Francis Fukuyama on Trump’s War With Iran

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. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Well, when I woke up on Saturday morning to learn that the United States and Israel had um uh flown major strikes on Iran and when I learned over the course of the day that uh it seems likely that they have uh succeeded in killing uh Ayatollah Khomeini, um I immediately wanted to get uh a a wiser perspective on these events from my friend Francis Fukuyama and so I emailed him and asked whether he would agree to do a podcast in Substack live.

Um, and he agreed to do that. Um, so this is what we're recording today, slightly out of schedule day earlier than we would normally release our midweek episode. We talked about the nature of these strikes, what the likely future is for Iran, the risk of a broader regional war, um, what position Israel is in uh a number of years after October 7th and how its international uh standing has evolved, how it has achieved a number of big military successes, but also seen its international standing and reputation significantly erode. And finally, in the last part of this conversation, we talked about what all of this means for domestic American politics.

I asked Frank how the natural experiment that he diagnosed in late 2016 and early 2017 is going. Whether it turns out that a historically grown strong political culture and a well-written constitution is enough to maintain democracy, or whether somebody who has taken as extreme steps to undermine that political order as Donald Trump is likely to succeed. in doing so. Spoiler alert, Frank is relatively optimistic.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (39 minutes, 6,291 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.