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- [00:00]
Francis Fukuyama
It's funny, because I kind of thought that one of Trump's big vulnerabilities is that, you know, he's not a strategic thinker and, you know, he's never been tested in a genuine crisis, and he was not likely to come out of it looking good. He could come out of this one looking pretty, you know, pretty successful. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:31]
Yasha Munk
My GU today is Francis Fukuyama. I asked Frank to come back on the podcast to talk about the recent conflict in the Middle east, the Israeli and then the US Strikes on Iran, what they have accomplished, whether it is likely that the Iranian regime will fall and what that might mean for the world, how this situation will. Could potentially transform the wider Middle east and what that means for American politics. We also assess more broadly what Trump's presidency looks like five months into his term. Is Trump succeeding in transforming the American state and perhaps American society? Is his administration slowing down in its ability to actually put its agenda into effect? Has Trump failed to live up on his promise of aspirational populism? And finally, in the last part of this conversation, Frank and I talk about both why he finds AI to be such a powerful tool and why he has increasingly come to be concerned, come to be worried about how AI might elude the control of humans and pose a truly existential threat to humanity. To listen to that part of the conversation, please support the work we do. Please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamunk.substack.com. Francis Fukuyama, welcome back to the podcast.
- [02:22]
Francis Fukuyama
Thanks very much, Jasa.
- [02:24]
Yasha Munk
So I think we're both struggling to follow all of the things that are going on in the world and to make sense of them, let's start with what perhaps the most obvious topic, the supposedly 12 days war in the Middle east, which Donald Trump has declared over a few days ago. Is this actually the end, and what do you think it has accomplished?
- [02:51]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, this is one of those questions that's really impossible to answer at this point because it would depend on a lot of things that we don't know. For example, exactly how much damage was done to this enrichment facility at Ferdow. I think that in the short run, it looks like a pretty big success in many ways, because first of all, the Israelis progressively managed to dismantle most of the forms of military leverage that Iran had, beginning with Hamas and then Hezbollah in Lebanon. Then Syria fell, and then their initial strike really took out most of Iran's air defenses. And so they've had pretty much air superiority for the past couple of weeks. And the one thing they couldn't do is get at this deeply buried enrichment facility. But the Americans look like they've taken care of that. And so, you know, the Iranians are just in this extraordinarily weak position right now. I think the big uncertainty isn't what's going to happen in the short run. It's more the longer run. I mean, Iran is a serious country, 90 billion people. Even if you have regime change, it's not clear that they're going to give up on their nuclear ambitions. One thing I think that this attack signals is that there's a big distinction between nuclear and non nuclear states, that you can do whatever you want to to a non nuclear state. It would be much harder if, you know, if Iran actually had a nuclear program. I've all along felt that the reason they were going for this program is exactly that, that, you know, once you get nuclear weapons, it's really hard for anybody to come and overturn your regime. The Ukrainians had a, you know, if they had retained their nuclear weapons, I don't think the Russians would have been able to do what they're doing to them now. There's going to be all these long run consequences that aren't going to be necessarily so pretty. Meaning that a lot of countries are going to see this as a signal that they need to get serious about their own separate nuclear deterrence.
- [05:04]
Yasha Munk
Let's talk about these two topics in turn. First, what is going on with Iran and then the broader question of the danger from nuclear war and nuclear proliferation. When it comes to Iran itself, it does sort of seem as though the country is at the weakest point it has been internationally. I mean, it's possible that the regime has some avenues for revenge, some avenues to do damage either to Israel or to the United States, but haven't yet become obvious and that it's somehow holding those in reserve. But that doesn't appear likely at this point. It seems as though its ability to project power is really extremely limited at this, at this stage. If Iran really is weakened in those ways, how will that change the Middle east and will that actually create opportunities for a more peaceful Middle East?
- [06:01]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, there's another variable that you need to insert in there, which is the durability of the regime in Tehran itself. I think ever since the Mahsa Amini protests from, I don't know how many years ago was that, it's pretty clear that the legitimacy of that regime is really very low. And it's only its control over their power ministries, you know, the IGRC and, you know, the, the militias that they control that are keeping them in power, and that the regime itself is quite unpopular. And it would seem to me that this humiliation is, you know, is going to weaken, weaken that they've been trying to crack down because I think they themselves feel very vulnerable internally. So I don't think you can answer your question about what this does to the larger Middle east until you answer the question of is what's going to happen internally in Iran.
- [07:05]
Yasha Munk
So how would you see the different scenarios on that? I guess probably the most likely is that the regime is further internally weakened, but that it is somehow able to hold on to power. And then I guess the other possibility is that the regime does fall in some kind of way, which presumably opens up a broad range of scenarios from the most hopeful ones, given that Iran does have more democratic history than some other countries in the Middle east, that after nearly 50 years of Islamist rule, a lot of population seems to be chafing at that, that there are certainly strong secular voices in the country that would like to have greater rights for women, for example, that see the way in which Iran's prosperity has been damaged by the way in which the regime has turned the country into a sponsor of terrorism around the region. But of course, there may also be other extreme forces of voices within the country that are going to make a play for power as well. As always, when there's a power vacuum, there may be a danger of civil war or other very dangerous outcomes. So I guess under the two different scenarios, what do you expect would happen over the next years and decades?
- [08:26]
Francis Fukuyama
You can't ask that question. I have no idea. All of these things are possible. I mean, the country also has a lot of ethnic divisions and you could have breakaway parts. There's just no way of answering that question at this point. I mean, we can hope for a good transition, but our experience with regime change in that part of the world is not all that happy A1. So I just think it's useless to speculate on that stuff.
- [08:53]
Yasha Munk
I ask you the questions and I hope that you answer them, that you're right. I certainly don't feel capable of answering those questions. Perhaps a philosophical question about that, which is, how do you think about this under conditions of uncertainty? I think it's easy to feel torn when you have a horrible regime. And the Islamic Republic of Iran certainly is a horrible regime, both in terms of what it's done around the region, around the world, and in terms of how it's treated its own citizens, to feel torn between, obviously, the hope that this regime falls, that it gives way to something much better, and the apprehension that it could give way to something worse, or it could give way to the kind of chaos that leads to a lot of death. Now, one thing is a kind of political lesson which is trying to lead wars of regime change that are designed to change the political structure of another country is probably a foolish idea just because of how unpredictable historical events are under most circumstances. But another is sort of just, I guess, as an armchair observer of history, I mean, where should our sympathies be? Should we hope that tomorrow a grand revolution breaks out and the regime falls? Or should we fear that? Or should we do both at the same time? Or should we think, like Immanuel Kant, I suppose he did about the French Revolution, that on the one hand, from some logical or moral point of view, we don't want it to happen because we think that what could result is bad. That's not exactly the reasons why Kant was apprehensive about the French Revolution. And on the other hand, we can't contain our joy that something better may be around the corner. How do you think about those things?
- [10:40]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that it would be a great thing if this regime actually fell. I think some of the alternatives are, you know, very problematic, especially for people in Iran. But it's a little bit hard to think of regimes that would be, you know, terribly much worse than this one. I guess the one thing you have to say about Iran that really makes it very different from Iraq is that it's a real country. And this is something I think people didn't appreciate in earlier stages of this conflict. You know, statehood in Iran goes back millennia. It created one of the first states anywhere in the world, and that state was consolidated centuries before states were consolidated in Europe. And I think that a lot of Iranian friends of mine keep pointing to the fact that we picked the wrong side in the Iraq Iran war. I mean, that Iraq really wasn't a country. It was never a country, really. And part of the chaos that ensued after the American invasion was the fact that it wasn't a country. Whereas Iranian statehood is really not contested. And so the question is, who is it that manages to come to power? It could be the military. I mean, it could be the igrc. I mean, they've been the basis of the regime's power up till now, and it could be that they'll simply take over. I've heard Iranians say that if you Had a more democratic Iran come to power, it might become one of the most secular countries in the whole world, because they've been living under this theocratic dictatorship ever since 1979, and most Iranians really hate it. So again, I mean, the range of possibilities is very great, but I don't think anyone's going to shed any tears if this particular regime falls.
- [12:43]
Yasha Munk
I've seen a lot of people compare the current conflict to the Iraq war for some obvious reasons, both that Iran and Iraq are obviously adjacent countries, that there's been some rhetoric around regime change, both from Israel and in some ways from Donald Trump. But it seems to me that the disanalogies are at least as important. One disanalogy, as you pointed out, is in the nature of those two states, that Iran has a much longer history as a state, and that even though Iran is quite ethnically and to some extent religiously diverse as well, I think it has a much clearer ethno religious majority than Iraq ever did. Which makes the kind of civil war that Iraq ended up in unlikely in Iran. For you might, of course, have different forms of civic conflict if a power vacuum arose. The other, perhaps, is that it seems to me that the goals that both Israel and the United States are pursuing in Iran this time around are quite different. At the time of the Iraq War, both the United States obviously planned from the beginning to have boots on the ground for some amount of time. They didn't anticipate it being for as long as American troops stayed in Iraq, but they certainly thought that they would physically invade the country. That was part of the plan from the beginning. And there was this kind of idea that America would impose an American style or Western style democracy that would be a kind of shining example to other countries in the Middle East. And it was kind of buttressed by a certain hopeful set of ideas about how easily you can export democracy to other places. It seems to me that even though Netanyahu and Trump may in various ways hope that the humiliation of Iran might be the end of the regime, they're certainly not proposing to send ground troops to occupy Iran, which would be a vastly more complicated and costly and deadly undertaking. And I don't think that either of these countries really think that they're going to go and send over advisors and write the new constitution of a country. And so where are the perils and where are the dissimilarities here? Is Iraq actually a useful metaphor in terms of how to think about this, or is the nature of this country very differently and that of course, also goes to some domestic questions. We might ask about how this will impact the popularity of Donald Trump. There's such worlds between them politically, and at this point, just temporarily, that it's easy to forget that the last Republican president before Donald Trump was George W. Bush. And George W. Bush's presidency certainly went south. Bush certainly became unpopular in good part because of the failure in Iraq. Trump claims to have learned that lessons said in his inaugural address that he was going to measure in part by the wars that he doesn't start. I think there's a part of Trump's base that was very worried, as he was clearly contemplating joining this war against Iran, that he was giving up on those lessons. I think perhaps some people on the left hoped that, in a way, this might deal a blow to Trump's popularity. But it seems to me that he's taken quite a different approach to this, which is send in a bunch of big bombs, do some actual damage to the Iranian nuclear program, and declare victory very, very quickly. That's a very different kind of war. And it might actually allow Trump to go around saying that I'm the first American president in 25 years who's won a war which could be quite popular with the American public, actually. So, both in substantive terms, what you think of this comparison that people are making to Iraq, and I guess in more American domestic politics terms, how do you think this will impact Trump's presidency?
- [16:43]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that actually we did learn a lesson from Iraq that is playing out right now, which is don't get involved in the domestic politics of countries in the Middle east and think that you can shape their outcome. I think that's something that we've learned very painfully, and Trump is certainly not going to try to do that. Israel, even less, has the ability to really shape events in a successor regime, and that's a healthy lesson. I don't know of anybody that thinks that we're going to repeat our efforts, you know, to actually create a democratic regime in Iran the way we tried to do in Iraq. I mean, that's just kind of lunacy at this point. The impact on American politics is going to be. I mean, it's one of those things that puts me in a bind, because it does seem to me that Trump could come out of this looking very, very good, that there's a kind of minimal willingness to take risks, that he says he's going to do something he actually does produces a result that actually looks pretty good in the short run. And I think it's going to increase his popularity and legitimacy immensely. And I think that's not good for the United States, but it's a good outcome, you know, in terms of foreign policy. It's funny, because I kind of thought that one of Trump's big vulnerabilities is that, you know, he's not a strategic thinker, and, you know, he's never been tested in a genuine crisis, and he was not likely to come out of it looking good. He could come out of this one looking pretty, you know, pretty successful. I think that in the longer run, if there's not a kind of orderly succession that leads to stability in Iran and that it continues to be a source of terrorism and. And, you know, draws other countries in and that sort of thing, in the longer run, he could look, you know, he could look foolish. But I. I just think that in the short run and in a cycle that is attuned with American politics, he could actually benefit from this quite, quite substantially.
- [18:59]
Yasha Munk
Yeah, I mean, that's at least at this stoic of a conflict, what I think may happen as well. Now, of course, that depends on whether the cessation of hostilities between Iran and Israel holds. You know, as we're recording this,
- [19:17]
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- [19:17]
Yasha Munk
looks as though the ceasefire may break down. It may also very well get back on track. It's a little bit hard to know. And, of course, one question is what the situation is going to be in two days. Another question entirely is what's going to be the case in two weeks or two months. But if Trump is able to say to the American people, I took decisive action, I eliminated a nuclear threat both to us and to our ally, and then I got out and that's it. All that happened in response that the Iranian bombed our military base in Qatar, where there was no fatalities, and they kind of give us warning of it anyway, and that's about it, then that's obviously going to strengthen his domestic standing. I guess the other question to ask is about Israel. And there, too, there's a question about whether the apparent success of his mission will strengthen Benjamin Netanyahu, who was politically on the ropes once again before he decided to start this war with Iran. He now may very well be strengthened his domestic politics. And there's a broader question. I mean, Israel, on the one hand, now looks stronger and safer than it has done in a very long time. It has brought under control, not just Iranian proxies in Lebanon, obviously, in the Gaza Strip, but also very significantly weakened an Iranian regime that was extremely hostile to the country. At the same time, it has lost a lot of support in the international community, including among its allies. You see Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, making suggestions that he will soon recognize a Palestinian state. A number of European countries like Spain have already done that in the last years. And it just looks increasingly as though Israel is staking its midterm and long term survival on the ability to militarily dwarf its neighbors for the indefinite future. And even though it clearly is capable of doing that right now, I think there's just real questions about how wise a bet that is strategically in the long run, especially if the actions it takes, you know, thanks to its military superiority at this point, are part of what erodes the alliances and partnerships that have kept it safe in the past.
- [21:51]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, I think that in the case of both the United States and Israel, the big danger right now is to be, as Stalin said, dizzy with success, having succeeded in defeating enemies unexpectedly. You know, I'm sure Netanyahu and the Israelis feel pretty unconstrained that they can use their military power without any real fear of, you know, blowback, certainly in the short run. And Trump may feel that way also and, you know, may try to use that American power in other theaters in ways that aren't going to be as successful. So I think that's kind of the main, I think for Israel, you know, the real issue is, I mean, they never had, you know, that strong support in Europe in the first place. But I think that the attitudes of young Americans towards Israel are really, really different. And they've been really damaged by the war in Gaza. And, you know, at the moment, that's not going to endanger the kind of military and economic support that, that the United States gives Israel. But in the long run, it's going to erode that support. It's already the case, I think, that Israel has been sucked into the partisan divide in the United States with very strong support coming from conservative Republicans and a lot of active hostility coming from the left wing of the Democratic Party party. And I don't see that reversing at any time in the future. I just think that that's going to be something that Israel is going to have to live with, and therefore they're going to fear the election of a Democratic president that may go back to a much more neutral and much less supportive posture towards them. So I would say that's kind of the main danger that they face at the moment.
- [23:54]
Yasha Munk
Yeah. And it's one thing for Israel to lose the support of various European countries that have always been rather lukewarm in their relationship to Israel. If in the future you had a US President who really is very critical of America's alliance of Israel and is actually willing to cut off some key elements of it, that would pose a much more significant danger to the country. And I agree with you that some of the actions that Israel is taking today because its leadership thinks, rightly or perhaps wrongly, that that's what it takes to keep the country safe in the short run, risk undermining that support in the mid and long run, by the way.
- [24:36]
Francis Fukuyama
So one long term thing that the Israelis need to worry about is among the things they could do if they really get dizzy with success is something that I think a lot of right wing Israelis have wanted for some time, which is basically to declare sovereignty over the West Bank. And at that point, they've got two choices. They can actually try to expel the Palestinian population. They already want to try to do that in Gaza, or they could just frankly admit that Palestinians are there, but they're not going to have the rights that Arab Israelis have enjoyed up to this point. And at that point, Israel actually begins to look like what its enemies have accused it of being, which is an apartheid state where you basically deny the premise of equal dignity of all people regardless of ethnicity, and you say, well, the Arabs are at a lower status. And I think that in the long run, this is very bad for US Israeli relations because essentially, if you're not Jewish, why do you support Israel? Well, I mean, conservative Christians have their own, I think, kind of nutty reasons for doing this. But you know, for more secular Americans, I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that Israel was the only genuine democracy in the entire Middle east and that, you know, as a fellow democracy, we owed Israel support. But if they moved to being more formally, you know, a very illiberal democracy where the democracy only applies to the Jewish part of the population, you know, it raises a real legitimacy question for them. And I think that it's, you know, I certainly wouldn't want to go there if I were an Israeli. But, you know, that certainly is the impetus for many of the, you know, the people on the Israeli right.
- [26:35]
Yasha Munk
Let's assess a little bit where we at in the United States. We are about five months into Donald Trump's first term, so there's a lot of it yet left to go about three years and seven months. So we're still very much in the early stages. How worried are you now compared to the last conversations we had about Trump's presidency? I think on the One side, you see some of the kind of scenarios that people had warned about starting to play out. One of the concerns that democracy watchers had from the beginning was that there might be some form of clash between the forces of order and protesters, and that that might lead Donald Trump to call out the National Guard in order to, quote, unquote, restore order, and that that could get out of hand very quickly. We had some so far, comparatively mild version compared to the fierce of that play out in Los Angeles. But it very clearly is a sign that those exact scenarios may be in the offing. On the other hand, it feels a little bit as though the shine has come off the Trump presidency. He actually continues to be relatively popular. When I checked, just before recording this, in Nate Silver's average, he was down by about five or six points in the approval ratings. So he's certainly popular more than he is popular. But those are not terrible numbers. Those are better numbers than a number of presidents had at the same time, at the same stage in their presidencies. But certainly the sense that I think the first hundred or perhaps fifty days of presidency gave, that there is this master plan for how to broaden the power of the presidency for all of the things that the executive is going to do, for how it's just going to completely transform American life and American politics feels like it has run aground a little bit. It's perhaps inevitable that the kind of speed and the radicalism of the first hundred days of the administration can't be kept up for four years. But it certainly has felt in the last 50 or so days as though the speed with which things are happening is slowing down, as though some of roadblocks from the federal courts which have held up so far, are making it harder for the administration to actually go full speed ahead with some of the things that they've wanted to do. So I've been a little bit confused about how to think about the balance between those two different things. On the one hand, I think the growing indications that Trump really is very impatient with some of the limits on his power. On the other hand, the fact that the sort of extent of the speed and frankly, the efficacy with which the administration moved in the very first days of its reign seems to have slightly subsided. How are you making sense of this moment, Frank?
- [29:42]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think it's subsided. I think, however, that the Middle east is actually going to. I'm assuming that his popularity is going to recover pretty substantially as a result of the attack on Iran. That might fade away over time. But I do think that he's helped himself in just seeming decisive and being a president can get things done. I think that in terms of the overall popular reaction to his presidency, it's still going to depend on a lot of the factors that we talked about earlier, particularly the economic ones. The 90 day tariff deadline is coming up in, well, what is it now? We're already on the 24th of June, so the deadline is going to expire in a couple of weeks. As far as I can tell, he hasn't really negotiated any bilateral deals with anybody. And then he faces this prospect of does he chicken out or does he double down? If he doubles down, you're going to have a lot of negative economic consequences. You're also seeing him back down on a lot of the deportations because it's really been devastating in meatpacking hospitality, a lot of other, you know, domains in the economy. And he's kind of recognized that that's hurting people that are who are in his base. And therefore he's, you know, been granting exceptions and cutouts and so forth. And so it could be that, you know, he will actually chicken out on a lot of the more, you know, the harsher aspects of his threatened, you know, policies. But I don't really.
- [31:35]
Yasha Munk
It's one of those strange things where it seems like the less he does, the more popular he might end up being. The stock markets are now up since the beginning of the year, but up since Trump took office. They're not quite at record highs, but they're doing very well. The American economy may have slightly suffered because of the unpredictability and the chaos instilled by Liberation Day, but it seems to be chugging along at a somewhat decent pace. So if he somehow declares victory after 100 day pause and passes off the five and a half bilateral trade deals that he's instituted and says, that is all I was hoping for. And there we go. Then he might be able to benefit from a relatively thriving economy and come out of this relatively well. If of course, a few weeks from now he says, well, we have these five and a half trade deals and congratulations to these countries, but everybody else is back to having these extremely high tariffs and the stock market plunges again and all of the Wall street people who seem to be betting on the idea of taco of Trump always chickens out are sitting there with juevers on their face that ironically might then harm Trump quite a lot. So I guess is it too simple to say that if Trump sits back and doesn't do very much for the next years he might actually end up being quite popular and then ironically be able to expand his power in some of the ways that he wants. But if he pursues some of his ideological goals, he might end up being unpopular and that might actually make it much harder for him to reach those other goals. Is there a kind of tension here between his ideological views and his desire to expand his power?
- [33:39]
Francis Fukuyama
No, I think that's right. I think that if he does chicken out, that's probably good for him. It's going to take away this major threat of, you know, tanking the economy and like in the first term people will say, well, you know, things he threatened a lot, but in the end, you know, it wasn't so terrible. And that might ease the pressure on some of the institutional changes that he's seeking in terms of the power of the presidency. So, yeah, I think that that's definitely, that's definitely a threat.
- [34:16]
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- [35:18]
Yasha Munk
How about some of the immigration things? So there's obviously significant concern that the Trump administration was ignoring some lower court rulings on immigration. They seem to mostly have desisted from that strategy. The person that they deported to El Salvador under supposed suspicion that he was a member of a gang back in the United States, and there's an ordinary set of court proceedings about him. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student who was being held, you know, has been released and is in New York. The federal government is trying to get him deported, but they're doing that, you know, in an ordinary court process while he is with his family in New York City. So it seems as though, on the one hand, the administration is, you know, trying to take very tough action on immigration, but on the other hand, seems for now at least, to have decided that they're not at this moment, seeking a full frontal confrontation with the courts, where they're simply saying, we're not going to listen to what the courts tell us or to ways they're trying to constrain us on immigration. How do you think this immigration policy is playing out? And how will that shape Trump's presidency?
- [36:50]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, there's one scenario that actually could lead to a pretty good outcome that seems to me conceivable at this point. The problem with immigration reform, comprehensive immigration reform, at all the moments it's been tried, the last big one was during the George W. Bush administration was the question of so called amnesty or giving undocumented people a path towards citizenship, which was an absolute no, no for conservative Republicans. And I think the experience of what's going on in several of these industries that are highly dependent on immigrant, undocumented immigrant workers is actually beginning to make a case that conservatives may recognize that you've got these people, they're not criminals, they've been working hard, they've got families and were really dependent on their labor. And, you know, that might set up a ground for moving in the direction of, you know, some way of actually, you know, legalizing them. Now, I think if Trump were really smart and strategic about this, he would take that up and you might actually get this miracle of, you know, something like comprehensive immigration reform under the sky. The trouble is that there are other people, you know, like Steve Miller and, you know, Bannon and other people in his orbit that just seem hostile to foreigners. I mean, they've also been doing this stuff that to me is just inconceivable, like telling green card holders not to leave the country because they may not be allowed back in by saying that, you know, they want to deport, you know, even people that are legally in the country or making life as difficult as possible. You know, the threats against universities not to accept foreign students. I mean, where does that come from except for this, you know, just very nasty nativist desire not to have foreigners in the United States. And so there's also that side of this administration, and I think they may well be at war. With one another. And so, again, it's a little hard to know which of these forces is going to be dominant.
- [39:17]
Yasha Munk
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about the first five months of the Trump administration, in my mind, is the way in which he's really failed to deliver on what I called aspirational populism. When you look at how Trump got reelected In November of 2024, it was obviously, and we've mentioned this a lot in this podcast, in good part by expanding the traditional base of a Republican Party to include a lot of young voters, a lot of Latinos, a lot of other demographic groups that historically have not voted for the Republican Party in large numbers. And I've argued, for example, in conversation with Ali Hochschild, that one way to understand that is to tell a different kind of deep story of what motivates those voters. In 2016, we used to go back and say, say, old white men who are just nostalgic for the past and want things to go back to how they were. I was always somewhat critical of that reading of what was happening, but it really is, I think, untenable. When you look at who voted for Trump in 2024, I think a lot of those were people who were saying, hey, my life is better than that of my parents and better than that of my grandparents. And I want somebody who gives me even more opportunity. I want somebody who allows me to start a small business and really thrive and save a bunch of money on taxes if I'm doing well. I want somebody who perhaps will take America to Mars with his alliance with Elon Musk and some of the kind of tech visionaries. And it's just striking to me that Trump has mostly given up on those voters. He's given up on those voters with a budget that is very unpopular because it hands out relief to the very richest Americans, but is basically negative on the incomes of a vast majority of
- [41:03]
Francis Fukuyama
Americans, including a lot of the rural poor white voters that are really the core of the MAGA base.
- [41:13]
Yasha Munk
That's an interesting point, actually. So it doesn't do anything for those young Latinos, for example, who moved into Trump's column in November 2024. But nor does it actually support the kind of co Constitution constituency that was with Trump from the beginning. That's a very good point. Obviously, his alliance with Elon Musk has broken up in an interesting way, this idea that he's going to have the best and the brightest from Silicon Valley run this aspirational playbook about what the American government could be and what the United States could achieve seems to have mostly gone away. And then on immigration, as you're saying, there's a majority of Americans who want better control over southern border, who might be open to some amount of more energetic deportations, and that includes a lot of Latino voters. But the kind of apparent hostility just to most foreign born Americans that you feel emanating from people like Stephen Miller in the administration is just a minority position in this country. And it certainly is a minority position among some of those new voter groups that had moved towards Trump. And so it is interesting that what I think a populist movement in America in 2025 in some sense wants to be, which is to appeal to this multiracial working class constituency, is not something that Trump has been very effective at actually putting into political practice in the first part of his presidency.
- [42:48]
Francis Fukuyama
No, that's right. I guess the question is whether his basic political instincts are going to lead him to a more moderate position, kind of recognizing that he does need to hold on to those new voters. And that's one respect in which he is not an ideologue. I mean, he's just kind of infinitely opportunistic and he may perceive that, you know, this is not a winning position, but, you know, we'll have to see.
- [43:14]
Yasha Munk
I also wanted to ask you about a completely different topic. You've written, very interestingly both about how much you have enjoyed using AI, how powerful a tool you think it is, and more recently about how you've come to be much more concerned than you had been previously about the danger that AI poses, about the ways in which it might really elude the control of humans, in particular because of something called agentic AI. Tell us about why you've become so much more concerned of late.
- [43:50]
Francis Fukuyama
You know, I constantly get asked by journalists my opinions about AI, and I have been avoiding talking about that for a very long time. But I've started to actually read and think much more seriously about the problem. And I actually guess that I now see why the more extreme fears that people have are actually something we ought to worry about. And in fact, we're very far from, I think, actually comprehending what the nature of that threat is. So the, the, the kinds of dangers that are posed by AI. There's, there's two sorts. So one is simply an acceleration of what we've seen with other forms of technology, which is that AI will allow, you know, targeted advertising, it will allow cybercrime, it will allow all sorts of, you know, deep fakes that will further undermine the trust that people have in the media in, you know, kind of normal democratic discourse which really requires agreement on basic fact, you know, so all of that is happening. I'm really struck, you know, in my Instagram feed I would say that 50% of the videos there are deep fakes. You know, maybe it just reflects the kind of stuff that I, I tend to, you know, because the algorithm gives you more of whatever you start watching. But, you know, for example, there's this genre of videos where some guy in a Dodge Ram TRX souped up pickup truck runs over a bunch of police officers. And first of all, it's, it's kind of creepy that there's a segment of the population out there that really wants to be able to run over police officers in these souped up trucks. But they're obviously fake videos. You know, I mean, they look very realistic at first, but they're obviously fake. There's another genre of cruise ships crashing into one another and, you know, ripping big holes in their sides of each other. There's another genre of, you know, tourists.
- [46:08]
Yasha Munk
We're learning a lot about your taste because I don't get any of these videos on Instagram, but it's very interesting, right?
- [46:13]
Francis Fukuyama
So there's another genre where you have all these tourists on a beach and then a tsunami comes and washes them all away. So that's already happening. And that I think is going to accelerate. But the real problem are these fears that are more existential that AI could wipe out the human race at a certain point. And this is the one I never really understood because it seemed to me that you'd always be able to hit a kill switch for this type of AI. But it does seem to me now that I see much more clearly a path by which you could get to that point and it could be coming much, much more quickly than people recognize.
- [46:59]
Yasha Munk
And that's to do with this idea of agentic AI, right? Explain to our listeners how agentic AIs is different from just I type a question into ChatGPT, right?
- [47:11]
Francis Fukuyama
So agentic AI is where you actually delegate authority to an AI to make decisions that would normally be made by a human being. And in a certain way we already do that, right? That we have a lot of systems that monitor traffic and if they see something outlandish appearing on social media, they, you know, they, without any human intervention, they correct that. But this comes out of my thinking about the problem of delegation. This is one of the things I'm going to write much more about in this memoir that I'm working on. But I think that the problem of delegation is the central problem in politics. Every hierarchical organization needs to delegate authority because the problem is that it's the agents in a principal agent relationship that really oftentimes have the greatest knowledge and the ability to act quickly and so forth. And so if you try to control everything from the top, you're simply not going to have a successful organization. And this is true in virtually every human organization. So we are increasingly delegating authority, Authority to agentic AIs to make decisions on our behalf. And I just think that that's going to grow because they know much more. If you hit AGI, artificial general intelligence, which some very smart people think is going to happen within the next few years, you'll basically be having these agentic AI agents that are as capable and much, much more knowledgeable. Knowledgeable than any, than any human being. But the other kind of creepy thing that I don't think people have quite taken aboard is that at the cutting edge of AI today, the most sophisticated AI systems, you know, the ones that people are investing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in, are not being programmed by anybody. It's not like you got a bunch of software engineers that are saying, okay, we want a machine that will do X, Y and Z and not do, you know, A, B and C. They're actually, you know, the metaphor that's used is that they're growing, meaning that these machines are basically programming themselves, that they, you know, they're given a base set of instructions and, you know, they have a lot of knowledge that they can take in. They take in more knowledge, they try things, and if it works, you know, they do more of that. And if it doesn't work, they stop doing it. But that's not being controlled by anybody. It's controlled by those machines themselves. And so when you talk about delegating to an AI, you don't actually know whether you can trust the AI. And there's all these scenarios. For example, if AI start talking to one another, they invent a language that only they understand. And so you're not actually going to have human beings that know what they're saying to one another. There are scenarios where they can exfiltrate themselves so that someone decides that this AI is doing something dangerous and you want to shut it off, but they've actually already inserted themselves into other, you know, computer systems that you don't know about. And I think that there are these anecdotal cases where, you know, these AIs are doing stuff that nobody expects. I mean, this is the experience I think that we've all had with ChatGPT comes up with stuff that is very surprising. You don't know where they got this idea, but this is something that is happening to an increasing extent with these machines. And so it just seems to me that if you know anything about the way that human organizations work, you know that over time they delegate more and more authority to lower levels of a hierarchy. And this is already happening with AI and it's going to continue to happen. You know, you're already seeing this in terms of military affairs. So you know, we've said for some time now that there's always going to be a human in a loop before a machine can kill another human being. That's being violated as we speak. I mean, the drones that are being used by Russia and Ukraine are controlled by AI programs where there is no human in the loop, you know, that they, they can recognize a hostile target and they can just decide on their own to, to, to destroy it. Right. So you're already seeing examples of delegation of lethal, you know, the use of lethal force, you know, as, as we speak. And I just don't see how this is, you know, this, this, you know, this, they refer to this as the loss of control problem with, you know, advanced AI. And I just don't see how this isn't going to get a lot worse as time, time goes on. So this is, I think the thing that we, you know, that we really need to worry about the other stuff, you know, all the deep fakes that's happening and I think people are fully aware of it. But you know, the more serious long term threats are out there and they're probably going to come sooner than we realize.
- [52:29]
Yasha Munk
I'm really struck in this moment by how AI is both kind of in the background of every conversation and still I think actually underestimated as a force that is just going to completely reshape human life in society. And I'm struck by how many people have this reaction of oh, I asked ChatGPT to look up some quote and hallucinated an answer. So it really can't do anything. The number of people who really, I think are sleeping on the extent of a capacities that these systems now have. I think there's some real cope of people saying these systems aren't really intelligent because they're just these stochastic parrots, right? They're just these algorithms. There's just this kind of physical base for how they give these answers. And so therefore it's not real intelligence, which of course ignores the fact that at some level of description which we are still not fully capable of rendering about our own brains, those are machines made of matter as well. So some of those arguments that are used to draw the conclusion that suppose the AI is not really intelligent could actually be applied just as well to humans, and I think would be just as misleading in the case of humans. And then I think this dimension that you're drawing our attention to of agentic AI is something that is just outside of the experience of most users. That is not how most people interact with ChatGPT or whatever other interface they may have experimented with. And so it's really outside of their imagination. I hesitate to ask you what we should do about that because that's.
- [54:13]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, well, I mean, one thing I didn't mention is that it's going to be really hard to do anything about it because of geopolitics and also just competition within, you know, that whole sector, that the advantages of getting to AGI first are going to be really, really huge. Both China and the United States are racing, you know, towards that. And, you know, the constraints that we want to put on, you know, the degree to which we delegate, you know, authority to agents, AI agents, is only going to slow us down in that race. And that's why I'm now kind of pessimistic about whether we can control this, because they're going to be countervailing pressures to, you know, get there first that are already very, very powerful. So I don't know what's going to happen, but I. I think that this is, you know, this is going to be kind of the chief worry, you know, in. In the coming years that these systems are so powerful and that we are actually losing control of them.
- [55:18]
Yasha Munk
We should have a real conversation about this on the podcast. Perhaps we can ask some AI expert to join us for that conversation, really go in depth, just to put a bow on it for today. If people want to understand this better, if listeners are a little bit skeptical of what you're saying or they just feel lost when it comes to AI, what can they do to experiment with AI by themselves to give them a sense of those capacities? What can they read, what can they listen to? What is a good way to get smarter on this topic?
- [55:48]
Francis Fukuyama
Okay, so if you go on YouTube and you search for a couple of interviews with Geoffrey Hinton, Hinton is one of. He's called one of the godfathers of AI because he, some years ago, design some of the fundamental building blocks of what's become things like ChatGPT. And he's got an enormous amount of credibility. And he lays out, I think, very clearly what some of the dangers are, including these more existential threats. And I think that's probably a good place to start because. Because, you know, he. I think, you know, you go to someone like Sam Altman, it's not helpful because he's got so many mixed motives, right. He's got a commercial interest. He wants to downplay the dangers, you know, and I don't think that's going to be very reliable. Someone like Hinton, you know, his career is largely done, and I think that he is much more credible in terms of talking, thinking sensibly about, you know, what the future may hold. So that's my recommendation.
- [57:00]
Yasha Munk
Frank, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.
- [57:03]
Francis Fukuyama
Okay. Thank you. My pleasure. As always.
- [57:07]
Yasha Munk
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like, rate the show on itunes. Tell your friends all about it. Share it on Facebook or Twitter. And for finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [57:34]
Francis Fukuyama
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.