 Good afternoon, everyone. It's wonderful to see all of you. Wonderful to see a packed room. I'm Dan Kurtz-Faelen. I'm the editor of Foreign Affairs Magazine in New York. We've got a big and important topic, the future of democracy, and a lineup that needs very, very minimal introduction. So given that, I will dispense with all that quickly, and we will get right into the discussion. I'll start with the person closest to me. We have Egl's Levitz, the president of Latvia, a position he has held since 2019. And before that, which is perhaps relevant to this discussion, he was a judge on the European Court of Justice. We then have minister Sherry Raymond, Pakistan's federal minister for climate change, and also perhaps relevant to this discussion, a former longtime journalist. I think spent about 20 years as a journalist. Then Chris Coons, a US senator from the state of Delaware. And I think fair to say one of the US Senate's most prominent voices on global issues, along with lots of areas of domestic focus in which he plays a prominent role. And then Tim Snyder, a historian at Yale, author of a slew of great books, including most recently, The Road to Unfreedom. Do I have that right? Is that the most recent book? Close, okay. You write a lot of books, so I apologize for having the order wrong. And I think fair to say, in Tim's case, in a fairly small category of people who are both truly top-flight academics, but also very prominent public intellectuals. So a great mix for this topic today. We're having this discussion at a moment when, on the one hand, we're well into the second decade of what the scholar Larry Diamond has called the Democratic Recession, Freedom House, and its most recent Freedom in the World Report. Noted that for 15 straight years, more countries have seen democracy decay, have seen deteriorations in democracy, than have seen progress. So for every year, for 15 years, more countries have gone the wrong direction in the right direction. And I think it's fair to say, certainly in the case of my own country, but also when it comes to many other advanced democracies, there's a real profound sense of democratic dysfunction to the extent that some of the core tenets of our democracy are at risk. At the same time, I think these past few months have caused at least some people to have a little bit of a sense of renewed urgency and optimism around the cause of global democracy. There's a sense of perhaps cautious optimism that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has focused minds around the problem and given a little bit more impetus to do something about it. There's certainly been a surprising vigor to the response from many of the global democracies responding to that invasion. And I noted in the trust barometer that Edelman released here in Davos this morning that they registered an increase in trust in democratic institutions, which has not been true for the past several years, which is perhaps a reflection of the ways in which Russia's brutality and ineptitude in this invasion has thrown some of the strength of those institutions into stark relief. So it's a mixed picture, but I would say the broader context is not very cheery. But before we get to the question of the future of where these things go from here, I actually want to ask each of our panelists to spend about a minute reflecting on how we've got to this point. If you look at the democratic recession these past 15 years, this sense of democratic decay, I'd like each of you to give us one minute on what explains the problem to you. And I realize we'll be painting with a very broad brush, but what are the failures of democracy over these past 15 years that account for where we are? President Levitz, let's start with you. Yeah, thank you. I think there are three main failures of the liberal democracy in the last 10, 15 years. There are ignorance of the social problems caused by globalization. There was also ignorance or misperception or mismanagement of the crisis of migration and of the crisis of cultural diversity. And there also is a third very important reason. We have now, since the new social networks, a new kind of formation of public opinion. This is not more the classical one. Democracy is based as a classical race how the public opinion is formed. And now we have no real answer to this new way of formation of public opinion. And it shows that this public way how the public opinion is formed, which is important or decisive for democracy is easily to manipulate. And this is also a new situation. And we have no real answer to that. I will mention only that the European Union has adopted draft so-called Digital Service Act, where is some responsibility of the big social platforms provided for. We will see how it works. But it's also, it's the last moment we should regulate also this issue. And this all is a basis for populism. And I see that the populism is a real danger and a real enemy of the democracy because the populism offers wrong answers to the right problems. Especially the populism is trying to destroy the democratic institutions as courts and rule of law, but also as a free press and so on and so on. And democracy cannot live without these democratic institutions. And I think we should find the right answer also to the populism. This is only a diagnosis. There is no answer how to deal with that. But then maybe we can discuss this further how to deal with that. We'll get to the answers. Let's do diagnosis first. Minister Ramon. Yeah, thank you very much. I think part of the, again, I also see three problems. But one of them is the structure of even our conversation today, which is sound bites. And that defines our level and structure of discourse, also on the social media, on television, even in my country, everywhere. So there's a cognitive disconnect with real structural debates with thinking as it used to be with the entire intellectual enterprise on which liberal democracy was based. So people want theater now. They want bread and circus and they want quick fixes. They want instant gratification. And the populist picking up from what the president said here, the populist picks that up right there. The wrong answers entirely, the inflammatory divisive answers to very real issues. The second problem I see here, and I'm glad we are recognizing that something is very really broken in all our democratic systems, is that there is little recognition of the huge inequality that's been growing, both in the West, everywhere else. And elites are being obviously targeted as unrelatable, inauthentic, unable to build the trust dividend that democracy gets powered by. So everywhere in the world. And then thirdly, and I'm sure this has been discussed hugely, I'm trying to stick to the limit here. Thirdly, there has been a growing chasm between the global south, which is not even discussed as the global south anymore, but there it is. And the West and even in, for instance, how the response, the West's response, or the international system, response to the Ukraine crisis or the humanitarian crisis there versus the humanitarian crisis, say, in Afghanistan or browner cultures or less colder climates, has been very alienating for those of us who have always taken a clear linear path, if you like, on humanitarian responses, they have to be the same for everyone, is what we grew up learning, even in Western capitals, where some of us have studied, have been privileged enough. So these three things have actually created a distance. And the core of it is, to my mind, the 1% which is all of us telling the rest of the world how to run itself and not having the empathy to be even relatable. Okay, so we have six hypotheses. We'll see if we can get to 12, Senator. Two of my match with the president. I'll simply distill down some of the ways in which the things my colleagues here observe are relevant in the United States and then externally in the United States. We've long been tolerant of high levels of inequality because of a belief in and in actuality of social mobility and opportunity. The significant reduction in social mobility in the United States. It's a complex word. Are my kids gonna do better than I am? Many, many millions of Americans felt like they're on the outside looking in, they're being forgotten. They don't have the same opportunities. First, second, to your point about migration and identity, the United States has made real progress towards acknowledging and addressing historic racial and regional and historic inequalities and mistreatment of the African-American and indigenous populations of the United States. But then by the same token that has produced this sense of grievance and exclusion and isolation, particularly among those in rural communities and particularly among those in more conservative communities. And these have pulled together in part fueled by social media and in part fueled by domestic migration patterns into a loss of a sense of legitimacy and connectedness to our role in the world and to the possibilities of our nation. 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan were broadly speaking exactly those communities that were most likely to have sons and daughters enlist in our military and fight overseas. They concluded that somehow our role in the world was less successful, less legitimate. Their future in our country was less bright and they were fed a story that ultimately really took off that undermined confidence in science, undermined confidence in experts or elites and ultimately undermined confidence in the legitimacy of the institutions that are critical for our democracy to survive. And then I'm worried that that, you know, we're obviously not the sole driver of the world but when there's something that happens in the United States like the January 6th assault on our capital and the world sees it, it shakes confidence or inspires similar activities. And so I think there are ways in which our place in the world has also undermined democracies and other places in the world. And to heal this or address this, we must look at both. Professor Snyder. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be with all of you and to see friends here. Number one, I think a core problem is the assumption which has been deeply built into this meeting among many others during the 21st century that democracy is somehow a default, that democracy comes automatically, that there is no alternative to democracy, to quote Margaret Thatcher, that history is over and democracy is all that's left. This thesis I think was broadly accepted in the late 20th century and early 21st and never had any kind of basis. That was always just silliness from the beginning. Democracy requires an understanding historically that it is one possibility among others that for the 2,500 years that we've had a history of democracy, it has always been, as my compatriot, Frederick Douglass put it, it has always been a struggle and that it must always be based upon values. As we've let the humanities go in the last 30 years, concomitantly with this belief that everything was automatic, concomitantly with this belief that history or larger forces were going to bring democracy, as we've let the humanities go, as we've let history and literature and philosophy go, we've lost the language which allows us to describe why democracy is better. So that's my first point. My second point I will echo with the oligarchy point, which has been made, I'd just like to make it in a slightly different way. For 2,000 years and more, not just left wing but conservative voices, Plato to Raymond Daron, have made the point that it's impossible to have a single conversation when there's extreme inequality of wealth. Apart from all the other problems that have been mentioned, we cannot have a single conversation about a society. We cannot have a forum, right? We cannot have a place where people can discuss if they are living completely different lives. And when the wealth is controlled not just by the 1% really, to which I'll happily raise my hand to, I am in the top 1%, but when it's controlled by the top 1% of the top 1%, of the top 1%, then it's very hard to have a single conversation. My third point is going to be generations. This trust of democracy tends to increase as people get younger, unfortunately. And there's a reason for that, which is that it's very hard when you're young to see a future. And when it's hard to see a future, it's hard to think about how deliberation and all of these slow processes are really what's going to be in your interest. So if we want to have democracy, we have to bring back a future, which means solving the hydrocarbon problem first of all. It means dealing with climate change first of all. Thanks. So let's turn to answers for 10 or 15 minutes before we go to the audience. President Levitz, let me start with you. To the extent there is a new sense of urgency around the cause of global democracy in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, what will it take to make good on it? What are the kind of key steps that you see democratic powers needing to take in this moment? And then let me put a finer point on one piece of this. Do you find the framing of global dynamics today around democracy versus autocracy as helpful in this regard? I completely agree with Professor Snyder that we lost the sense, as in the history, democracy was established only a short time, maybe 100 to 150 years, and only in a part of the world. And this sense was lost. And now with a Russian invasion in Ukraine, we have now seen that this perception, this very provincial perception, was wrong. And that means we have got more sense for the fragility of the democracy and that the freedom, the democracy, is very high value, which is worth to defend. I think this is an unintended side effect of Putin's invasion to Ukraine. But I think also that we should keep this moment and to realize that Russia is an aggressive neighbor, aggressive power, and we should defend ourselves. We should help Ukraine, but we should remind that Ukraine is fighting our fight. And there is a duty of the democratic world to support Ukraine so that Ukraine can win the war. So I see that this moment of self-awareness, which was started 24th of February, should be used in a way that we see that democracy is based on values. We have these values and we have not compromised. We should not compromise these values and therefore we should defend our way of life, this is way of life of democracy. And therefore I would say I am not pessimist, I am rather optimist, but in general I am a realist. And I see that we should, we will take this moment in order to consolidate our democracy, to consolidate the international solidarity of all democracies, as I said already, that the democracies is a state form which is valid only for a minority of the international community. And to make also democracies as a state form more visible in international politics. And therefore the initiative of President Biden to have a summit for democracy in December last year, I think it is a very good step forward so that we can more value our specific situation, our specific values, our way of life, our state form. So I think this side effect should be also taken to the whole picture about when we are looking to this war in Ukraine. Of course we should help Ukraine, it's our duty. Ukrainians should not be, should not show any gratitude to us for that, for this help because it is our duty. We are acting in our interest when we are helping Ukraine. But I think this moment is some kind of moment of awakening from illusions which we have after 1989 after this perception that the history came to the end and there would be only democracy and peace and so on. We should stand for democracy. Minister Rehmann, one thing that has shifted in the last couple of decades is the perception that democracy was good at solving problems, right? Democracy worked. And I think there's been a sense more recently that some autocratic systems without naming names here have done a better job at solving complex problems. You now work on climate change. Do you see an authoritarian advantage in addressing these kinds of problems? And how do you see in complex messy democracies any chance for progress on a problem like climate change? Well, we are not the only home of partisan gridlock, as you know, and wash my mouth out with soap and water if I suggest that authoritarian systems are better at solving anything. They may look like they solve stuff, but certainly for complex heterogeneous countries such as mine, many different ethnicities, many languages competing sort of states for resources. In that competition, the only slow, messy, unglamorous way, the vulnerable get protected. And I emphasize the vulnerable because democracy speaks to the vulnerable, in my view. oligarchies do not. And at the inflection point of values and responsibility or duty, there's been some slippage globally, certainly, and I don't want to repeat my point, but certainly in messy democracies, there are moments of great questioning. And there are, in my country, many times because we have had more of an experience with authoritarian systems than democracy. And yet the re-jigging of the social contract for our federation has always come in moments of, I would say, great glittering democracies. Those moments have passed because we ourselves and democracies, we challenge the system repeatedly. And then authoritarian governments stand to get much more aid. They stand to be seen as convenient funnels for diplomatic and other interchange. So it's a complex world, but I think that for the messier the situation, the walk away from looking for the authoritarian to solve the problem is what we have to guard against. And we're in a feedback loop on intellectual rigor being applied to any problem. Authoritarian states do not apply that because simply because they are not inclusive by the nature of that beast. And building inclusion into the world we are looking to reshape whether in Pakistan and we're in the tick of the weeds, if you like, of the problem, it needs a constant reset and it needs a constant graying of the hair is graying and the younger generation is asking, what did you fight all this for? So it's like being a woman in the world or in Pakistan, two steps backwards, one step forward or the other way around, depending. I hope the other way around. How much of your glass is full today, so, yeah. Senator Coons, you started getting out some of this in your last answer, but let's focus on the role of the United States. The U.S. has seen for decades part of its global mission as a promotion of democracy that's been tarnished for lots of reasons over the last couple of years, a couple of decades. You mentioned Iraq and other militarized examples of democracy promotion, but all of the reasons to fear for our own democracy is certainly a big part of this. How do you see the U.S. is able to play any global role in advancing democracy, protecting democracy, given where we are at home and how would you change the way we go about that, given, I think, new self-awareness when it comes to our own weaknesses? In a lot of ways, the single most important thing we can do to advance democracy globally is to advance democracy domestically. The single most important thing we can do to advance democracy domestically is actually solve problems and show that whether it's reducing the cost of prescription drugs or coming up with a bipartisan and sustainable strategy around energy security and addressing climate that we're solving problems. I don't think we did enough recognizing and celebrating the very hard work of what is the largest infrastructure investment, the biggest law, the biggest bipartisan solution set, something that's eluded to Congresses and presidents for 20 years. We partly took on an ambition that just kept growing and growing in confrontation of a wide range of problems. But if we can't deliver a response to inflation, to the cost of gas, to the cost of groceries, to a sense of insecurity and instability, crime, the border schools, your average American isn't going to vote in ways in 22 and 24 and going forward that build consensus and legitimacy and reward compromise, A, B. To your point, Professor, we just sort of took for granted that democracy would grow naturally. And so the committee I chair, the subcommittee I chair, we invest about $60 billion a year as a nation in the State Department and foreign assistance. And the vast majority of that over the last 20 years has been invested in public health. We thought that by helping people in developing countries have better access to vaccines and to clean water and to health and to combat HIV-AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis that this would inevitably lead towards more stable countries and indirectly but improve our reputation and our standing. And we have underfunded partnerships around democracy significantly. We just lost Secretary Albright, one of the great champions of democracy who led the National Democratic Institute, I have a bill. A senator always has to say I have a bill with Senator Lindsey Graham, an example of actually compromising and trying to move forward. It's a robust bipartisan renewed investment in democracy activity globally. We spend a very small amount of money on supporting civil society, on supporting protecting journalists, on supporting frankly in a digitized environment where far too many governments are using the mechanisms of elections to facilitate surveillance and repression. We have to show up. We have to be a good example ourselves. We have to show that we recognize the limitations of our own recent conduct and examples. And then we have to show up and actually partner with dozens of other countries and to the extent they welcome it, invest in the mechanisms of democracy with them. Professor Snyder, I think one of the things that most of us did not recognize about the road to unfreedom, 10 years ago to use the title of your not most recent book, one of your recent books, was that the threat would not come in the form that many of us had thought, that a lot of the real challenge would come electorally through people posing as Democrats who would represent a threat to democracy that did not look the way that it had in previous eras. Given the kinds of erosions of democracies that we've seen, especially in electoral systems over the past 10 or 20 years, what to you does that put at the top of the priority list in terms of protecting democracy? What have we learned from the erosion of the past 10 years? Okay, since we only have 18 minutes left, I just wanna make sure that I say the following thing, which is that democracy is wonderful. Good, good for you. I'm not sure otherwise that's gonna get set. Like it's wonderful, it's better than other systems, and most of our democracies would be better if they were more democratic, right, echoing the Senator, including my own. Like the problem is not too much democracy, the problem is too little democracy, even in the democracies, and that of course leads into my answer to your question, and it goes back to what I said in the introduction, that in order to run democracies, you have to have certain kinds of principles that are acknowledged, among them the rule of law. And so from in a spectrum where Hungary is somewhere here and America is somewhere here, you see, and Russia is somewhere over here, you see that democracies can be ritualized by way of contaminating the mechanisms, and so you get an extreme situation as in Russia where there is no succession anymore, no one's democracy is completely fake, or you get, you know, you're in Hungary where it's pretty much ritualized, or you're in the US where we have to worry about January 6th and a repetition of January the 6th. So to get the principles right, you have to have the mechanisms right, and that seems very important to me. The second thing I wanted to say here, echoing another remark that has been made by I think all three colleagues in one form or another. We can't do any of this without the facts. We don't know anything about global warming without the facts. We don't know anything about wealth inequality without the facts, and as Minister Rehman said earlier, we spend all of our time, you know, conjuring the best sound bites, but, and we spend all of our time thinking we're talking about the news, but we pay echoing now Senator Kuntz's remark, we pay almost no one to actually report the news. I mean, the number of actual reporters in the world is stunningly small and getting smaller all the time. And without reporters, we can't monitor the local politicians who then become the regional and the national politicians, and without the reporters, we can't actually structure the legislation to get things done, and without the reporters, and Ukraine is just a wonderful example of this, it's thanks to the reporters in Ukraine, Ukrainian and otherwise, that we actually know what's going on, right? So my big answer to this is that we don't, we have to have, there are gonna be people at the top who provide spectacle, oligarchs are always gonna win if it's about spectacle. The only way to combat that is to have lots and lots of people who are actually providing facts. So investigative reporting at home and abroad. I'm gonna do a lightning round to all four panelists and the audience, and then I'll go to questions from all of you. I'd like to hear all of you in just a few words, say whether you think, if we look at a Freedom House report 10 years from now, will it show further erosion in global democracy or gains in global democracy? Professor Snyder, I'll start with you since you're the one without the political risks here. Have I already demonstrated that? Yeah. If Ukraine wins this war, yes. If Ukraine loses this war, no. Senator? Both, a period of erosion that'll be more scary, more broad spread, more profound than we expect right now, and then a significant period of recovery in advance. Obviously the outcome in Ukraine is a critical piece of that. But in terms of response to the pandemic, to climate and to opportunity and globalization, you could have made the argument that an authoritarian state was faster or was better at delivering a response to development and economic opportunity. I don't think you can make the argument that they delivered a better response to the pandemic, particularly with regards to innovation and the public health response, certainly with response to climate. And I don't think, I think the example of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine is gonna cause a lot of folks to reevaluate whether freedom is worth fighting for and whether freedom must be fought for. And to your point, ultimately, I believe they will conclude that it's worth fighting for. I'm gonna speak as much as the men do now. Fair. All right. So, I don't think it's a zero sum here that if one pin drops, there'll be a domino and at the expense of being hugely unpopular, I think the outcomes are not linked to how the Ukraine fares in this. I think they are, but it's not existential to the future of democracy. It's not going to pave the way in one linear swoop. And secondly, I think what obviously it will change the game, it will change the way the Cold War, if there is one Cold and Hot War plays out, and it'll shrink the resources, it'll shrink global resources at a time when our attention needs to be elsewhere. And I'm not saying this because I'm Minister of Climate Change, but we are sitting in the anti-chamber of catastrophe, literally, of the apocalypse. And we are still in the historic moment of not having the intellectual imagination or the leadership needed to stand down to the vested interests that are holding back the real changes needed to make to the world and to the race to 1.5. We are well behind it and we are not going to, the vulnerable will suffer the most, but so will everybody else. And this has to be a failure of our collective leadership while we put off decisions and I quickly say that it's absolutely correct to say to my country or to everybody else, the polluters, that you need to make a transition from fossil fuels. Absolutely we can and we should and set benchmarks for it, but net zero is where it is extremely far and probably unrealizable because the developed world that leapfrogged all the stages of development, and so it should, is still emitting. And one country that shall remain unnamed, lecturing in a meeting about transiting is actually reconsidering because of their national needs. So it can't be this way, you know, big chem, big oil, big petroleum has to be faced. They have to be socially responsible and that can only be driven from forums like this. These are intrinsic to that conversation. Let me give you a 15 second two finger. As a man who only said six words. You were good. I'm just gonna add one of the reasons I think Russia has to lose is that the Russian state is a hydrocarbon oligarchy and this war is a sample of what the 21st century will look like if the hydrocarbon oligarchs get to win. Yes. President. Yeah, this war is a war of an autocratic regime against a democratic state. And this is not only a war between two states, but also between two systems, two kind of state forms. And I would say that democracy on long term has better chances and there could be some declines but in long term better chances for two reasons. The first reason is that democracy is much more attractive to the people as each form of autocracy. There is no very attractive system in the West, for example, the Chinese system. It's very little number of persons which wanted to have this Chinese system by us, for example. But with the Versa, it is really a part of population in autocratic regimes want to have democracy. And it is a very important mechanism of democracy that this attractiveness. The second is democracy is not immune against false decisions and against illusions. And we can speak about the illusions that what you said already that democracy has won for eternity and so on, it was illusion. But democracy is the only form of government of state which has a mechanism of self, which can't correct the own decisions. Autocracies cannot correct, they will fail. But democracy is a system where the corrective mechanism is included and that means despite the failures at the end this failure is normally corrected. And this, for this reason, democracy is stronger as each form of autocracy. And therefore I am after 10 years optimistic. And including that Russia will lose this war and Ukraine will win. Same question in the audience, but only yes or no and you're all required to answer. Hands up if you're optimistic about democracy in 10 years. Pessimistic? Okay, optimistic crowd. Questions, I think the first one was in the front row here. Sorry, second row here. And please identify yourself when asking a question and keep it short so we can get as many in as possible. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for this conversation. I'm the chair of the Green Party in Israel and a former member of parliament. And I think it's clear for all of us that democracy depends on ongoing work and collaboration. However, while we see populists collaborating globally very efficiently, building infrastructure together using the same words, the same vocabulary, the same rhetoric helping each other, I don't see those who believe in democratic values operating in sync in the same way. And my question to you is what do you think we can do to increase democratic collaboration internationally in order to save our democracies that are in trouble? Do you want to interrupt it to any one panelist? Mr. President, or do you want to take this one? Yeah, so I think we have now realized that democracy is fragile. And as of this new information, which we have now after this war or during this war, this is incentive to collaborate more between democracies. And you, Senator, said already that until now, United States aid was not directed to strengthen democracy. I assume that it would be now more in this direction. Yeah, so we know all that democracy is a state form which guarantees in long term the better results. And therefore, I think that we are also now aware that we should more collaborate. I said already this was that democracies should be more visible in international politics. This conference of democracies organized by President Biden, I think it is a very good point. And I assume that this year would be the next conference. I think we should have a sense of this 60 to 90 states in the world that we belong to one system which is based on the same values. And if we will strengthen this feeling of belonging to the same system, of course, it would also strengthen the democracy in the world. Any 15 second? I'll just briefly say we invest fairly heavily in legislative exchanges. And there are lots of conferences and travel and meetings. But not enough. We can and should be doing a lot more to help parliamentarians from to your point, Mr. President, democracies around the world, both those that are struggling and those that have a lot to learn from each other and those that seem better established. I think we had taken for granted that we had a lot positive to teach. Now I think we need to recognize we also have a lot to learn. But exactly those exchanges I'm intending to strengthen our investment in doing further. I just want to speak to, I think the connections are crucial in terms of both learnings and support. But democracies are inherently not linear in their experience. And people and different countries experience or navigate democracy quite differently from each other. No one size fits all. So I think we need to move away from the notion that there is one set pattern for democracy or that parliament's all work one way. The point is having tolerance for the models we all favor as long as they are representative and inclusive. I think that's what matters. May I say one word? Let me get Professor Snyder in first, one second. Younger people have to try to make democracy cool. That's right. I'm going to put that on you. And number two, although I completely take the point about the pluralism of democratic forms, the way that the bad guys try to game the systems tend to be quite similar. And so one thing I think is that parties should be looking for across national lines, should be looking for other parties to talk to, not only on ideological lines. So I'm sure you have friends who are Greens in Germany and Austria and so on. But the parties who care about democracy are not necessarily the parties that have the same outward ideological profile. So for example, Viktor Orban's party was in with the center right in the European parliament for a very long time, which caused a lot of difficulty because of a superficial ideological profile. But parties that are actually in favor of democracy and who need to trade experience about how to hold back the people who are gaming the system, they should be talking to each other. Let me go to a second row here. Thanks, Ken Roth from Human Rights Watch. There seems to be a certain schizophrenia in this conversation. It started out very pessimistic and is now turning more optimistic. And I take the point that democracy is facing serious autocratic challenge. It's not delivering. But when I look out there, actually, if you put yourself in an autocrat's shoes, I see a pretty hostile world. There have been these big pro-democracy anti-autocratic demonstrations really across the world, Hong Kong, Thailand, Myanmar, Russia, Belarus, Uganda, Sudan, Cuba, Nicaragua. I mean, it's pretty pervasive. Second, we talk about autocrats learning how to manipulate the system. But they're actually getting less good at it because they're resorting to this extreme versions where they disqualify all the opposition candidates or shut down all the media. And so they have an electoral charade, but they don't get any legitimacy from it. And then there is this tendency of learning how to band together. So you see these kind of anti-autocratic coalitions that even merged in. It didn't work in Hungary, but it did work in Czech Republic. Erdogan's facing in Turkey. It worked in Israel. It worked with Biden. And so I just, when I look there, I see something that's kind of more optimistic than at least what was initially described. Am I missing something or what do you think? Let me give each of you 30 seconds to wrap up because we're at two minutes left. So minister, why don't we start with you? I'm just saying that, look, I'm reeling at the framing of everything, of the lifeline, or lifetime, or span, or breadth of democracy as a Ukraine or not Ukraine victory conversation. I'll be very honest. The Amia Kulpa on Afghanistan or Iraq might help bridge that gap for me and many others from my part of the world. But we're still seeing democracy as the only ultimate way of life and governance, if you like. That's the only social contract that includes people and speaks to complex federations and states. Having legitimacy is crucial to that. And that's the gap that we are all having with each other or seeing with each other within country and even without. I think that needs to come back. And we need to also be very clear about speaking the language that otherizes the non-democrat, which is, right now, I don't want to be free and easy with words, they matter. But the F word is back, isn't it? The fascism word of the other one. The F word is back in our lexicon. We're seeing it everywhere in different variation and morals. And its authoritarianism is tilting very hard. It's taking a hard right towards that dark moment of shame we don't want to speak about collectively, which is fascism. And it's coming back. Professor Sander, let me go to you since you just wrote a piece called Russia is Fascist. Your response to Ken Ross's question. Well, first of all, I wanted to give you a mea culpa for Iraq, Afghanistan, and I'll throw in Syria. Thank you, yes, Syria. I was against Iraq 20 years ago. And it was one of the most harmful, not to mention, stupid things done geopolitically in the 21st century. So I'm happy to give you those mea culprits if that helps. And one of the reasons, again, why I'm against the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that I think it ought to be understood as an imperial war and in a larger framework of the history of European colonialism that makes a lot of the language easier to understand and the war easier to understand. And then I think it gives Americans a good reason to think back directly on Syria and the mistakes I believe we made in Syria. What was I supposed to be talking about, though? That's wonderful. Do you buy the optimism that the optimistic case? So I'm a historian. So I think that the possibility is always broader than we think, both negative and positive. And we might disagree about Ukraine, but I think we're at a hinge where things can go off in a lot of different directions, depending upon good or bad decisions we make in the next few months and years. Senator Koons. Ken, you cited the optimism that, for example, the peaceful revolution in Sudan brought. I am also struggling through the grim reality of the moment of a military coup and a return to a militarized government. But I take your point that across the world, across dozens of cultures, millions and millions of people want to have a hand in determining their own future. I think democracy is the best form of structuring society and the best way to make sure, as you put it, that the vulnerable are included and accounted for, that one has a self-correcting mechanism, that we have any hope of addressing existential challenges like climate change. But it's also something we are going to have to fight for. And I thought I'd delivered the mea culpa before, but I'll reinforce it. Thank you. The United States needs to recognize that we need some humility. Every year, we play a world series in which only Americans compete. Perhaps that suggests to us that maybe we need a rebranding and a re-examination of who we are and our place in the world. We have a lot to learn. Part of why I come to Davos is to hear from and learn from folks from very different cultures and countries and backgrounds. But that's also the point of our trying to learn from each other across the world. I remain optimistic about democracy. Mr. President, the last words to you. Yes, I am also optimistic because, of course, in the last decades or in the last decade, there is a decay of democracy because of the failures of democracy, of the failures of perception of the world, of the perception of reality. But as I already said, democracy is the only state form which includes also the mechanism of self-correcting. And we are now here also using this mechanism of self-correcting by this self-reflection. Self-reflection is also a characteristic only for democracies. And we are doing so. So we are correcting our failures. And then if we would correct these failures, then of course, I am optimistic. Well, we will stop there before we turn pessimistic again because we have all of our panelists. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.