Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss how Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary came to an end, why democratic institutions proved more resilient than many expected, and what lessons this holds for understanding the limits of competitive authoritarianism.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Well, Ivan, it’s always a special pleasure to have you on the podcast, but today is also a joyous occasion, because of the defeat of Viktor Orbán after 16 years of leading Hungary. It’s striking that he had such total control of Hungarian politics for a long time and now clearly lost control in the last months, and was defeated very roundly. The opposition Tisza party is going to have a two-thirds majority in parliament.
He conceded the election, something that not everybody expected. How are we to understand this moment in Hungarian politics, and what’s its relevance beyond Hungary?
Ivan Krastev: This is interesting because this is an irony of history. If you’re looking at people on the streets of Budapest, it was really very much like 1989. If you see the profile of the constituencies voting for Mr. Orbán, they very much look like the constituency of the old Communist Party. He was in power for too long, and this is also one of the reasons that he lost. In democratic politics, there is a certain type of limit. Democracy cannot tolerate governments staying for too long.
This is going to be more and more of a problem for leaders who believe they can live long and remain in good health. You remember the old dictator game, where you have a hundred dollars and you should offer the other side some money, but if they don’t accept, both sides get nothing. Scholars have discovered that if you offer the other person less than $20, they’re never going to agree.
Mounk: The idea here is this: I get $1,000 and my task is to distribute it between the two of us. You can then accept or decline. Rationally, if I give you 10 cents, you should accept—because 10 cents is better than nothing. But it turns out that people have pride and they don’t want to feel cheated. So below a certain threshold, they say, “Screw you,” even if it means they themselves lose money.
Krastev: In my view, there is something like this in democratic politics. There are certain limits beyond which people start to feel it’s too much—the idea of change, of rotation, becomes very important. What is most interesting from Magyar’s point of view is that one of the things he is going to propose as a constitutional change is that nobody can be prime minister for more than two terms, which is normally what you do with presidents. That is rotation of power, and the dynamics, in my eyes, are quite interesting.
There is a circle and an irony here that is quite striking, because everything came back to your earlier point. Revolutionaries rarely age well in power. Orbán is a case in point. As you know, he started his political career in 1989 at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the 1956 revolution. Before the reburial, all the leaders of the opposition met and decided not to raise the issue of Soviet troops in Hungary, afraid that doing so might provoke reactionary forces on the Soviet side and make the transition more difficult. Then a 25-year-old Viktor Orbán broke the taboo and said, “Russians, go home.” I mention this because in these elections last weekend, it was the 45-year-old Péter Magyar who, in the wake of leaks about elite Russian interference in the Hungarian elections, used the same phrase: “Russians, go home.” So you have this kind of cycle in which 1989 comes back.
But there is also an element here that may surprise many. When the communists left power in 1989, many of them—in places like Hungary—adopted much more liberal economic policies. In the same way, Magyar is not so different from Orbán in many of his policies. In a certain sense, Orbán may leave, but that does not mean you are going to have a wholly new foreign policy consensus or wholly new economic policies. It is very much about cleaning the system, dismantling the model, and changing the personnel. This is interesting to watch, because unlike in Poland, Magyar has a constitutional majority, so he can undertake measures that are much more radical than anything post-populist governments have done elsewhere.
Mounk: I have a couple of questions. One is about something I remember you explaining before—the evolution of Hungarian politics and politics in a number of Central European states. You argued that we sort of misunderstood the 1989 revolutions. One easy narrative about someone like Viktor Orbán is that he became a traitor to the 1989 revolution—that he ultimately turned his back on everything he stood for in 1989, and that’s why he is bent on undermining democracy, why he is against Brussels, against internationalism, and all of those things. But the way to understand 1989, you argued, is as having three different strands: a liberal, universalist, democratic strand; a nationalist, anti-imperial strand; and a religious conservative strand. We should therefore understand Central European politics not as people betraying the revolution, but as a civil war between its different strands. Orbán, as it turned out, really belonged more to the religious conservative or anti-imperialist tendency.
But how do we square that with his strange embrace of Russia in recent years? Is this simply a convenience of power? Because it is striking—as you’re saying, his entry into politics was defined by telling the Russian troops to go home. Yet by the end of his rule, he is aligning Hungary in many ways more closely with the Kremlin than with Brussels. That really does seem like a betrayal of the central promise of his entry into politics.
Krastev: You are totally right that there were all these trends in 1989, and what is interesting about Orbán is that he was dancing with all the different wings of that revolution. He entered as a liberal, but a liberal from the countryside—not a Budapest liberal. He is somebody who does not come from a political family, who does not come from a strong dissident tradition.
The major answer to your question is how he redefined what it means to be sovereign. Sovereignty for him in 1989 essentially meant getting out of the Soviet bloc, joining NATO, joining the European Union—and he was firmly in that camp. The problem came with what sovereignty meant for him within the European Union. He came to conclude, step by step—particularly after 2010, and especially after the migration crisis—that it was Brussels that was the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty. He then redefined sovereignty to mean having geopolitical options, and began investing in relations with Russia and China—China, to be honest, even more than Russia.
He started doing something quite remarkable: selling his veto in the European Union—to the Chinese, to the Russians. His importance to them derived precisely from the fact that he was a member of the European Union. He could veto sanctions against Russia. He could veto economic policies against China. Suddenly, a small country that has no geographical or other reason to be so central to European politics became pivotal.
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But his model rested on three things that were in fundamental contradiction with each other. To be successful, Orbán had to be anti-Brussels and anti-EU. At the same time, he needed European Union money, which amounted to as much as 4% of Hungarian GDP. And he needed to remain important within European politics in order to be able to sell his influence to the Chinese and the Russians. In the beginning he managed this—he himself called it a “peacock dance,” making a step in one direction, then another. But with the passing of time he radicalized and radicalized. He lost access to European money, and economic issues proved very important in his losing the elections. He also moved closer and closer to the Russians, to the extent that some of the leaked memos that emerged were genuinely humiliating for somebody who had cast himself as a rebel speaking truth to power.
And yet, here was this same Orbán trying to present himself to his voters—and to the world—as a rebel, even as Putin was reportedly telling him, “You are the lion and Trump is the mouse who wants to help you.” That destroyed the rebel image. The relationship with Trump didn’t help either.
The paradox of the elections is this: Orbán had run as the sovereign fighting globalism—that was his central platform. But he turned out to be a globalist. At his own campaign rallies, the Vice President of the United States was showing up, foreign countries like Russia were trying to help him win, and against him stood one of his former supporters who largely refused to give interviews to the Western media, who did not want to talk about big international issues, who simply said to Hungarians: “I care about you, I care about your salaries, I care about what is important in your life.” By the end of his career, Orbán had ended up embodying everything he had spent his life fighting—first authoritarianism, and at the end, globalism itself.
Mounk: To add to the irony: he changed the electoral system to benefit himself, by giving a large bonus of parliamentary seats to the party that gets the most votes under normal circumstances. He assumed the opposition would always be divided—that while he might not win outright majorities, he would always have the single biggest party. Of course, it is precisely because of that electoral system that the opposition is now going to have a two-thirds majority in parliament, and will be able to unravel some of the safeguards he put in place to keep himself in a position of influence even after losing the election. So there is one more irony there.
Krastev: What you’re saying is extremely important institutionally. All of these populist leaders hated liberal democracy because in liberal democracy, when you’re winning, you’re not winning enough. So they tried to radicalize—they came up with majoritarian systems, but as a result, every election starts to look like a regime change. That is attractive when you’re in the opposition. But suddenly you understand that you have created a system in which when you’re losing, you’re losing a lot.
It was very important that Orbán conceded so early. The margin was simply too large, and Orbán is a strong enough politician that the fact of losing the election does not change my view of him—he understood that he simply could not contest the results. Add to that the fact that two-thirds of opposition voters were people younger than 30. He could not rely on street protests on his side.
This is very important, and I say it having met both Orbán and Magyar. I had the feeling that Orbán, to some extent, was expecting what happened. But what was interesting is that many colleagues and pollsters who knew the data—who knew the opposition was doing much better—were afraid to predict the results, because they were no longer sure that Hungary was a democracy. Only in a democracy can a government lose an election, and those who lose power relinquish it peacefully. So you had this incredible schizophrenia in which people were predicting a 15 to 20 point advantage for the opposition, and yet when asked who was going to win the election, they said, “I cannot be sure.”
Mounk: What do you think the lessons of this election are beyond Hungary? One set of questions is about what this tells us about the resilience of democratic institutions. Hungary was in many ways the key example of why an older consensus in political science seemed shaky. There was an idea in the 1990s and early 2000s that once a country reaches a standard of living of about $15,000 to $16,000 of GDP per capita in today’s terms, and once it had changed government through free and fair elections a couple of times, it would basically be safe. Hungary seemed to disprove that, because it fulfilled those conditions and yet Viktor Orbán clearly made it an “illiberal democracy”—his own term, which he embraced—really undermining freedom of the press and marginalizing the opposition through all kinds of institutional tricks, pushing out institutions like Central European University from Budapest.
And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we must now say that it wasn’t an authoritarian regime. It was a kind of competitive authoritarianism, or semi-democracy, or flawed democracy, or dirty democracy—the terms proliferate—but somewhere in which the playing field may have been uneven, yet the opposition retained an ability to win elections, to displace the government at the ballot box. Which is what they did.
So should that make us more optimistic about the United States and other countries where we see strong forms of democratic backsliding? Does it turn out that truly capturing a system so thoroughly that elections become meaningless is a very hard thing to do in an affluent place with a long democratic history? Or do you think Hungary is too sui generis to jump to those kinds of conclusions?
Krastev: We cannot draw conclusions based on Hungary alone, but there are certain things we can observe. One is that if you allow people to vote, you cannot ignore the possibility that—however much you control the media, however much you control economic power, if you’re not going for outright political repression—people can decide to speak. From this point of view, the agency of the voters was very much reconfirmed.
Being in the European Union also puts certain constraints on Hungary, not least because it is a small country. I would not, for example, draw a direct comparison between the United States and Hungary when people say Trump is trying to adopt the Hungarian model. Yes, you can borrow policies, but the countries are so different institutionally—in size, in culture. Hungary, for example, is an extremely ethnically homogeneous place.
A second point: we like to talk about ideas and programs, but political leadership matters. Orbán could probably have lost in 2022 as well, had there been a strong political leader who managed to do what Péter Magyar did. In political science, we tend to favor institutional explanations and ignore the talent and the risk-taking of individual politicians. If you look at Magyar’s biography, you would never have predicted this. He was a cadre of Fidesz—there was nothing dramatic about him. The most heroic thing he had done was divorcing his wife, who was a minister under Orbán, and making public recordings about government corruption. And yet he resonated with people—precisely because he had been part of the Orbán system. A classical liberal candidate could not have done this.
On the other hand, I don’t think it would be entirely wrong to conclude from what we saw in Hungary that European right-wing populism faces a fundamental problem: it cannot win elections once it becomes the establishment. Populism in Europe was rooted in a very strong anti-establishment sentiment, and it was that anti-establishment sentiment that ultimately destroyed Orbán. Most far-right parties in Europe are not currently in power, so they are not the establishment in the way Orbán was—and that distinction matters.
The symbolism and psychological impact of this election were considerable. Orbán was also the intellectual, financial, and institutional hub of the European far right, so his fall will have very practical implications for how these parties cooperate. One impact, in my view, is that far-right parties in Europe will increasingly go their own way. This type of far-right solidarity can backfire. That is also true of the Trumpian effect.
One of the most interesting questions here is not why Orbán lost, but why JD Vance, Vice President of the United States, in the middle of a war in which he is going to be a negotiator, decided to come to Hungary and spend three days at a rally—knowing what the opinion polls were saying. In my view, there are two explanations. One is that they were treating Orbán not as an ally of the state, but as an ally of the Trumpian revolution. Magyar is not anti-Trump, he is not anti-American—so why does it matter so much? But if you see yourself and your government as a revolutionary government, you support Orbán the same way the Soviets supported revolutionary leaders in other parts of the world. The second explanation is that they believed Orbán was important for their European policy—that they wanted an East European leader who was not merely pro-Trump, but also pro-Putin. Such an explicitly pro-Putin leader is not easy to find.
Mounk: I agree that they see Hungary as a revolutionary ally. I would add the wrinkle that for the most part, the Soviet Union was the first nation with a communist revolution, and so it cared about the revolution in Vietnam, it cared about the revolution in Albania—but those were children of the revolution. When you have many children, you can split your attention and each one matters a little bit less. For the people who are trying to give some intellectual coherence to Trump—which is an impossible task—Orbán was the father. It’s not just that he was a revolutionary relative. He is an antecedent, with all of the reverence that that deserves.
Mounk: And I don’t think that Trump cares. I have no insight into his psyche, but I don’t think that Trump was sad when he heard that Orbán is out, whereas I think that JD Vance and a lot of the MAGA intellectuals probably did care, because Trump is fundamentally not an intellectual, unlike many people around him.
Krastev: What you’re saying is very important because, of all these leaders, Orbán was the only real intellectual among them. Meloni is a very good politician, but she is not going to spend her time talking to influencers and conservative professors. Orbán was still very much coming from the culture of the 1980s, when ideas mattered and when you needed certain constituencies. If you’re thinking in tweets, consistency doesn’t matter—what matters is intensity, everything in capital letters. Orbán, by contrast, wanted a classical ideology, and that probably alienated some of these people.
This raises one of the big questions for me: what is going to be the impact of these elections on the choices that new right parties in Europe are going to make? They had genuinely admired him—he was the model. And for Orbán himself, in my view, the model was Bibi Netanyahu. It was never Putin. Putin cannot be your model if you don’t have the oil and the nuclear arsenal. But for nationalists in Eastern Europe, Israel was in many ways the most successful East European country. It was ethnically defined, but it was a democracy—an ethnic democracy. It was economically very successful, with very high technology and nuclear capability of its own, and influence totally beyond its size. Most of its people were, two or three generations ago, former East Europeans. Orbán was even using Netanyahu’s consultants—not in these elections, but in previous ones.
This is the story of small countries with big dreams about their history and their role in the world, and in this Orbán occupies a league of his own in Europe—for the French far-right and others, it is different, they are a big country. But Orbán was never just interested in running Hungary. He wanted to run Europe. Paradoxically, that did not help him in the elections.
Mounk: What lessons do you think we should draw from Hungary for electoral politics? You already said that you don’t think this means right-wing populism is on its last legs, because what drives it is anti-establishment sentiment. When you’re in Hungary, after 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán, anti-establishment sentiment means you want Orbán out. When you’re in France, anti-establishment sentiment may well mean you want to vote for Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen, if she is allowed to run.
What about people who are running against populist incumbents? Do you think that, as some have argued, the lesson of Hungary is that you need to distinguish yourself on rule of law, on corruption, on actually delivering for people—but that you also need to embrace some of their political stances? Because what is striking about Magyar is not that he is the liberal, progressive alternative to Orbán. It is that he is able to eat into Orbán’s electorate by saying: “I am a conservative, I disagree with Brussels on many things, I am going to protect Hungary from immigration more than Orbán did—and by the way, I am not corrupt and I don’t have all these scandals to my name.”
Krastev: The most important thing Magyar did was the most simple thing a politician of 50 years ago would have done: he went to the people, physically. When you have been in power for a long time, even when you go to see people, you’re not really seeing them anymore. What Magyar did was simply go to villages that opposition politicians normally never visit, because they assume these villages are controlled by Orbán. He went there and he listened.
On corruption, too, he did something interesting. Normally when politicians talk about corruption, they talk about big companies, they talk about billions. But ordinary voters outside the big cities don’t think in terms of billions—billions do not exist for them. Magyar focused on corruption in the health system, corruption in things that people can actually understand. On that level, he was a very traditional politician, going to people and saying, “I am doing what you asked me to do.” But he also knew very well where the consensus lay.
The clearest example: Orbán kept trying to cast Magyar as a traditional liberal candidate, because he knows how to defeat liberal candidates. So the government came up with extremely outrageous anti-LGBT legislation, expecting Magyar to jump up and protest the way opposition candidates before him always had. He could have done so—500,000 Hungarians protested the legislation—but Magyar said nothing. He said, “This is not my priority.” That is precisely why Orbán found him so difficult to deal with: Magyar stayed focused on the core issues.
There is another dimension that matters for anyone running against a populist incumbent: it is not easy to tell voters who have been supporting that incumbent for years that they share the blame for the system. Magyar managed to make victims of them—just as he made a victim of himself. He said, “I was one of you. He cheated us. We believed we were doing something good.” He was the honest insider who said, “He cheated all of us—we didn’t sign up for this.” Suddenly people felt innocent. Suddenly they were victims of the regime rather than participants in it. As a result, 500,000 fewer people voted for Orbán in these elections—he bled his core voters. It wasn’t simply that Magyar mobilized more opposition votes; he also collapsed Orbán’s base.
Then there is the generational dimension. Almost two thirds of voters under 30 voted for Magyar, because he knows how to speak to that generation. There is something generational about the charisma of political leaders—it is very difficult to remain charismatic across different generations over a long period of time. Orbán’s charisma simply did not work on younger people. He is a good speaker, he had worked well with crowds, but a new generation came that did not find his jokes funny, did not find his references mobilizing. That generational dimension, I think, is also very important.
Mounk: A lot of the time, previous political moments prized different things. In the 90s and early 2000s, the medium prized the sound bite. There were news cycles, you needed to dominate each one, and the way do that was to have the right 15-second clip on the evening news. People like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were masters of that. This moment prizes authenticity. It matters much less than it used to whether you say what people agree with, as long as they feel that you are honest, that you are being yourself. That means a lot of young people who have grown up in this environment find it easier to adapt, while older people who were raised in the age of the sound bite and who have been in office for a very long time find it harder. Though, of course, there are some older people who play very well in this age of authenticity—Bernie Sanders is an obvious example.
Viktor Orbán is an interesting case in this regard. Say what you will about him—he clearly was willing to be honest about his beliefs in many ways, to go against the mainstream and challenge people. All of that could have given him an appeal to young people. But I wonder whether in the end the hypocrisy got too much. The opposite of authenticity is hypocrisy. When you’re claiming to stand up for the Hungarian nation threatened from outside, but you’re cutting deals with Putin, at some point—even if you’re a good speaker—the tension between what you claim to be doing and what you’re actually doing gets too big to preserve authenticity. People start to think you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth, and charisma doesn’t save you. Trump says whatever he thinks, he’s deeply corrupt, but he never talks out of both sides of his mouth. That is not the right description of what he does.
Krastev: You’re right, and this is very important. The problem with Orbán is that he stayed in power for so long that he really became a king. He moved the government to the old palace, and you can see that he became the symbol of power itself, such that people stopped seeing the person. He put on extra weight—everything that comes with aging—and to some extent that added to his troubles. Suddenly they could not see the person anymore.
His rebel story worked when he was seen as one man against everybody. But when Trump came along, Orbán became the ally of the strongest player in the game, and pretending to be a victim all the time—young people didn’t buy it. There is also something about his brand of conservatism that worked against him. He is conservative in the way an old man is conservative, and old men who are conservative rarely have much tolerance for the next generation—how they look, what they believe. He became a kind of disapproving old uncle, and that cost him with younger voters.
What he is going to do now is, for me, a very interesting question. If the law limiting a prime minister to two terms in their career passes, Orbán cannot become prime minister again. That law will have strong popular support—Magyar is young and will clearly embrace the constraint himself, and that will appeal to people. So how does Orbán position himself? Does he simply become a bitter figure, somebody like Berisha in Albania, spending whatever remains of his political life fighting the people who drove him from power? Or does he try to carve out a role as the intellectual leader of the European new right?
Then there is the question of his relations with Trump and Vance. Are they going to see what they did as a mistake? Are they going to forgive him for losing? Because Trump is not famous for his tolerance of losers—and unfortunately, that is how Orbán looks right now.
Mounk: Perhaps Orbán can become a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute on the West Coast and enjoy some Californian sun. But I want to make sure that we talk about the broader world. We are recording this on Monday, April 13, as the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is beginning. It is too early for us to know how that blockade is going to play out in military terms. Help us think through this extraordinary war that has now been going on for months. What sense can we make of how America got into this war and whether it is going to be able to get out of it? How is this changing the world?
Krastev: I am not a specialist on the Middle East, and I do believe that modesty is quite important—these days we try to pretend that we understand everything. But there are three or four things that, precisely as a non-expert, make a strong impression on me.
One is that part of the problem with this war was the previous special operation in Venezuela. It worked too easily, too well. In the same way that nobody is going to fully understand what was in Putin’s mind in 2022 without knowing how he experienced the annexation of Crimea—how easy it was, how glorious it felt—something slightly similar happened with Trump. There were of course other factors: the Israeli factor, and his personal history with Iran. If you go back to Trump’s biography, his politicization very much coincided with the hostage crisis in 1980, and so Iran has always been important to him. There is also his obsession with nuclear weapons—he wanted to be the one who solved that. But then you have a war in which it was never very clear what success or failure would look like.
This is where something important for political scientists comes in. Trump does not have an understanding of a regime as an institution. For him, a regime is simply the leader and his friends—because that is also how he understands the American system. So when Israeli intelligence told him that in one day they could kill the Ayatollah and some key commanders, he believed that was regime change.
There are two things about this that will stay with me and that are not discussed enough. The first is how the decision by the Americans and the Israelis to kill a leader—and particularly a religious leader—is going to affect the behavior of others. What I follow in discussions on the Russian side is many people are now saying: why are we not doing this, why are we not targeting key Ukrainian commanders? We are creating a wholly different understanding of what constitutes permissible conduct in war.
The second is what you do when you don’t know what to do. Here I think Trump is doing something that was beautifully described to me by Stephen Holmes, drawing on the ideas of Niklas Luhmann—the great German sociologist—who asked what it means to be powerful. Power, in his conception, is the capacity to offload your problems onto others. What is the blockade? You don’t want to risk a military operation, you’re not prepared to lose people. So you make the problem much bigger. Your problem becomes a Chinese problem, an Indian problem, a European problem, because the oil is not going to move. Oil prices will rise so sharply that others are forced to solve your problem for you. That is a wholly different understanding of what power is—the power to make a problem bigger, to make your problem everyone else’s problem. The blockade is really going to hurt others much more than it is going to hurt the United States.
Mounk: The blockade is a fascinating piece of tactical thinking. Trump is often capable of tactical brilliance, and sadly he often completely lacks strategic vision. We went into this war assuming, first, that the real goal—toppling the regime—would be relatively easy to achieve. That obviously turned out to be wrong. We assumed, second, that there was an easy exit plan: we start this war, we can stop this war, we throw a bunch of bombs, we destroy a lot of Iranian military capacity, we degrade the nuclear program, and hopefully the regime topples. That would have been an incredible outcome. If not, we stop the bombardment, come to some kind of ceasefire, and get out when we choose.
Neither assumption held. Iran was able to impose costs on its neighbors through sustained bombardments—not just of Israel, but of the UAE, the Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia—and mostly by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The administration found itself in a very serious bind. The logic of the blockade is: you think you have leverage because you’re blocking our ships from getting through the Strait of Hormuz—we’re going to get leverage over you by blocking all ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz.
Part of what makes this work is that you need to be ruthless enough, and perhaps crazy enough, not to care too much about the consequences. This is where the schoolyard bully dynamic comes in—Trump is many things, including a schoolyard bully, something he has been since he was a very small child. Part of what gives a schoolyard bully his power is that he is impervious to consequences. If you know that the boy threatening you at recess cares about being reprimanded by teachers, or cares about being thrown out of school, you have a kind of protection—you can think, “I’m not going to give you my lunch, because if you beat me up, you might get expelled.” A lot of the power of a schoolyard bully comes from the credible signal that he is crazy enough not to care what the consequences are.
Trump can project that he doesn’t care much about the consequences of this blockade—in part because the U.S. is now basically energy independent, so the real impact on America is much more limited than on other countries. But also in part because he doesn’t care about American alliances with Europe, East Asia, and other places where the blockade is going to have the biggest economic impact. That is a consequence previous American presidents would have worried about. Trump is a lot less worried about it, and that gives him a lot more power.
Krastev: There are three other elements here that are very important. One is that Trump believes that to be powerful means that you can do what you want. We normally know that this is not the case—that power is very much based on the constraints you operate within.
The second is the timeframe in which he works. People like to compare Putin and Trump, but when it comes to timeframes, these are two of the most different people you can imagine. Putin thinks in centuries—consulting the dead Russian tsars on what to do in Crimea, reading 19th-century books and manuscripts to decide his next move.
Mounk: There’s a famous Tucker Carlson interview where Carlson asks him one question and Putin starts in the 12th century and goes for 45 minutes.
Krastev: For Putin, the 12th century is as relevant to the conversation as what happened yesterday. Trump, on the other hand, cannot imagine anything longer than four weeks. Every time he uses timeframes, it is either something he is going to do in one day, two weeks, or four weeks—he thinks in weeks. He is never going to say, “In two years we are going to do this,” particularly when it comes to conflicts. As a result, he cannot imagine something going on for a long time. That kind of time-framing—how you manage time—is critically important.
The third element is that he also became a victim of not understanding the power of words. He was so good with words, and he managed to mobilize this idea of civilizational destruction. The Iranian regime is genuinely unpopular—it is really awful, and many Iranians wanted to get out of it. But the moment somebody starts talking about destroying your civilization, there is no longer any language available to defend what the Americans are doing, if you are Iranian. This is very different from the Cold War. During the Cold War, American governments tried to claim the cultural tradition of the other side as their own ally—you talked about the Soviets and claimed that Pushkin was your ally, that Tolstoy was your ally, that you were on the side of their culture against their regime. For Trump, that does not exist.
This creates a very strange situation that helps explain why Europeans are not joining. Technically, of course, it is not easy for them to do so. But beyond that, they understand that everyone facing Trump is also facing a question of identity—who are we? The British, who are very much hurt by what is happening, the French—everyone is now using Trump simply to tell others who they are. There is no real relationship with Trump anymore, only a theatrical one. That theatrical nature of power on the Trumpian side is going to create a very serious problem for any future American president, Republican or Democrat—the problem of how to restore meaning to the words that carry weight in politics.
Mounk: This relates to a broader question I’ve been asking myself. When Trump won re-election and was moving very fast in the first couple of months of his administration, it felt as though the old order had collapsed and any hope of restoring it seemed deeply naive. Trump is clearly making big changes in the world, including this reckless war in the Middle East. But his ability to impose his vision on the United States—and in many ways on the world—is being revealed as very limited.
He has not transformed American culture. He has degraded it in various ways, but he doesn’t enjoy nearly the dominance over American culture that Viktor Orbán enjoyed in Hungary for a good number of years. A lot of his institutional initiatives are running aground. They wanted to either transform or destroy higher education in the United States. I know from conversations with university leaders that life is certainly not easy for the top American universities at the moment, and there is some genuine damage being done, but I don’t feel the difference day to day at Johns Hopkins, where I teach. For all of the protestations, I don’t think professors at Columbia or Harvard do either—if you are a faculty member at one of these universities, you are not worried about criticizing Donald Trump. On the contrary.
So what does that do to the old order? There are clearly parts of it that are going to be impossible to reestablish. There may be others that return relatively to how they were before. Or perhaps we have to wait for the truly world-historical figure who is able to leave the old order behind and put something new in place—and we are still in what Gramsci would call the interregnum, that strange long moment where the old has died and the new cannot yet be born.
Anyone who thinks we can simply turn back the clock and return to the Obama years is completely wrong. But the birth pangs of a new order—the impossibility of actually putting something different in place, rooted partly in the incompetence and anti-intellectualism of Trump, and partly in the strength the old order still retains in certain ways, even as it is clearly on its last legs—that is also an important factor. So how does this movie play out?
Krastev: One year after Trump came to power, the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted opinion polls in 11 European states and a number of major countries beyond—Brazil, the U.S., Turkey, India, South Korea. The view of Trump had of course changed—he had lost support here and there. But the biggest change was not about Trump at all. Suddenly, after one year of Trump, in every single country, a majority or plurality of people declared that they expected Chinese influence to increase over the next decade. What is even more important, China had stopped being perceived as threatening.
I believe one of the things Trump did was to dismantle a crucial distinction that the old order was based on—not a distinction of power, but of legitimacy. We knew that China was powerful, economically impressive and admirable in certain ways, but we maintained the distinction that there was something wrong with their political system, that we didn’t want to live there. What Trump managed to do was to create a world in which power is the only currency of identity.
If there is something you can call a Trump doctrine—not about any particular place, but about the world as a whole—it is not that he sees it as a clash of great powers. He sees the world more like Greek mythology: there is one supreme figure, Agamemnon, and then there are other powerful figures—the Chinese, the Russians—and then everyone else who basically doesn’t matter. This is a hierarchy without order. He constantly expects others simply to demonstrate that they know how powerful he is. In doing so, he has deprived America of everything that is not an identity based on raw power.
He is not even a conservative leader, if we’re being honest. In his world, migration is the most important issue—and yet his major allies are the Gulf countries, where migrants make up 80% of the population? This lack of any real political conviction, where everything reduces to “I am powerful and you should treat me accordingly,” creates a very real vulnerability. Everyone else is trying to do only one thing: tell him that he is not as powerful as he believes. That is what the Iranians did. He was right that the destruction of Iran has been incredible—but they said, “You destroyed us, but you cannot change us. You are not as powerful as you believe.” Europeans are telling him the same thing.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ivan discuss whether Trump has a future, and the European identity crisis. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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