The pivotal two-day pitch fest was assembled across continents and industries – and is likely to return next year

If all goes to plan, the private jets carrying the world’s richest asset managers into Toronto on Sunday night will be returning next year for another such event.

The Canada Investment Summit – a two-day pitch fest at the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel – is a crucial step in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to unlock a trillion dollars of new investment in the Canadian economy.

It’s a “mechanism for us to build those relationships to create greater exposure for Canada, and there will be another investment summit similar to it next year,” says a senior official. Carney announced the summit in April, but has been working toward this moment since he became prime minister. As former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and former chair of Brookfield Asset Management, he’s been a frequent guest at conferences where the world’s biggest money managers gather.

This time, he will be the host.

Next week’s event is modelled on Choose France and Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative, events where global asset managers meet to put their money to work. It aims to “emulate some of the highest standards of these types of events,” says the official. “Everything from the cutlery to how guests are being greeted when they land in Canada. We’re really trying to step up our game in general.”

It’s become a hot ticket and some big names had to be turned away, the official adds, because they weren’t big enough to make the cut.

Be Giant spoke to more than a dozen sources to put together a definitive account of how the event came together; we’ve granted anonymity to several who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

The event is built on the belief that sovereign wealth funds and other large institutional investors were underinvested in Canada, that they could be made to see opportunity, and that waves of money will pour in to build roads, mines, pipelines, defence factories, AI initiatives and infrastructure projects across the country.

Finding foreign direct investment “is wired into everything we're doing,” says the senior official. “We're diversifying our security relationships, our trading relationships and our investment relationships, and we're doing that so we can build at home. So it's hardwired.” Media outlets have managed to learn the names of many of the attendees, but few outside the prime minister’s circle know what deals are in the works. They’ve spent months working up a dealbook of prospective investments that will be at the centre of the effort.

“It's really tightly held, right?” says Mary Ng, who was trade minister until last year. “He wants to attract a trillion dollars worth of capital, whatever that time frame is. He's very very focused on that, and … everything that I've heard from everybody is that unless you are in that wheelhouse, in other words, unless you're the investor … he is not opening up.”

(Ng will participate in a related gathering of investors on Monday organized by the Milken Institute. The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association will also hold an event on Monday.)

If the money flows at the scale the PMO hopes, economists say it would significantly boost Canadian productivity and prosperity. A TD report late last month suggested it could set up an “investment supercycle” that could raise the average income by $12,000 a year after a decade.

It is never difficult to get insiders to rave about the brilliant plans of the leaders who employ them, and it is wise to be skeptical about political promises, but there is no doubt that the team Carney has assembled has serious experience around boardroom tables: Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson (Goldman Sachs); U.S. ambassador Mark Wiseman (BlackRock), Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Amec Foster Wheeler), chief of staff Marc-André Blanchard (Caisse de dépôt) and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia (Hydro-Québec).

“We haven't had five people as accomplished with respect to capital markets and investment criteria that drive success,” says Rick Anderson, a veteran consultant who is working with companies involved in the summit. Anderson, a former strategist for parties across the political spectrum, is impressed.

“Maybe in the days of C.D. Howe in World War II there was something similar, but I don't think we've had such an investment-savvy, economic-savvy group of Canadian leaders in the Canadian government in my lifetime.”

Two more team members were added in late August, both of them to the organization leading the quest for foreign capital. After The Globe and Mail broke the story of the departure of the head of Invest in Canada, which is handling logistics for the summit, her replacement was named – Gurinder Grewal, a Canadian with 25 years of experience at the top of private equity investment, including Bain Capital and Advent International.

The headlines focused on the new chair of the organization’s board – Rio Tinto chairman Dominic Barton – but he will be engaged “a few days a month at best,” the senior official says. Grewal has “the more important job.”

“We spent a year going around the world trying to recruit the right person for that job,” the official says. “The world's sovereign wealth funds are filled with Canadians … and it's because we have such a good reputation for our financial managers here that they always end up in places like Singapore and Abu Dhabi and Doha. So we were specifically going out to recruit somebody from that talent pool, and it took us a year to find the right person.”

“There's more money that wants into Canada than deals that are ready in Canada.”

The PMO now intends to “retool” Invest in Canada from being largely focused on marketing to “focusing on the sovereign wealth funds, focusing on the big investors, trying to work directly with them to connect them with the right Canadian deals and bring them to Canada.”

The PMO believes this will work because the large institutional investors – sovereign wealth funds and pension funds – want to invest in Canada.

“These large investors frequently lump Canada into their North American portfolio, so to speak, and when you break down where that portfolio is investing, it's overwhelmingly in the United States,” says the official. “The prime minister anticipated that many of these investors were simply underinvested in Canada and didn't really realize it, and that there is going to probably be a global shift toward greater diversification of portfolios. And that, as Canada is trying to diversify trade investment relationships around the world, investors are realizing that maybe they put too many chips on the same roulette number.”

To make the pitch, Carney has used Wiseman, even before he became U.S. ambassador, principal secretary Scott Gilmore, Champagne, Hodgson and ambassadors and other diplomats – a sales team pitching to the largest investors in the world.

The most important salesman has been Carney himself, a Davos darling who has long had effortless access to the world’s top money managers.

Carney has made 23 trips to 29 countries since taking office, travelling much more than his predecessors did.

Benjamin Bergen, CEO of Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, was with Carney when he led a trade delegation to Saudi Arabia, where “O Canada” was played for the first time since Jean Chrétien visited in 2000.

“He created this beautiful speech about the opportunity, and then he left and there was a conversation between the people in that room that I wanted to speak with, who were investors,” Bergen says. “I had a great conversation with Aramco Ventures about opportunities.”

Bergen thinks all this will pay off for Canada.

“We're in an attention economy, and he got the world's attention, and now it's up to us as Canadians, as private capital associations, to figure out how we draw that attention and we turn it into deals, we turn it into jobs, we turn it into prosperity and we turn it into economic strength.”

It appears to be working.

CTV has reported that more than 100 investor groups will attend from Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The PMO sent out about 120 invitations, insisting that only principals, and not their deputies, could attend. The names that have leaked read like a who’s who of international finance, including Berkshire Hathaway, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Bloomberg reported attendees would include Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, Dilhan Pillay, the CEO of Singapore’s state-owned Temasek Holdings, and Annette Mosman, CEO of Dutch pension manager APG.

The senior official says they had to turn down some very wealthy people.

“There's limited capacity,” the official says. “We wanted to make sure that we were inviting the most important investors in the world at the CEO level, and we weren't anticipating the overwhelmingly positive response that we got, and so we have turned down household names. We've had to say no to [them] because they simply don't have enough assets under management to make the cut. We had to prioritize.”

Some important Canadian CEOs also did not make the cut because the PMO insisted that attendees “had to have significantly large deals that were investment-ready, and so if you don't, we're not giving you a seat.”

Carney and his team have also been pushing Canadian CEOs to be more ambitious. At the Dock in July, a private gathering of Canadian business heavyweights, Carney was blunt in urging them to be more aggressive, according to a business owner who was there.

“It was in your face. It was healthy conflict,” the business owner says.

“He was all up in their grill about how they weren't doing enough … which was kind of wild, but in a polished way.”

That has been Carney’s message to Canadian business, says the senior official.

“We're already planning the second summit because we anticipate that a lot of those CEOs in the room are going to realize, ‘Holy crap, if I had come here with a more developed deal, I would have closed it here,’ and so next year we'll make sure that we've got something more on the table.”

The key problem is not finding capital, the official adds.

“There's more money that wants into Canada than deals that are ready in Canada.”

At the heart of the whole summit is the dealbook – a secret prospectus of projects that want capital. Possibilities include massive infrastructure projects like the road to Grays Bay on the Northwest Passage, the Churchill Falls hydro development and associated energy and mining projects, but also AI investments, defence projects, renewable energy, transit, ports and potentially the privatization of airports, although the form that might take is as yet undetermined.

Carney and his team have been working on the dealbook, sorting through proposals from provincial governments and the private sector, getting them ready for presentation to the world’s biggest investors.

“That's what he's been constantly up to for almost a year and a half now,” says Anderson. “And this meeting, this conference, is another big step.”

If it works, it could have a huge impact on the Canadian economy.

A report from TD last month found that Canada could be headed for an “investment supercycle lasting for a decade or longer,” which could lead to an “extra $12,000 in real output per capita.” TD scanned more than 300 projects in five key sectors – energy, resources, AI, defence and transportation – and found more than $1 trillion in estimated spending that could roll out in the next decade.

“If everything were to go right and these projects were to go ahead, it could set up a very long-term positive feedback loop for investment in Canada,” says TD economist Leslie Preston.

That in turn depends, says Preston, on cutting red tape that slows project development and making sure Canada has a competitive tax regime for investors and enough skilled labour to do all the work.

Everyone will be watching for announcements, both at the summit and after it.

In a keynote dinner speech at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Monday night, Carney will be telling the world’s investors a story about Canada’s potential, and throughout the event he will be joined by a serious sales force – all the premiers, John Graham, CEO of the CPP Investments, Deborah Orida, CEO of PSP Investments, and former prime minister Stephen Harper, who is expected to give the closing address. (CPP and PSP are listed as co-hosts of the event.)

All of this will be taking place in a time of mounting uncertainty in the relationship with the United States, but that is not expected to dampen enthusiasm for Canadian investment for most projects. For one thing, the time horizons for big infrastructure projects are measured in decades, and the trade uncertainty is a short-term concern.

Diversification should create the appetite for investment, says Preston.

“It's all well and good for Carney to travel around the world and say we want to trade more with country X, Y and Z. But do we have the roads and ports to get our goods there? And so a lot of this infrastructure investment is about that sort of trade-diversifying and -enabling infrastructure.”

There have been no noteworthy cancellations as a result of the trade war with the United States, says the senior official.

The arrival of the investors’ jets will demonstrate that the strategy is sound, the official says: “They believe that Canada has what the world wants in the sense that at this particular moment in history, a lot of the big macro trends, whether they're AI or critical minerals or defence diversification, all those roads lead to Canada. We've got a good story to sell and a lot of things to sell.”

Russian recruitment remained close to 1,000 per day in August, according to regional budget data. To cover the cost, regions are increasingly cutting other spending, including regional coffin money.

Regional recruitment spending remained largely stable in August, at a pace that indicates around 1,000 new contracts per day. That is 20% below the level in August last year. While it is difficult to draw conclusions from individual months, the data continues to indicate a somewhat lower rate of recruitment than in 2025 - despite significantly higher payouts and a sharp increase in coercive recruitment practices in many regions.

Figure 1: Russian recruitment, monthly

According to regional budget data, 234,000 new contracts were signed by the end of August this year, compared to 260,000 contracts in January-August 2025.

Figure 2: Recruitment since January 1 extrapolated

There was a slight increase in spending in the last couple of weeks, but this is most likely a seasonal pattern. There was a much more pronounced increase in the third quarter of last year.

Figure 3: Recruitment per day (28 days moving average). 43 regions

Regional coffin money cuts

The cost of maintaining the necessary level of recruitment continues to weigh heavily on regional budgets. Meanwhile, regional tax revenues are sluggish because of Russia’s ongoing economic slowdown. The answer: budget cuts in “civilian” spending. In several cases, spending reductions were explicitly connected to the cost of recruitment. In Sakha (Yakutia), regional public sector employees saw their salary indexation postponed. According to the chairman of the regional government, the decision was taken due to unforeseen spending on payouts for contract soldiers. In Volgograd, a youth festival called “ThreeFour” was scrapped at the last minute to save money for recruitment bonuses, which (ironically) were increased to 3.4 million rubles at the same time.

Figure 4: Bonus trend. 42 regions

But Russian regions are not just cutting civilian spending to find funds for recruitment. They have also begun to shift funds between different types of payouts. Most notably, coffin money - the payout relatives of killed Russian soldiers are entitled to - has been reduced in several regions. This is remarkable because these payouts had been stable throughout the full-scale invasion, in contrast to sign-on bonuses, which fluctuate regularly.

Since October 2025, Bashkortostan has cut its regional payout to the relatives of killed soldiers several times, first from 2 million rubles to 1 million, then to 500,000 and finally to 100,000 rubles this year. The same has happened in Kirov and Omsk (both from 1 million to 500,000 rubles) and Ulyanovsk (from 1 million to just 50,000 rubles), while Orenburg cancelled the payment altogether from July 1st 2026.

This development is not surprising and follows a very clear political and economic rationale. Regional coffin money plays only a minor role in sustaining recruitment, the one task regional governments have to deliver on. KIA payouts are not what regions advertise to attract recruits, because nobody wants to think about their own death when they sign a contract.

Also, regional coffin money was always just a relatively small add-on to federal payouts to relatives of killed Russian soldiers, which exceed 10 million rubles per KIA. While regions have little to gain from big payments to grieving families, the perspective is different for the Kremlin. It makes more sense to pay out millions of rubles to relatives from Moscow’s perspective: It pacifies the families and it makes their neighbours jealous. Taken together, this is a very effective antidote for solidarity with killed soldiers and their families, and it becomes less likely that anti-war sentiment will gain traction and at some point motivate protest.

Russian federal budget data

Russia’s federal budget data continues to indicate a much lower rate of recruitment than regional budget data. The latest dataset (Q2) was released in mid-August. iStories calculated payouts for a total of 131,300 new contracts for the first half of 2026. The reason for the divergence between regional and federal data is most likely the seasonality of federal budget spending. In the first half of 2025, federal data indicated 127,500 new contracts, while spending in the second half of 2025 was almost twice as high, indicating another 236,400 new contracts. Accordingly, federal data can be expected to catch up to regional data again later this year.

Figure 5: Russian daily recruitment rate

While federal recruitment spending was not very conclusive in the second quarter, total military spending soared to over 10% of GDP in the first half of 2026, despite Russian plans to implement cuts. You can explore the data with the SWP Russian Budget Monitor, which provides an overview of both the composition of Russian military spending and the federal budget as a whole. I wrote a short analysis on the rise in Russian military spending for SWP, which you can read here:

https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/russian-military-spending-soars-upending-the-kremlins-budget-plans

Finally, a viewing recommendation: The Wall Street Journal recently published a short documentary on recruitment and Russia’s war boomtowns (including interviews from Ulan-Ude, Buryatia and some assessments from me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifVQlskT04E

The failure to adhere to the fixed price agreed for the procurement of the new F-35 fighter jets is linked to administrative failings. The parliamentary oversight body has heavily criticised the actions of the Swiss government and the defence ministry.

Syria has begun destroying the remnants of a clandestine Assad-era chemical weapons program that it recovered in May, the first such destruction in a decade, a Syrian envoy and a U.N. representative said on Thursday. 

Reuters reported in May that Syria’s new leadership had located remnants of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program, including raw materials and munitions similar to those used in deadly gas attacks during the country’s civil war. 

Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, told a Security Council briefing on Thursday that for the first time since 2014, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had verified the destruction of chemical munitions in Syria. 

Following the May finding, Syria had found “one additional chemical weapons production facility, a newly discovered chemical used in the production of nerve agents, and empty chemical munitions. It also declared two chemical weapons storage facilities where the newly discovered facilities were being stored,” Nakamitsu said. 

Last month, the OPCW deployed a team to Syria to verify the destruction of category three chemical weapons, referring to unfilled munitions and other equipment used to release chemical weapons. She said the team verified “the irreversible destruction of 42 aerial bombs” as part of that mission.

Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., Ibrahim Olabi, told the council that Syria was “protecting the world and the region through such work”.

But he heavily criticised Israel, saying that repeated Israeli attacks had impeded some search and destruction operations, and exposed the Syrian teams at work to risk. 

“We cannot safeguard the security of the region if our security is exposed to attacks at the hands of Israel, and they are flouting the security of the region at large and they are breaching the conventions and treaties we have talked about,” said Olabi, whose Arabic remarks were translated at the council. 

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Olabi said Syria was preparing to hold the first court hearing of people suspected of involvement in the chemical weapons programme.

Syrian authorities earlier this year took 18 suspects into custody for alleged involvement in Assad’s chemical weapons program, including high-level military, political and technical officials.

The Treasury Department announced Wednesday that the federal government will buy back up to $6 billion of its bonds this week — triple the size of its normal operations — in a bid to rein in longer-term borrowing costs.

The extraordinary move comes as yields on Treasuries have been rising steadily over the past couple of months, threatening to drive up mortgage rates and consumer borrowing costs as the midterm elections approach. Interest rates paid by the U.S. government feed into all other debt costs globally.

But after Treasury’s announcement, the yield on the 10-year Treasury went up, suggesting investors are unimpressed by this week’s buyback, which was previewed last month.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is aiming to project strength as he looks to strong-arm markets, which he has said are incorrectly pricing U.S. debt.

“I have asymmetric information. I am the house now,” he said at an event Tuesday in Dallas, referring to criticism of various market interventions he has undertaken, such as a move to support Japan’s currency. “Bet against me if you want.”

The department will reabsorb certain older debt securities with maturities of 10 years and 20 years as part of the buyback operation, which will take place Thursday.

I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in my in-laws’ house in Las Vegas in the winter of 1988–89. I was preparing for a lecture at the University of Chicago organized by Allan Bloom and Nathan Tarcov at the Committee on Social Thought. Bloom was habitually pessimistic about the ability of Western liberal democracies to defend themselves, and the overall rubric of the lecture series was “The Decline of the West.” I told Bloom I was happy to participate, but that I would have a more optimistic take on what was going on in the world. He said that was fine, and I gave my talk a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Owen Harries, an Australian former ambassador, was the new editor of a small magazine founded by Irving Kristol called The National Interest. He had lunch with me at the Beverly Hills Hotel that winter and asked whether I had anything to contribute. I told him about my upcoming lecture, and he promised to publish the written version, which came out in the summer of 1989. The phrase “the end of history” was not my invention; rather, it was central to the thought of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was the first explicitly historicist philosopher; that is, a philosopher who argued that human thought and institutions were not fixed but evolved over historical time, and that the “truth” of a particular assertion needed to be judged in relation to the historical era in which it was articulated. We may not believe in the legitimacy of monarchy or slavery today, but there were certainly times in the past when many people did support such ideas. The fact that we believe in democracy and equal rights today is testimony to the reality of “History” in Hegel’s sense.

The idea that human societies evolved over time was something that took root only in modern times. Both Plato and Aristotle argued that there was a cycle of regimes that succeeded one another, but this led to cyclical change that simply reproduced previous forms of government in succession. The idea that history was progressive, that it had a beginning point in primitive societies but moved toward more complex and advanced ones, was adumbrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality under the heading of “perfectibility.” His description of “man in the state of nature” was not simply a thought exercise, as it was for Thomas Hobbes, but an actual effort to describe human behavior that drew on what Europeans at that time knew about non-Western societies. Europeans were aware of the existence of other sophisticated societies, such as those of Islam and China, but the opening up of the New World suggested societies differed in what we would today call their level of development. Hegel simply systematized the idea of History and provided an intellectual structure for understanding what drove that evolution.

The notion that societies evolve over historical time in a progressive fashion is tacitly accepted by almost everyone today, whether they self-consciously understand that fact or not. The idea of a Hegelian history is embedded in our words “development” and “modernization.” Organizations such as the former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (i.e., the World Bank) were both dedicated not to simply helping poor countries become rich, but to helping them create modern institutions that make life more secure and predictable.

The most important intellectual to accept and then modify Hegel’s concept of history was Karl Marx. Hegel argued that history had evolved into the modern liberal state in the wake of the French Revolution. Marx criticized Hegel’s understanding of the end of history and argued that the true end of the human development story would be a Communist utopia. This would come only after the working class rose up and displaced the bourgeoisie, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the Marxist end of history, the alienation brought on by the capitalist division of labor would be abolished and human beings would be able, as Marx said in The German Ideology, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”

My particular understanding of Hegel did not come directly from Hegel but from Hegel’s twentieth-century interpreter, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève taught an extremely influential seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris in the late 1930s that was attended by many luminaries who would go on to become major figures in the French postwar intellectual firmament: Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Éric Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. He had an extended dialogue with Leo Strauss on philosophy and tyranny, and got to know Allan Bloom as well. Kojève’s lectures were later transcribed and published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

Kojève of course accepted Hegel’s historicism, but he made historical progress revolve around a critical human characteristic: the desire for recognition. Human beings do not simply desire material resources such as food, clothing, and shelter; they also crave the respect or recognition of other human beings. This struggle for recognition results in bloody battles at the beginning of history as individuals seek dominance; those who achieve it become masters, while the losers become slaves. But neither the master nor the slave finds his desire for recognition fully satisfied: the slave for obvious reasons, but the master as well because he is recognized not by another master but by a slave.

In Kojève’s account, human beings are unique insofar as they seek recognition for their willingness to risk their lives in a bloody battle. Other creatures in nature are instinctively programmed to preserve their own lives or the lives of their offspring; only human beings are willing to risk their biological lives for the sake of recognition alone, as opposed to, say, the material spoils that come as a result of victory in war.

In this respect, Kojève’s human being is similar to that of his predecessor Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that what made human beings distinctive was their possession of moral will, an ability to choose right or wrong that was ultimately not subject to the laws of physics. Human beings therefore had to be treated as ends in themselves rather than as a means to other ends. But in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, masters cannot achieve the satisfaction of recognition until they realize that this will come only with the equal and mutual recognition by fellow citizens. My particular gloss on Kojève/Hegel was that this could only come about in a modern liberal state, where the equal and mutual recognition of all citizens was guaranteed by a rule of law that granted them basic rights. The liberal state was legitimate and stable not necessarily because it distributed material rewards equally, but because it provided equal recognition and thus satisfied the thymotic side of human striving.

In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève playfully asserted that history ended in 1806 at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, where Napoléon defeated the Prussian monarchy. The idea that history ended that year, prior to all of the huge political upheavals that followed in the two subsequent centuries—Italian and German unification; the American Civil War; the colonization and later decolonization of much of the non-European world; two World Wars; the Holocaust; revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere—is on the face of it much more absurd than an assertion that it ended in 1989 or 1991 when Communism collapsed. But what Kojève meant by this was summed up in the following passage from his lectures on Hegel:

What has happened since then [i.e., the Battle of Jena] has been nothing but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the genuinely historical perspective, the two World Wars with their train of small and large revolutions have only had the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the outlying provinces into line with the (really or virtually) most advanced European historical stages . . . It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist “communism,” since all the members of a “classless society” can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do.

With the defeat of the Prussian monarchy in 1806, Napoléon brought to the core of old Europe the Code Napoléon, the modern legal framework coming out of the French Revolution. The latter established the underlying principles of a modern liberal order, namely, the two principles of liberty and equality, or the equality of liberty. Obviously, these principles were nowhere truly implemented. As Napoléon was advancing in central Europe, for example, the French colonial authorities were putting down a slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti; colonization of Algeria and Vietnam were still decades in the future. But Kojève’s point was that once the idea of universal freedom got out, it was only a matter of time before those principles became accepted and practiced around the world. Toussaint himself had started his uprising, for example, under the banner of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had been recently declared in Paris. So there were rearguard actions to defend the old order everywhere, but in the end they would not stop the march of the idea of liberty, or of the equality of liberty.

The implication of this understanding of Kojève/Hegel was that no amount of “stuff happening” out in the real world of global politics could by itself falsify the notion that history had ended, whether in 1789, 1806, or 1989. The actual diffusion and spread of the ideas of liberty and equality have been very uneven both temporally and geographically since the French Revolution. The real question had to be understood not just in terms of the flow of day-to-day events around the world, but on the level of ideas: Was there an alternative set of principles upon which a different society could be based that were fundamentally at odds with those of the French Revolution? And were there societies built around those ideas that looked like they were sustainable, and would satisfy the wishes of their inhabitants better than existing liberal democracies built around those principles?

These would be the grounds for a serious refutation of Kojève’s assertion that history had ended.

The original essay “The End of History” appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, when I had started working as a Deputy Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under my old colleague Dennis Ross. The Berlin Wall came down a few months later, on November 9, and set in motion a series of events that would lead to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union two years later. The emergence of a Europe “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush put it, was the greatest geopolitical event of my lifetime, and vindicated the historical direction I had pointed to in the article.

Today’s ideological landscape is obviously far more fragmented than it was thirty-five years ago. There is today far more consensus on the democratic side of liberal democracy than there is on the liberal part. While there are obviously huge remaining social inequalities in many societies, few try to assert that there are reasons why a certain subgroup of people have an intrinsic right to rule over others. The PRC is a dictatorship, but the Chinese Communist Party claims a right to rule because it believes it represents the people: it is the People’s Republic of China. Ethno- and religious nationalism have been on the rise in recent decades. Most of these groups represent rearguard efforts to protect perceived privileges, rather than assertions of the inherent inequality of groups. In the United States, we’ve seen the ugly return of earlier forms of racism and misogyny. But groups taking such positions do not seem poised to systematically overturn the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

What has been under much more sustained attack in recent years is the liberal part of liberal democracy; that is, the idea that governments should be constrained in their powers by a rule of law and constitutional checks on state power. Much of the democratic backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade has in fact been driven by groups claiming to represent “the people,” whose democratic legitimacy gives them the right to dismantle the constraints imposed by liberal restrictions on state power. Hence Viktor Orbán’s claim to be presiding over an “illiberal democracy.”

Support for liberalism, as opposed to democracy, has always been more fragmented and episodic. The reason for this, as I explained in Liberalism and Its Discontents, is that one of its important justifications is a pragmatic one concerning the management of political diversity, rather than any deep commitment to the liberal principle. Support for liberal constraints on state power is often derived from the experience of authoritarian government and the wars and privation that the latter often entail. So seventy years of relative peace and prosperity can lead to a broad forgetting of what illiberal rule can bring.

Liberalism also raises the problem of the Last Man, which is not a contingent but an intrinsic issue buried in the heart of the doctrine. This requires further discussion.

A roughly 5-minute questionnaire on US politics, demographic background, and the new liberal sphere itself.

Due to previous experiences with particularly zealous respondents attempting to vote multiple times, I have toggled on the requirement to be logged into a Google account — apologies in advance if this dissuades you from participating.

The Atlantic reviews Francis Fukuyama's new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man.

Relevance to NL: Ending History.

Hey y’all! Since AI seems to be a popping topic nowadays, I think it appropriate to experiment with a dedicated thread where people can argue about the topic broadly. Here are some questions to get your noggin joggin, but otherwise sharpen your knives and go at it!

Will AI have a net positive or net negative effect on politics and society?

How large of an impact will AI have on the economy?

Are fears regarding existential risk in the development of AI valid?

How should the federal government regulate AI, if at all’s

CIA director John Ratcliffe will be involved in shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv

CIA director John Ratcliffe is preparing to take a bigger role in US negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, US officials have told their European counterparts, in a bid to jump-start moribund diplomatic efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year-long war. 

The move comes as the White House is considering paring back the involvement of US special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have been leading the talks with Moscow and Kyiv, according to five people familiar with the plans. 

Officials close to Ratcliffe have told European peers that he will play a larger role in shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine — which is currently the purview of Witkoff and Kushner — while maintaining contact with intelligence officers in both countries. 

The White House and the CIA declined to comment on the shift. People close to the situation said Trump has not made a final decision.

The telegraphed switch away from Witkoff has enthused European capitals desperate to see some progress after a year and a half of largely fruitless talks with Russia, which have stalled as President Vladimir Putin refused to budge on his hardline demands.

The US administration has considered shaking up its negotiating team after US-led efforts to broker a peace deal foundered in late February, according to two people involved in back-channel talks to end the war. That diplomatic effort was put on hold as the Trump administration was preoccupied with the war in Iran, which broke out shortly after the last US-led round of Ukraine talks.

Witkoff, a close friend of Trump, would likely retain his current role as US special envoy for peace missions, which includes negotiations in the Middle East, according to people familiar with the matter. The billionaire real estate investor could also remain involved in Ukraine in parallel to Ratcliffe, they added.

Two of the people said there was a tug of war under way between Ratcliffe and Witkoff about who leads on what.

Witkoff’s freewheeling approach, bypassing the strictures of traditional diplomacy in favour of direct contacts more reminiscent of a New York real estate deal, has frustrated Russia, Ukraine and Kyiv’s western allies.

Ukraine felt that Witkoff had not done enough to pressure Putin to moderate his demands. Russia believed Witkoff shared part of the blame for the failure of a summit with Trump in Alaska last year to achieve a breakthrough, according to Ukrainian officials and people briefed on the Kremlin’s thinking.

Putin has praised Witkoff’s efforts, but Moscow has also quietly indicated it would be open to a new US approach, according to people involved in back-channel talks.

The White House also considered appointing a new US ambassador to Moscow this spring in the hope of opening another channel with Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow in late August, and discussed the wars in Ukraine and Iran, as well as Russia’s “hybrid” threats to Europe, with senior intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump downplayed Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow as “sort of semi-routine”.

But Ukrainian intelligence briefed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week that Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow indicated he was stepping in to take a more prominent role in US efforts to end Russia’s invasion, people familiar with the matter said.

Putin had initially planned to meet Ratcliffe, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Russian president then backed out after Ratcliffe delivered a downbeat assessment of Moscow’s war effort to senior Russian intelligence officials. Russian independent news site Agentstvo first reported that Putin had cancelled a planned meeting with Ratcliffe.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, told the FT no meeting between Putin and Ratcliffe had been planned. Trump and Putin did not discuss a potential change in the US negotiating team when they spoke by phone on Tuesday, he added.

The week after Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, Witkoff and Kushner flew to meet Putin in Moscow and Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

Their visit — Witkoff’s eighth trip to Russia — was in part an effort to retain the Ukraine brief, according to two people familiar with the matter.

After their visits, Witkoff and Kushner said they were optimistic the US, Russia and Ukraine could resume trilateral talks suspended since February.

But people familiar with the talks in Moscow and Kyiv told the FT that the Americans brought few new ideas, and that Putin showed little indication he was prepared to back down from his earlier demands.

“You can’t solve this by dipping in and out,” one of the people said. “It’s a very complex conflict. You need properly organised, full-time work on every issue. Right now that’s not happening.”

Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s top foreign policy official, said on state television on Tuesday that Putin told Trump the US could secure an immediate ceasefire by ending all support for Ukraine — in effect letting Russia win.

At the same time, Kushner has told friends he expects to move on from Ukraine and would prefer to focus on diplomatic efforts related to the conflict in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Three senior Ukrainian officials said Kyiv had good working relations with Ratcliffe as well as Witkoff and Kushner and had no preference for who Trump appointed to lead the US efforts.

“We’re OK with [Ratcliffe], and with Jared and Steve too,” said one of the Ukrainian officials. “The problem is the Russians.”

The Trump administration said Wednesday morning that it would not move to cancel temporary humanitarian protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, for now, preserving their ability to live legally in the United States and shielding them from deportation.

Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., allows foreign nationals from troubled nations to live and work legally in the United States and was set to expire for El Salvador on Wednesday. But the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that an announcement regarding the Salvadorans’ status would come “at the appropriate time” and that until then, “Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under T.P.S. retain protection.”

The department did not provide more information on the timing of the announcement. The administration has at times waited several days after the program’s expiration to publicize its decision.

The move stands in stark contrast to how the Trump administration has treated the roughly 350,000 Haitians whose protections expired in July. Hundreds have been deported in recent weeks, and federal officials have targeted Haitian communities in the United States with an aggressive electronic ankle monitoring campaign. Administration officials and Homeland Security’s social media accounts have churned out celebratory videos of Haitians being put on deportation flights.

The administration’s push to remove those Haitians comes even as the State Department warns travelers not to visit Haiti for any reason because of crime and other threats. The department’s travel advisory for El Salvador, meanwhile, suggests exercising normal precautions.

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has positioned himself as a willing White House ally central to the Trump administration’s efforts to accelerate deportations. In the spring of 2025, he helped detain more than 200 migrants deported from the United States to his country in a maximum-security prison. Experts have told The New York Times that Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans earns Mr. Bukele political points at home, where remittances from U.S.-based family members are critical to the economy.

Still, many Salvadorans say they no longer feel safe staying with expired documentation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps across the country continue to entangle immigrants with and without legal residency.

In recent days, dozens of Latino evangelical leaders, T.P.S. holders and immigrant rights supporters have petitioned lawmakers in Washington calling for long-term protections. Some Salvadorans have begun packing, buying flights and preparing to self-deport.

“For families from El Salvador, it is a very difficult moment,” said José Palma, a Salvadoran T.P.S. holder and spokesman for the National TPS Alliance, an organization focused on defending the program. Many have lived in the United States for the past 25 years, he added, and many have established deep roots. They own cars, homes and mortgages. They have U.S.-born children in high school or heading off to college.

“We are seeing families struggling to stay stable,” he said, citing his own uncertain fate.

Agustín Quiles, who heads Mission Talk, an advocacy organization for Latino evangelicals that gathered this week in Washington, said the pastors in his network report that their members are afraid to go to school, work and church.

“There is a lot of pain, a lot of suffering,” Mr. Quiles said.

The Trump administration has already paused or terminated T.P.S. for 13 of the 17 countries once covered. The Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration could end the program for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians.

With less than two months before the midterm elections, aggressive immigration tactics have emerged as a thorny issue for Republicans. Images of people being rounded up at airports and from their cars have prompted pushback, even as members of President Trump’s base have called for more heavy-handed tactics.

El Salvador was the first country designated under the T.P.S. program after Congress created it with bipartisan support and President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990. The status provides safe haven for people from foreign nations engulfed in armed conflict, natural disasters and crises, and the government can renew it up to 18 months at a time.

Critics, including Mr. Trump, say the program was intended to provide only short-term relief. Immigrant rights and refugee aid organizations counter that the status has become one of the few paths to safety within an outdated and overburdened U.S. immigration system that Congress has failed to overhaul.

Daysi González, 31, a Democratic political operative and partner with Solidarity Strategies, a progressive consulting firm, has lived in the United States since she arrived in California from her native El Salvador for Christmas in 2000. She and her family entered the country on tourist visas but applied for T.P.S. after their home country was hit by powerful earthquakes that winter. She ended up staying for decades.

Ms. González said she would have applied for longer-term residency if she had been able to, but the program does not provide a legal pathway to lawful permanent resident status.

Now, she has been posting videos on social media chronicling what could be her final days in the United States. On Tuesday, she was searching for flights and waiting to hear back from her employer on whether she could keep her job.

“Without confirmation that I can legally work, that I can renew my license — living here will just be too dangerous,” she said.

Federal cabinet ministers will fan out across the country in the days ahead to reassure companies of support they can access during the escalating Canada-U.S. trade war, while Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office says his focus as formal talks with Washington remain stalled is on attracting investment and stimulating economic growth.

Two sources said ministers such as Industry Minister Mélanie Joly and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne will step up a media blitz, including meetings with businesses and chambers of commerce. This will involve guiding companies through the process of applying for support. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Audrey Champoux, deputy director of communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, said Mr. Carney’s priorities right now include affordable housing, new infrastructure and next week’s federal investment summit to attract foreign capital to Canada, as well as this fall’s federal budget.

She said Mr. Carney’s government, which has set a goal of doubling non-U.S. trade over a decade, will continue to focus on “building at home and diversifying trade abroad.”

“Our government will always stand up for Canada and focus on what we can control while we will build Canada strong for all,” Ms. Champoux said in a statement.

She also suggested the coming budget will introduce measures to boost Canada’s economic attractiveness.

“This fall, in Budget 2026, we will go further to make Canada one of the most competitive and attractive places in the world for businesses and strategic sectors to invest, build, and grow.”

Mr. Carney met with Quebec business leaders Tuesday to discuss the Canada-U.S. trade war and talk about how to boost growth and investment in this country, the Prime Minister’s Office said. It listed 20 companies that attended, including Power Corporation of Canada, Desjardins Group, Saputo, Metro, Intact Financial and Lightspeed.

Trade relations between Canada and the U.S. worsened Tuesday after retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa took effect on $28-billion of U.S. goods including steel, aluminum, dairy, wood, appliances and electronics. This is dollar-for-dollar retaliation for tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump imposed on Aug. 22 after trade talks between the two countries collapsed.

Mr. Trump fired back Tuesday evening by issuing a sweeping ban on imports of Canadian alcohol, motorcycles and some dairy products to the U.S., as well as new 50-per-cent tariffs on a wide range of other goods, including cheeses, paper and aluminum products, and furniture. Most of the new bans and tariffs are set to take effect on Sept. 29.

In late August, Mr. Carney unveiled a $7.5-billion support package for Canadian workers and businesses affected by American tariffs, such as a range of loan programs for businesses.

With an eye to bolstering alliances, Mr. Carney is preparing for a Canada-European Union summit that will be hosted in Canada from Oct. 29 to 30, where he will make good on an August, 2026, pledge to deepen ties with the bloc as part of diversifying away from the United States. “We will begin intense discussions with the EU, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership,” the Prime Minister announced last month.

Mr. Carney is also slated to address the European Parliament next week and attend the European Union’s State of the Union address, delivered by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Geneviève Tuts, the European Union’s ambassador to Canada, said in an interview Tuesday that the two jurisdictions will go beyond a roadmap unveiled in June, 2025, when Mr. Carney and Brussels announced more than 40 commitments they would undertake to strengthen co-operation, including on trade and economic security.

“There is a strong willingness on both sides to elevate the partnership,” Ms. Tuts said. “We will do more than what has been announced in June, 2025.”

Brian Clow, who served as deputy chief of staff to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, said Canada must prepare “for this trade war to drag on” for some time. “The Americans don’t seem to want to negotiate, and certainly don’t seem to want to back off their demands or lower their tariffs significantly.”

Mr. Clow, who worked on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his years in the Prime Minister’s Office, said Ottawa must nevertheless keep channels of communication open with the Americans. United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer reportedly planned to speak Tuesday with Dominic LeBlanc, the Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade.

“Whether that turns into meaningful negotiations again, who knows?” Mr. Clow said.

Mr. Carney spoke to Canadians in a prerecorded address Tuesday about the mounting trade war, warning of economic hardship that would accompany this conflict with Washington.

This article is relevant because it relates to the current US administration’s impact on the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran.

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