deveriam estar fazendo. No futuro, haverá novas ameaças russas a todos os países de sua periferia—Geórgia, Moldávia, os Estados Bálticos e Polônia. Os EUA não precisam se retirar formalmente da aliança da OTAN; Trump já sinalizou claramente que não cumprirá o compromisso do Artigo 5 de defesa mútua. A América será enfraquecida tanto em sua intenção quanto em sua capacidade de enfrentar futuras ameaças de grandes potências.

E não deixe que ninguém diga que isso está sendo feito para focar nas ameaças de segurança no Extremo Oriente. Neste momento, é inconcebível que Donald Trump use o exército dos EUA para defender Taiwan contra a China. Se a China impor um bloqueio ou se preparar para uma invasão, Trump iniciará uma negociação com Xi Jinping, assim como está fazendo com Putin, que na prática entregará o controle da ilha. Ele então se vangloriará de ter evitado uma guerra.

Desde 1945, os Estados Unidos têm apoiado uma ordem mundial liberal baseada em normas como a proibição do uso da força militar para mudar fronteiras e em acordos formais de defesa mútua, como a OTAN e os tratados de segurança com Japão e Coreia do Sul. Esse sistema foi espetacularmente bem-sucedido em promover paz, prosperidade e democracia. Os EUA usaram seu soft power por meio de instrumentos como a National Endowment for Democracy para apoiar defensores da democracia contra o poder autoritário de países como China, Rússia, Irã e Coreia do Norte.

Os Estados Unidos sob Donald Trump não estão recuando para o isolacionismo. Eles estão ativamente aderindo ao campo autoritário, apoiando autocratas de direita em todo o mundo, de Vladimir Putin a Viktor Orbán, Nayib Bukele e Narendra Modi. A National Endowment for Democracy pode muito bem renascer como a National Endowment for Dictatorship (Fundação Nacional para a Ditadura). Como podemos dizer à Rússia e à China para não continuarem suas conquistas quando nós mesmos estamos ocupados tentando absorver o Panamá e a Groenlândia? Esses movimentos de política externa são completamente coerentes com o ataque do governo Trump ao Estado de Direito no plano interno, seu fortalecimento do poder executivo e o enfraquecimento dos freios e contrapesos em todos os níveis.

Não me digam que o povo americano votou por um mundo ou um país como este no último novembro. Eles não estavam prestando atenção—e deveriam se preparar para ver seu próprio país e o mundo transformados além do reconhecimento.

Toquio e o Japão como são, vistos por um estrangeiro - Quico Toro (Persuasion)

 

10 Observations About Tokyo

Notes on the world's most successful failing society.

QUICO TORO FEB 19

(Photo by Richard A. Brooks/AFP via Getty Images.)

In fifteen years raising a family in Montreal, it had never once occurred to usto move to Japan. Yes, my wife grew up in the Kyoto ‘burbs but she left in 2004 and had zero interest in going back. But “we make plans and God laughs,” the proverb says, and so it was in our case—a too-good-to-pass-up job opportunity came her way last summer, and we soon found ourselves packing up our lives and moving to a city we’d only known as tourists.

Six months on, here are ten observations on life here.

1. Tokyo is hyper-dense but not crowded. Even in the very center of town where we live—Nihonbashi—Manhattan-level density feels placid. The streets around our apartment are bordered by high rises and see plenty of foot traffic, but they always feel calm. The visual stereotype of white-gloved subway officials shoving commuters into hyper-crowded rail cars is two decades out of date: massive investment in new subway lines put an end to that years ago. Aside from a relatively small number of mega train stations, tourist hotspots and nightlife areas, Tokyo is calm.

2. How a compact metro area of 37 million people manages to feel this relaxed isn’t really a mystery: the city declared war on cars, and then won that war. Citywide, there are 0.32 cars per household, half the level in New York or London. Nothing is designed with the expectation that normal people own a car, because they don’t. Every shop that sells something too big to carry in a bag offers delivery. The streets are for pedestrians: every office, school, gym, hospital and shop is built on the assumption that you’ll walk there. There’s no on-street parking. Aside from main arterial roads, streets have no sidewalks: it’s fine to just walk right down the middle. Normal people don’t drive, road traffic is dominated by delivery vans, taxis and buses. Tokyo makes it easier, more convenient and cheaper not to own a car, so people don’t. Every service you might need is packed into even higher-density pockets right next to or on top of a train station. The result is an urban marvel: amazingly convenient, easy to navigate, and pleasant. Living here radicalizes you. Transit-centered hyper-density is just a smarter, more convenient, objectively better way to build a city than the car-choked messes we insist on in North America.

3. Of course, hyper-density requires compromises. In Tokyo’s compressed urban geometry, there’s just no room for some things I’d taken for granted. Bike parking racks. Small neighborhood parks. Ornamental flourishes. And the one that really gets me: street trees. Whole chunks of the city just don’t have any at all. This, I think, explains why Tokyo retains an oddly dystopian, Blade Runnerish vibe, despite being so calm and pleasant. You can’t go two blocks without seeing three convenience stores. But you can go days without seeing a tree.

4. The prime directive in Japanese society is “thou shalt not discomfit thy neighbor.” Ever. Even on trivial things. Prosocial behavior is a totalizing ideology. People take it seriously. A blanket taboo bans any behavior that might create any inconvenience to people around you, let alone—heaven forbid—open conflict. Kids get this ethos drilled into them intensively in school. The result is what you’d expect. There are no surprises. Everything and everyone is on time. Everyone is polite. Everything is clean. Everyone follows all the rules all the time. Everything works.

5. In the West, if you want to put someone at ease, you affect a plain, informal manner. Speak a little bit too politely and you come across as stiff, which turns the vibe frosty. In Japan, it works in exactly the opposite way. Polite language projects warmth and creates psychological comfort. Outside an intimate family setting, informal Japanese comes across as quite aggressive: it ends up hindering intimacy instead of enabling it. The hardest part of learning the language isn’t the language itself—though that’s quite hard, of course—but learning how to project warmth through politeness. I’m still bad at this.

6. To people in the West, Japan’s uncompromising insistence on prosocial behavior can come across as quite oppressive. The Japanese people I talk to don’t experience it that way. Quite the opposite. They can’t imagine how people elsewhere manage to get along without it. Or why they might want to try. In Japan, social interaction is very rarely ambiguous: what is expected of you is always explicit, always clear. My kids report that fitting in at school turned out to be strangely straightforward: there’s always a script. They just have to follow it. This is the opposite of stressful. You rarely have to think. Just follow the norm and you’re safe.

7. Democracy is a strange fit for a country this committed to prosocial behaviour. Politicians go to elaborate lengths to avoid criticizing each other too directly. The Liberal Democratic Party’s leadership race last year, which brought in the new prime minister Shigeru Ishiba, was a bizarre exercise in circumlocution—at least to me. Candidates leveled attacks at each other in ways so oblique that they would only register as an attack at all to those with encyclopedic background information about the race and each contender’s previous positions. If you have spent ten years obsessively following the comings-and-goings in Nagatachō—Tokyo’s Westminster—you could sort of squint and realize that the precise choice of words one candidate had used created a contrast with the expressed position of some rival candidate. Nobody would be so crass as to make the contrast explicit. Everybody understood it nonetheless. Japan has a democracy, but not as we know it.

8. If Tokyo is disconcertingly functional, that’s in part because it’s a parasitic organism sucking the life out of the rest of Japan. All the good jobs are here, all the opportunities, and so all the ambitious young people are here too. This one megacity is Japan’s New York, D.C. and LA all rolled into one. Living here, it’s easy to forget the huge demographic chaos Japan faces due to its collapsed birthrate and fast-aging population: stay in Tokyo and you’d never know the country has an acute shortage of young people. But the demographic shitshow is painfully evident the second you get out into Japan’s second- and third-tier cities: boarded-up shops, ghost neighborhoods, shuttered primary schools, abandoned houses: a Children of Men dystopia. The miraculous metropolis all around me thrives because the rest of Japan doesn’t. Every politician talks about this. None has a good idea for what to do about it.

9. Because Tokyo is so sleek and pleasant, it’s easy to forget that it sits at the center of a nation in long-term decline. Three decades of economic stagnation have seen Japan’s position on the world stage shrink dramatically from great power to afterthought. The yen is in the toilet: in dollar terms, incomes are worth a fraction of what they once were. People’s life prospects are dramatically constrained compared to where they were a generation ago. Nobody’s happy about it, but Japan has managed its decline rather elegantly: there’s little obvious poverty, no overt social conflict, very low unemployment, no such thing as a dangerous neighborhood. The hospitals work, old people are cared for, children are educated. It takes an extremely socially cohesive nation to pull it off, but living here gives you a sense that if all the cultural and political ingredients are in place, degrowth need not be a total catastrophe.

10. Xenophobes in the West sometimes point to Japan’s relative closure to immigration to explain its virtues. This is another outdated stereotype, like the guys shoving commuters into trains. Japan threw in the towel on its near-zero-immigration policy years ago, the government’s hand forced by the same demographic trends that have doomed its smaller cities and towns. There are quite a few workers from South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America here now, doing jobs that would otherwise go undone. Japanese people are pretty ambivalent about it, because we foreigners undermine the predictability that’s so central to society here. When a Japanese person is talking to another Japanese person, the script is clear. When they’re talking to a foreigner, it isn’t. Ambiguity creeps in, and unpredictability. Japanese people struggle with this. Partly in response, Tokyo is now full of English signage spelling out in very explicit language what is and what is not acceptable behavior. Do not smoke on this sidewalk. Behave properly in the subway even when you are very drunk. Do not speak loudly in the bicycle parking lot. And my favorite:

Obviously you don’t need to explain to Japanese people how to use the ritual cleansing vessels at a temple, but foreigners, well, they might make a mistake, so they better be told.

Listen, Japan doesn’t have a lot of experience playing host to foreigners, and they’re sort of groping their way towards a modus vivendi that doesn’t imperil the prosocial consensus. Keeping society predictable is what Japanese people are committed to. Because everything works here. Who’d want to imperil that?

Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.

Relato de um jornalista que foi prisioneiro dos terroristas que acabam de tomar o poder na Síria, por 2 anos - Theo Padnos (Persuasion)

Persuasion: 

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When I Was a Hostage THEO PADNOS · FEB 14 Read full story

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In the fall of 2012, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the military power now in charge of Syria, was a mere minor terrorist organization, a band of their fighters in Aleppo took me prisoner. Back then they were known as Jabhat al-Nusra. I remained in the group’s custody for two years—often in solitary confinement cells, but not always. During this time, it often happened that news of some stupendous victory would make its way, via the fighters’ two-way radios, into our prisons. It was a surreal experience then to listen as a government checkpoint got blown into the sky, for instance, or a truckload of government troops fell into my captors’ hands. 

What’s going on now, however, is surreal beyond anything I saw or heard when I was in Syria. I’ve spent the past few days watching my former captors’ wildest dreams come true. Actually, I suspect that all Syrians, in every corner of the world, are watching these events unfold in a mood of unremitting shock and awe.

Nevertheless, certain sights have become familiar. Those who’ve been following the rebels’ advance have gotten used to seeing them standing in the midst of the government armories and air force bases surrounded by expensive-looking military kit.¹ “By the grace and favor of God, the Almighty,” the men scream into the camera as they pump their Kalashnikovs into the sky, “we are in complete control here.”

Technically speaking, they ought not to be quite so astonished. I’m sure they know this. This is a religious army, after all. According to the dogmas, God wrote down every last detail of what’s occurring now at the beginning of time. In the presence of an act of God, however miraculous, the correct attitude is calm submission to His will. Somehow, in their enthusiasm, the footsoldiers sometimes forget this. But the leadership never does. They know the religion much better than their underlings do, have internalized the law more deeply, and enforce such discipline as there is. It won’t be long before the leaders put a stop to the soldiers’ love of making a show of themselves.

In the early days of my capture, the flags on all the fighters’ pickups bore the legend “Victory Front, the al-Qaeda System in the Levant.” It was imprinted on the stationery and scrawled across their t-shirts and bandannas. Even back then, however, the thinkers within the high command were doubting the wisdom of presenting themselves to the world as terrorists.

On one hand, people within the army generally liked the brand image of al-Qaeda, since it suggested fearsomeness and a dark, globe-spanning power that could spit in the eye of each great Western nation, one by one. On the other hand, the Western nations could not be brought around to seeing even a shred of good in al-Qaeda. By the summer of 2014, their intelligence agencies had all but cut off the flow of weapons and cash with which they had earlier nourished the Syrian rebellion. That summer, after the day’s work had been done, when they were lounging on their pillows and scrolling through their iPads, the high command sometimes allowed me to sit with them. Though many learned men debated the question at great volume late into the night, even then it was obvious, at least to me, that the al-Qaeda brand was about to be kicked into the gutter.

“They called us terrorists/ I told them, what an honor you’ve done me.” This was the opening line of one of Jabhat al-Nusra’s most crowd-pleasing, brand-amplifying anthems. It certainly filled the rank and file with esprit de corps. It brought along the schoolkids too, as it had a catchy tune and audacious lyrics (“We destroyed the trade towers/with civilian airplanes we did it/ reduced them to dust, ahh!”) Increasingly, however, the outside world was failing to understand. Thus, that summer, whenever a media contact outside Syria rang up a commander inside the truck, whoever was closest to the stereo system made sure to kill the volume. 

Eastern Europe Is In The Crosshairs: Ukraine and Poland - Michal Kranz (Persuasion)

 Eastern Europe Is In The Crosshairs

A deal in Ukraine seems all but inevitable. That puts Eastern Europe in real danger. 

MICHAŁ KRANZ NOV 25 ∙ GUEST POST PERSUASION

Polish troops at NATO Multinational Corps Northeast, February 2, 2024. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.)

For much of the past year in Warsaw, the first question I’d be asked by Poles and Ukrainians alike when they learned I’d grown up in the United States was who I thought would win the 2024 election. The follow-up, inevitably, was whether a victorious Trump would really let Ukraine and Eastern Europe fall to the Russians.

In the day or two following Trump’s win, this fear was palpable among Polish friends and loved ones. But, after months of warnings of the apocalyptic consequences of Trump’s return to power for Ukraine and NATO’s East, a new narrative has emerged along Europe’s frontier with Russia—don’t panic, but prepare.

The likely conclusion of the war in Ukraine during Trump’s first year in office will only be the tip of the iceberg of the transformations on the horizon for Eastern Europe. States in the region, most notably Poland and the Baltics, are already looking beyond Ukraine to a scenario in which Russia might soon be ready to unleash its war machine on NATO’s East itself, which, without ironclad American security guarantees, would be more vulnerable than ever. And yet, for Eastern Europe, this tense moment offers surprising opportunities. In the absence of America’s guiding and often constraining hand, they will have the chance to redefine their own defense future, reap the rewards of the post-war economic order in Ukraine, and finally force Western Europe to confront the realities of the multipolar world head-on.

What we are looking at, in other words, is a complete shift of the balance of power in Eastern Europe. In the short term, Poland and the Baltics will have no choice but to pick up slack and assume a stronger position in Europe than they have in memory, as they stare down the barrel of a Russia that will only be further emboldened by a de facto triumph in Ukraine and the weakening of the American security blanket in Europe. Meanwhile, Ukraine is facing its worst-case scenario, with the spigot of U.S. support likely to turn itself off—forcing Europe to take the reins of Ukraine’s, and its own, defense for the first time in generations.

The chances of Trump doing an about-face on aid for Ukraine and continuing to fund its defense are, unfortunately, very slim—and Ukraine is expected to be forced to the negotiating table. European efforts, led by Poland, to continue supporting Ukraine’s military, will at best stave off the inevitable, and the Biden administration knows this. Recent changes in policy like the lifting of prohibitions on Ukraine’s use of long-range ATACMS against Russian territory and shipments of anti-personnel mines are, more than anything else, measures meant to help Ukraine secure as favorable a position as possible prior to negotiations and to give it at least a modicum of deterrence against future Russian aggression.

It goes almost without saying that any peace deal is likely to end in the permanent occupation of the territories Russia currently holds and in forcing Ukraine to abandon its NATO ambitions—in short, a win for Russia. But even then, many questions remain about how such a “peace” would be administered in practice, and how Ukraine could avoid being swallowed up by Russia down the line. The leading proposal of the Trump transition team, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, would compel Ukraine to promise not to join NATO for twenty years, while a continuing flow of U.S. armaments deters future Russian aggression and some kind of European peacekeeping force polices the demilitarized zone where the fighting has frozen. 

A proposal along those lines suits Poland well, with Polish president Andrzej Duda last year suggesting that Polish troops could be deployed to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping effort. Meanwhile, Poland is poised to benefit immensely from post-war reconstruction efforts, with 3,000 Polish companies registering with the Polish Investment and Trade Agency to participate in Ukraine’s reconstruction. Helping to guarantee Ukraine’s security on the ground does of course carry considerable risk—bringing Poland all the closer to a clash with Russia. Nevertheless, this is exactly the sort of role Polish leaders have spent years preparing the country’s military for.

The belief among Eastern Europe’s leaders is that, no matter what they do, they are in Russia’s crosshairs—and the priority must be an active defense. Leaders further west on the continent have tepidly come around to the same conclusion, with recent pledges to invest not only in national defense spending, but also in developing Europe’s military-industrial complex. There is no reason to think that Putin will be placated through a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Quite the contrary. With, effectively, a win in Ukraine behind him and a U.S. leadership unwilling to engage militarily in Europe beyond the bare minimum, Putin may well decide the time is ripe for further reconstitution of the Soviet sphere of influence. Western Europe has been inching up its readiness, with France for instance on track to bring its defense spending up the 2% GDP mark this year, but Eastern Europeans know that if Russia strikes, it will be up to them to hold the line. Poland at the moment has the third largest military in NATO, and, if Ukraine’s army was able to keep Russian forces at bay for nearly three years, the hope is that Poland’s more robust and technologically advanced military could do the same.

It is hard to overstate just how uncertain the security of Eastern Europe suddenly becomes with Trump’s election. A full-scale American retreat from NATO is less likely than widespread discussion might make it seem—the recent landmark opening of a U.S. base in Poland and efforts to Trump-proof American aid to Ukraine and NATO mean that it will be difficult for Trump to distance himself from the alliance entirely. But, with Russia updating its nuclear doctrine, firing a nuclear-capable ballistic missile at Ukraine, and last week placing the new U.S. base in Poland on its potential target list, Putin clearly believes that he has the upper hand—and that Europe lacks the will or the ability to properly defend its Eastern frontier. 

With Trump on track to alter the entire regional paradigm a few short months from now, NATO’s East is scrambling to mitigate the fallout. That puts Poland, in particular, in the hot seat and in need of not only proving its worth as a rising military powerhouse, but also of working with countries like Romania, Sweden, the Baltic states, and besieged Ukraine to collectively keep Moscow at bay. But this moment is, above all, a crucible for Europe. For decades, Western Europeans have been able to bask in the security blanket the United States offered and to indulge in pacifistic visions. That illusion ended first for the states bordering Putin’s Russia, but Europe is now facing the same fork in the road—either make security a priority and forge an independent path forward on defense, or let Putin continue to have his way.

Michal Kranz is a Warsaw-based journalist who covers Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He has reported from the ground during the war in Ukraine, covered politics and society in Lebanon, and regularly reports on regional developments from Poland.