Francis Fukuyama (2:46)

Thanks very much, Yasho.

Yasha Munk (2:48)

So Frank, there is something remarkable about the fact that the president in recent memory who has been most adamant that he wanted to be not his terms, but basically an isolationist, that he thought that the American empire was overextended, that George W. Bush, his own predecessor as a Republican president, had chosen these disastrous wars of choice. And now it's Donald Trump that is engaged in a war of choice in Iran and At least according to Donald Trump and some Israeli sources. As we're recording, it appears to be the case that they've managed to kill, in the first hours of this attack, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. What do you make of this situation?

Francis Fukuyama (3:40)

Well, I guess an initial thing to say is that I don't believe almost any of the information I'm seeing, especially on social media, because I've seen a lot of assertion. Now, I assume that if Trump himself announces that Khamenei has been killed, that's probably true. There are also a lot of videos of, you know, missiles hitting American air bases, of ordinary Iranians rioting and calling for the end of the regime. I don't know how many of those are true. So it's basically very hard to sort out what's empirical at this point and what isn't.

Yasha Munk (4:22)

So. That's right. And I think we need to be careful exactly in how we frame things. It is clearly a massive attack on Iran. I developed a kind of mini theory of how Trump wants to operate in foreign policy. It's less of a doctrine and more of a playbook. It seemed to fit the initial attacks on Iran last June. It seemed to fit the attack on Venezuela in which he favored massive attacks that would move very quickly, and basically by the time that people woke up, that would already be over. This seems to be quite different from that. I mean, this does not appear, as we're recording this, to be a conflict that's going to be over in 24, 48 hours.

Francis Fukuyama (5:07)

Well, so I think this is the case with all of these decapitation attacks. I actually had a former colleague at rand, Steve Hosmer, who was a very wise political analyst who actually did a study of decapitation attacks going all the way back, you know, to World war, World War II. And, you know, the conclusion from looking at these other cases is that they're very unpredictable and they almost always don't achieve the political end that has been sought. Now, I think that the problem here is that unlike the snatching of Maduro or the attack on the Fardo enrichment facility, this is going to lead to a lot of internal instability. I think this is generally true. If you take out the senior leadership, you still have very well organized and very well armed, you know, IRGC and Postra or Basij that, you know, have a real interest in the outcome of this because their lives are on the line. And I think that what you're going to get is a lot of internal conflict. You could get conflict within the regime as different, you know, parts of the regime seek to assert dominance over the whole thing and then between the population and the regime. And that is going to be extremely difficult to control. I think that unlike the fertile attack, this is not something that can be done on a single strike. And they're going to have to continue to try to influence things from the air. We have a lot of experience with strategic bombing and the political effects of strategic bombing. I mean, there have been many, many books, you know, looking at the effectiveness of this. And again, just as in this case of the study that I was mentioning of decapitation attacks, you essentially set up this extremely chaotic, you know, aftermath where if you're not willing to put forces on the ground, you really cannot control things. And that means that you're right, that this is not going to be a one and done situation. There's going to have to be follow up attacks. And, you know, this is a conflict that is likely to, you know, continue for some time.

Yasha Munk (7:31)

So you're very knowledgeable about a great number of countries under different circumstances. What do we know about the circumstances under which regimes fall and the circumstances under which they persist? It's quite clear that the Islamic Republic has some loyalists and some hardliners. But it also appears to be clear that there's very deep discontent in the Iranian population. We saw that with the, the courageous protests at the end of December, at the beginning of January. It took extraordinary force and extraordinary brutality to end those protests. There's a revolutionary guard that wants to preserve its own political power and its own economic might because they are very involved in every aspect of the economy. I think it's hard to know to what extent they are at this point committed to theocratic nature of the regime as opposed to just wanting to preserve some form of quasi military rule. What would it take, you think, to destabilize this regime? And how big of a difference does it make whether the reports that we're hearing, including claims by the President of the United States himself that Ayatollah Khomeini, is that going to make a huge difference to the likely future of this regime in the next weeks, or is it unclear that it would actually make a giant difference?

Francis Fukuyama (9:01)

Well, I think it's already been destabilized. I mean, that's happened already. Unlike the case of Venezuela, where capturing one individual, Nicolas Maduro, left intact a power structure that then faced very different incentives on how it was going to act. I think in this case it's a much more complicated system. You have extremely well entrenched groups. It's not just the irgc, it's also the besieged. This, this other big militia that spread all over the country. You know, they don't represent anything like the greater part of the population, but they've also been, you know, pretty self disciplined in suppressing any threats to the population. Now that the senior leadership is out of the way, you know, you've got multiple questions. Will they continue to suppress dissent? You know, I've seen videos just in the last couple of hours of people protesting in the streets in different Iranian cities. Will they continue to want to shoot people in that situation? Will they turn their guns on one another? I think the only thing you can really predict at this point is that it's going to be very chaotic and there's going to be, I think, a lot of follow up violence.

Yasha Munk (10:19)

What is the broader regional situation? It's interesting that during the strikes in June it took Iran a really long time to retaliate and the retaliation seemed surprisingly circumspect. They hit one military base the United States has in the region. They had some regiment strikes on Israel and it was clearly calculated to de escalate to some extent this time around. The response from Iran came much faster. Within about two hours it hit a number of countries in the region that had actually apparently been trying to stay out of this conflict, including Saudi Arabia, giving them a strong reason to jump into the conflict. And it doesn't so far look as though they've been able to do tremendous damage. It was relatively limited damage. What is that telling us about the future trajectory of this war, about Iran's ability to retaliate and about whether this becomes a whole full scale regional war involving Saudi Arabia and a bunch of other countries in the region.

Francis Fukuyama (11:34)

It does seem to me that Iran is actually pretty weak at this point. I think they're trying to throw everything they've got at the United States and its regional allies. And I don't think it's actually going to do very much except for occasional damage to a hotel or an air base or something like that. So I think that the issue really is not a wider regional war. You know, in any event, the major allies of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, have both been severely weakened. And so it's not as if they could start up other conflicts in other parts of the Middle East. I think the main action is going to be inside Iran. You know, it's going to be who survives, what kind of a leadership does the regime manage to retain, how do they deal with the population. I think it's possible that the scales have been shifted so much that the overthrow of the regime is entirely possible. If that happens, then you got a whole different set of big questions that arise is, you know, how do you actually create an alternative to this regime that's been around ever since 1979? But I think that the fear of a wider war and more and more countries getting sucked in is not what I would, you know, focus on at the moment.

Yasha Munk (13:07)

I mean, does this basically mean that the United States can choose when to escalate and when to de escalate? Do you think at the moment the United States feels that they've achieved their war objectives, they can get out of this? Or is Donald Trump now on the road to a quagmire that he may not be able to get out of in the way that George W. Bush got sucked into a quagmire in Iraq and in Afghanistan?

Francis Fukuyama (13:31)

Well, first of all, it's not clear what Donald Trump's objectives are. This is what a lot of people have been saying, is that he never explained either to the American people and may not have clearly in his own mind what he hopes to accomplish by this. If his goal somehow is actually regime change that leads to a stable and reasonably democratic outcome, then that's not going to happen for a long time, and the United States is likely to get sucked into this much further. It's possible that Trump, if he actually has managed to kill off Khamenei, Ayatollah Khamenei and the senior leadership, he may, you know, say, okay, mission accomplished. That's what we wanted to do. Now it's up to the Iranian people to take over and then just stop fighting at that point. At which point, you know, Iran, the poor Iranians, are then left to slug it out in what could be a pretty messy and bloody civil war. But I really, given Trump's earlier proclivities, it seems to me very unlikely that he has the intention of following through and actually producing a stable successor regime to the Islamic Republic. And even if he did have that intention, probably doesn't have the capacity to do that. And so what you're looking at is the prospect of just presiding over a lot of instability that the United States and Israel caused, but not a terribly satisfying outcome, except in these very reduced expectations, as I suggested.

Yasha Munk (15:22)

What are the offerings for him for claiming victory? I mean, last June, he claimed that the Iranian nuclear program had been completely decapitated. That runs slightly counter to the justification for this particular conflict and was contradicted by various intelligence assessments at the time. But it gave him a clean out, right overnight attack, bunch of very impressive bombs. We've achieved our objective. Moving on, with Nicolas Maduro, there's obviously the spectacular capture of a dictator of Venezuela, bringing him to Brooklyn where he's sitting in jail, bring him to a court in Manhattan. Again, it was very easy for him to say, operation was a success, we're cutting deals with a successor, even if that certainly doesn't fulfill the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people. Moving on, what's the success that he would claim in this case? Is it just that he's going to say tomorrow, well, we've killed Khamenei and the rest is up to the Iranian people? Is it that he would wait for some kind of regime change? Is it that? What's the moment where he claims victory and turns his attention to whatever is next on, on, on the Trump administration's agenda?

Francis Fukuyama (16:36)

Well, you know, unfortunately, I think that his view of what success would be is a completely political decision that has to do much more with American public opinion than any reality on the ground in Iran or in any other part of the Middle East. I think that in the first place, one of the big motives for this attack was to take the attention away from the fact that his administration is failing in many respects in terms of its domestic policy. It's funny, there was, they were playing a clip when Obama was still President Trump saying, well, this is what happens when a administration starts failing. They start to, they launch a war to distract people's attention. But, you know, I'm afraid that this is part of what's going on here, that there's, you know, a lot of negative things in terms of Americans, the way Americans think about his administration. And so that may have been part of the motive. And if that's the case, he's really looking at the polls in this country to see what mission accomplished means. And I think if there's a point at which he gets widespread support for having launched the attack, for having killed a few leaders and, you know, that seems to be about it, he may well wash his hands of it. Even though he has actually not accomplished the goal of, you know, of real regime change. Regime change is really, really hard. You know, I think there's one thing that Afghanistan and Iraq taught us, producing a stable political outcome that is consistent with American long term security interests in that part of the world is really, really difficult. And I just don't think that he's going to be able to get there. But he may not need to if the American people decide, well, okay, he did what he said he was going to do in terms of the decapitation, and that's that.

Yasha Munk (18:38)

Yeah, I mean, let's dream for a moment and go through some of the different scenarios from what might happen if the current regime is in some meaningful way replaced. Obviously, the best case scenario would be that we get a genuinely democratic Iran and that the aspirations of what does look like a very substantial portion of Iranian people to having a reasonably secular democracy are fulfilled. And that would obviously have a potential to change the Middle east in a very significant and very positive way. I assume that the likelihood of that is small in part because. Because there's so many people in the military apparatus with a very strong vested interest in keeping control of power to some extent. But, you know, it's certainly something to hope for.

Francis Fukuyama (19:29)

Well, that was true in Venezuela also. They had a very powerful military and the colectivos, you know, these local militias. I think that the situation is very different in Iran. You know, the main problem for any kind of democratic opposition in Iran is that it doesn't exist. It's not an organized force. The regime has been very good at jailing or killing anybody that seemed to arise. There was no Maria Clarina Machado that had demonstrated her popularity and legitimacy in an election just a year ago in Venezuela. There's actually a big organized emigre community that has been supporting her and, you know, could plausibly take over Venezuela at the right moment, you know, sometime in the next few years. That kind of opposition really does not exist now. People have been fantasizing about Reza Pahlavi's son, you know, coming back as a, you know, as a successor. The opposition is so fragmented that they basically have to unify around somebody, you know, that they need some figure that can provide them a little bit of coherence and stability. And if it's the Shah's son, maybe that'll happen. But I think that compared to Venezuela, they got a much tougher road to hold. The other thing is that, you know, the Chavez Maduro regimes got started in the late 1990s, so they've had about 20 years to mess things up in terms of taking over the structure of the Venezuelan state. You know, the Islamic Republic has been around since 1979, and they've actually created a, you know, much more. I don't know, sophisticated isn't quite the right word, but they've been running the thing for a much longer time. And therefore, the ability of any kind of opposition group to simply take over, you know, the governing of that place is going to be a much harder task than I think it potentially would be if you actually had a democratic restoration. Right. So I know that's just one scenario that you're trying to think through, but I agree with you, it's not very likely to happen, certainly not in any short term period.

Yasha Munk (21:57)

Yeah. So perhaps what is more imaginable is that you get, you know, some of the most powerful military leaders within the country saying we're going to liberalize the regime in certain respects. We're going to move it towards a form that either is no longer theocratic or only ostensibly theocratic and basically join a long list of military regimes in the region. I think that's a good test case on how much the ideology of a regime matters. Right. If you have effectively some of the same generals in charge, but without the religious overtones, or at least religious overtones significantly reduced, some of Iran's national security interests are going to remain the same as they were. Some of its historical enmities to countries like Saudi Arabia would remain the same. But the Iranian regime has also had particular Zealand in arming proxies around the region in sponsoring terrorist attacks. And I guess I'm sure that there's some realist IR scholar among the close to 1000 people who listen to us live and among the many more who will listen to this as a podcast, who will try and explain why actually this is just a rational response for the Iranian regime. You just look at borders and arms and other objective factors and that's what they should do. It does seem like non realist scholars of international relations would be right to press on that and to say no. It does seem like a lot of those choices are driven by ideology and in this case by religious beliefs and convictions, more than just by the kind of objective self interest of a regime. But how do we disentangle those things? Imagine you get a pretty hard nosed military general who wants to keep his hands on power, wants to make sure that all of his other generals and colonels and so on still get to run a lot of Iranian economy. They don't want to give up their privileges, but they think perhaps it's in our interest to ratchet down conflict in the region a little bit. Is that realistic? How much would change under such a scenario, do you think?

Francis Fukuyama (24:11)

Well, I can't answer that. I have heard Iranian friends that are in the democratic opposition assert that if this regime falls, Iran is going to become one of the most secular countries in the whole world because they've had such a long experience living under this Islamic dictatorship that virtually everybody hates it. And, you know, therefore they're going to go kind of to the other extreme of demonstrating, you know, kind of anti religious or anti clerical, you know, face. There obviously are still true believers in this. But, you know, I think it's interesting. There's been a general pattern where you have ideological regime regimes that start out ideological that gradually convert themselves into not just authoritarian regimes, but highly corrupt authoritarian regimes. So, you know, people may not have been following this that closely, but I think that's basically happened in Cuba, right? Fidel Castro created a Marxist Leninist dictatorship that was built around, you know, an egalitarian Marxist ideology. I think at this point, what holds them together is not ideology at all. It's really self interest. It's all the, you know, the drug smuggling and, you know, extortion and other things that they can do. The Maduro regime in Venezuela had already gone a long way down that path. And I think that I'm positive that something very similar to that has happened in Iran, where the main motive for a lot of the people in the IRGC and Basij is really, you know, is not ideological at all. It really has to do with their economic interests and so forth. So the idealism that may have existed at one point may well not exist anymore. So we'll have to see whether that's the extent to which that's really true. I think the other thing is that the desire for revenge on the part of the population, I suspect, is going to be much more intense than it was in Venezuela. So this is a subject for different podcast. It's interesting the way that Delsey Rodriguez is actually kind of stabilizing things and actually doing things to stabilize the economy and to raise people's living standards sufficiently that I think she's actually been able to mute a lot of the anger and the desire for immediate democratization that might otherwise exist. I think that these guys in Iran are going to have a much harder time doing that. Even if you had a pragmatic, you know, military guy that wanted to liberalize and restore relations with the United States and so forth, I think it's just going to be harder for them to do that. But, you know, what do I know?

Yasha Munk (27:27)

And obviously the Venezuelan regime has been extremely brutal and extremely corrupt. But, you know, the absolute brutality visited upon them protesters in Iran in January was rare even by the standards of these kinds of autocratic regimes. And we don't have exact numbers because of how repressive regime is, but the number of protesters who appear to have been killed there over the last two months is extraordinary and that

Francis Fukuyama (27:59)

they're talking about tens of thousands of people killed just in a single month. And bad as Maduro was, you know, it didn't get to that point. So I think the kind of pent up anger, the other thing is that the Iranian economy has been in collapse really for some time. And, you know, inflation has been out of control. Nobody has any savings. There's really not a middle class anymore that has, you know, any kind of property. So I think they're much, much more desperate than even people in Venezuela who are pretty desperate themselves.

Yasha Munk (28:35)

Well, you know, I think we both hope that even if it doesn't seem likely at this point, events do take a turn for the positive in Iran and that the aspirations of people in Iran are realized. Let's talk about some of the other actors in the region and then return to the United States and Trump himself. How is seeing Israel's position? You know, Israel suffered the horrible attacks and massacres of October 7, sponsored in large part by Iran. They have been phenomenally successful in military terms over the last couple of years, you know, really weakening their adversaries in the region to an astonishing extent, including Iran itself, but at a high humanitarian cost and a high cost in the country's public standing. Israel is in some ways more isolated now than it has been in most stretches of its history. There's a very interesting poll in the United States that was conducted in the last weeks which suggests that for the first time since the start of this poll, more Americans now sympathize with the Palestinian cause than with the Israeli cause. Benjamin Netanyahu has been able to sustain himself in power despite his at least occasional deep popularity within his own country. Are these substantive victories for Israel that are going to make the country safer, or are these Pyrrho victories that over the medium or long term, are going to make Israel a lot more vulnerable?

Francis Fukuyama (30:22)

Well, I think that the political damage that the Netanyahu government's actions have created since October 7th are the single most damaging thing that Israel has suffered. The poll numbers that you just cited are true, but particularly among young Americans, support for Israel, which had been pretty much, you know, instinctive in my generation, is just completely gone right now. And I think that, you know, this kind of use, you know, just overt use of military force to get your way, which has been characteristic of both Netanyahu and of Trump, is not going to endear, you know, either of them to, you know, These, especially these younger constituencies, even if the outcomes are good in terms of, you know, in a kind of raw power geopolitical terms. And I think that that's what I would, you know, that's what I would worry about because, you know, you basically can't kill all your enemies and you can't kill all your critics. You really need to retain some sense of legitimacy. And I think this is not going to, this is not going to help things again, even if the outcomes are okay in terms of bloodshed and the successor regime and so forth.

Yasha Munk (31:51)

Yeah, I mean, that's very much the concern I have that if you're in a moment of strength, it is easy to full of hubris, but at some point as well, we'll be in a moment of weakness. And of course, now it is easy to imagine either a Democratic president in the United States who does not want to help Israel, or for that matter, a Republican president of the United States who's quite hostile to Israel, given some of the voices and figures that are rising on the American right. And whether Israel can maintain its strength if it undergoes a period of economic crisis, if it undergoes some kind of internal crisis, and if it can no longer counter in the support of the United States is a very important question. In the poll that I cited, there's some expected partisan split where Republicans are more friendly to Israel and Democrats are more friendly to Palestine. But as you're saying, the most striking split is that Americans over 65 remain more inclined to support the Israeli cause. And then the younger the age group, the stronger they lean towards the Palestinian course.

Francis Fukuyama (32:57)

Yeah, the split within the American right, it is actually quite disturbing from the standpoint of Israel's interest. There's a recent interview between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee, who in a, in, in essence represent these two completely radicalized polls, one being, you know, very anti Israeli and I would say also pretty anti Semitic, and the other one being, you know, over the top, pro Israeli. And that's something that is really new in the Republican Party. I don't think you've ever seen kinds of expressions of just, it's not just that they're not supporting Israel the way they were, just, you know, outright hostility that Israel is leading America, you know, down the wrong path and manipulating American policy and so forth. You know, people on the right have not said this kind of thing before. And then, you know, in the Democratic Party, you have a similar kind of split. It's, you know, recently not been publicly expressed in quite the same form. But, you know, you Have Mamdani elected in New York City, who really is the first kind of public, publicly elected official that's broken with, you know, the tradition of American support, the strong economic and military support for Israel. So I think both the extreme right and extreme left, you're seeing this horseshoe effect where you have the two extremes on both sides, political division coming together in opposition to Israel.

Yasha Munk (34:46)

One of the strange ironies in the region before we fully return to the United States is that, as you're pointing out, Israel is losing a lot of support among the countries that have traditionally been allies to also, I think, you know, has lost whatever remnants of support it may have had in other countries of the region. And yet the fact that Iran retaliated against American allies in the region against Saudi Arabia and Jordan and other countries means that they may now join a regional war on the side of Israel against Iran. I mean, the politics of the Middle east never failed to confuse and to be complicated. There's a strange irony in that, isn't there?

Francis Fukuyama (35:36)

No, that's true. I mean, this trend started with the Abraham Accords in the first Trump administration where it turned out that these conservative monarchies in the Gulf were actually much more willing to make peace with Israel than their more left wing counterparts. Now that there's been overt attacks on these countries, I think that's probably a trend that will strengthen. So again, this is one of the political geopolitical payoffs for Netanyahu that he's actually probably bolstered his support. But, you know, this is one thing in thinking about international politics, sometimes actual outcomes really trump any kind of ideological priors that people have. I mean, this is kind of what you were suggesting earlier, that although you may start out having a certain ideological point of view, at some point your material interests become overwhelming and you kind of make excuses and you can come around to, you know, supporting things that you didn't support earlier. And I think that, you know, that's already happened in a lot of the consult conservative Gulf countries now down the road. Whether that will remain the case, whether these monarchies are actually laying the grounds for a populist revolt against their rule, that's something that may happen in the future. We haven't seen it yet, but something to keep an eye on.

Podcast Host (37:15)

Thank you for listening to this emergency episode of the good fight about the strikes on Iran and the war in the Middle East. In the last part of this conversation, Frank and I turn our attention to the domestic ramification of this conflict. Will this war strengthen or weaken Trump's domestic political standing? To what extent is Trump succeeding in remaking the United States in his image? And why is Frank Fukuyama a little bit more optimistic than many other commentators about the track record of American institutions in actually standing up to and resisting Donald Trump over the course of the last year? To listen to this part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support what we're doing here. Go to writing.yashamunk.com listen or to persuasion.community/listen and set up the premium feed of this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Thank you so much for listening.