Edward Luce refuses to write the obituary of Western democracy. The Financial Times chief U.S. commentator told Clearer Than Truth co-hosts George Bogden and Nathan Kiker that even after nearly a decade of democratic decline, “it is never game over.” His appearance on the podcast turned into a tour through Brexit, the failed bet on China, the return of nationalism, and the strategic mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski, guided throughout by the archival curiosity of George Bogden and the pointed questions of Nathan Kiker.

Nine years after The Retreat of Western Liberalism

Nathan Kiker opened by revisiting Luce’s 2017 book, which he had found alarming when it first appeared and more prescient with each passing year. Luce recalled that his publishers wanted to title it The Collapse of Western Liberalism, and that he refused then and would refuse now. The world has moved further down the road toward a climate friendly to authoritarians, he conceded, yet the story isn’t one of steady defeat.

For every two steps back, he argued, there is a step forward. He pointed to the electoral defeat of the Law and Justice party in Poland, to an Italian government under Giorgia Meloni that governs less harshly than feared, and to strong small-d democratic pushback in recent American off-year elections. The contest is too often declared over by publishers and headline writers, he argued, and that instinct should be resisted.

What George Bogden saw in Oxford

George Bogden brought a firsthand vantage to the discussion. He was finishing his doctorate at Oxford at the time, traveling back and forth across the UK, and he had made a point of knowing people outside the university’s affluent circles. He described his astonishment at how badly his own department misread Brexit voters. Colleagues assumed, he recalled, that the only people who would vote to leave were those who “didn’t like repeating their order at Pizza Express.” That gap between elite perception and popular anger, George Bogden suggested, foreshadowed a similar misreading in the United States.

Luce agreed that Brexit has curdled into regret, with comfortably more than 60% of Britons now favoring a return to European membership. Return isn’t likely, he cautioned, because Nigel Farage’s Reform party now leads the polls, and because leaving the EU never delivered on immigration. Inflows in fact doubled. He called that a time bomb set beneath centrist parties in an era of low growth.

Where the elites went wrong on China

Nathan Kiker asked what the governing class got wrong around 2000, when trade deals were reshaping the global economy. Luce fixed on the conclusion of China’s WTO accession negotiations, and on the triumphalism of the English-speaking world in that period. The assumption was teleological, he said, a belief that every country had boarded the same escalator toward liberal democracy and would eventually arrive where the West already stood.

The terms offered to China resembled those given to South Korea and other tiger economies. The error, in his view, was ignoring scale: China is 20 times their size, and deserved to be treated as a different kind of problem entirely.

George Bogden, Isaiah Berlin, and the return of nationalism

Drawing on his work as an archivist, George Bogden described finding an Isaiah Berlin essay in the Clinton Library, tucked inside the personal papers of speechwriter Robert Boorstin. Written as the Cold War ended, the essay warned that intellectual elites were building a Tower of Babel and underestimating the force of resurgent nationalism. George Bogden asked whether that blind spot persists.

Luce recognized the pessimistic, war-forged liberalism of Berlin, “the skunk at the party” in a decade that believed history had ended. He introduced the term oikophobia, fear of one’s own people, as the mirror image of xenophobia, and named it as the justified suspicion many voters hold toward a globalist elite. The European Union, he added, suffers a democratic deficit rooted in its many languages, which makes a single democratic conversation nearly impossible and leaves Brussels easy to caricature as remote.

Brzezinski and the question of the last grand strategist

The conversation turned to Luce’s 2025 biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Zbig. Brzezinski had identified the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet Union in the captive nations chafing under a Russian yoke, and spent his career weaponizing that grievance through human rights and peaceful engagement. America is different, Luce said, a federal republic built on a creed rather than blood and soil. His worry is that the creed itself is now contested, and that the country has split into what he called “two republics” that increasingly regard each other with contempt. The dissident legacy that shaped Brzezinski’s Cold War also gets its own hearing in a conversation on Soviet dissidents as a strategic lens.

George Bogden matched the biographer’s material with his own reading of Brzezinski’s papers at the Library of Congress, describing how the strategist understood the United States as a “tribe of tribes” and mobilized Polish American communities to push for NATO expansion against the early caution of Strobe Talbott. He also raised the diaries of General William Odom, the lone general who testified to Congress that the Iraq War would be a catastrophe while serving as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Was Brzezinski, George Bogden asked, the last grand strategist, or does the foreign policy establishment simply no longer tolerate apostates who think at that scale?

Luce called it a chicken-and-egg problem. A bipolar world made grand strategy easier to practice, he said, while the multipolar world he dubbed “the revenge of geopolitics” is more dangerous and far harder to theorize. Sharp minds still exist in abundance. The demand for them, he argued, has collapsed. Deterrence in that more volatile order is the throughline of an earlier conversation on nuclear deterrence and strategic ambiguity.

Where do we go from here

Nathan Kiker pressed for a path forward. Luce declined to offer a tidy prescription at a moment when, in his assessment, the institutions of the constitutional republic are under assault and Congress has abdicated its role. Removing Trump he described as a sine qua non for restoring broad-based democratic prosperity, paired with a Democratic Party willing to revisit first principles. He drew a parallel to Britain’s Labour Party, which holds power yet “doesn’t seem to know why,” even as Farage waits in the wings.

He closed on a sober note about artificial intelligence, which he expects to deepen the inequality that fed populism in the first place. History suggests that moments of such inequality and public distrust end in war or revolution, both of which he fears. The task, as he framed it, is to find another way out using the democratic culture that still remains.

The full episode is available on Clearer Than Truth, the foreign policy and national security podcast by George Bogden and Nathan Kiker.

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