Francis Fukuyama on War in the Middle East

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. My guest today is Francis Fukuyama.

I asked Frank to come back on the podcast to talk about the recent uh conflict in the Middle East, the Israeli, and then the US strikes on Iran. uh 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 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 his 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.

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