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00:00The political scientist and political theorist Francis Fukuyama made waves in 1989 with a book called
00:05The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama worked in the State Department under President
00:12George H.W. Bush on the policy planning staffs and he was one of many prominent neoconservatives,
00:17but he broke ranks with them in 2003 over the invasion of Iraq. Now Fukuyama is out with a new
00:22book, a memoir about his intellectual evolution, and we asked him about how he's thinking about
00:27current conflicts in the world, including the war with Iran. We're at a moment now, several months
00:32into this conflict with Iran, where there is still a conversation in some quarters about regime change
00:38in Iran. And I'm curious, given that interest that you have, given your experience kind of
00:44dissociating yourself from colleagues and friends who supported the invasion of Iraq, how you're
00:49thinking about the prospect, yes, of there being some kind of regime change in Iran and just about
00:54that war more generally? Well, I think the premise that you need regime change to really solve the
01:00nuclear problem is correct, because as long as you have the IRGC and, you know, that particular form
01:07of Islamic regime running the country, you're never going to be sure that it's any commitment it makes
01:13to getting rid of nuclear weapons is going to be kept. That being said, it's really hard to change
01:22regime. And you really can't change it just by bombing. Air power is very limited in the kinds of
01:27political effects that it can bring about. And since the United States doesn't want to put boots on the
01:32ground, I think we're going to be floundering in a way and trying to affect things within Iran.
01:38How much parallelism is there as you see it to what happened back in 2003 in terms of the amount
01:43of
01:43foresight or lack thereof going into this conflict?
01:45This is what's so maddening. You know, I think that we learned a lot of lessons in both Afghanistan and
01:51Iraq.
01:51Beginning with what I just said, that you can't just bring about political change through air power.
01:58Even with boots on the ground, it's very difficult for outsiders to do that. And it's as if we have
02:03to learn these lessons all over again and make the same mistakes all over again.
02:08We've had a number of guests on the program, diplomats, academics, who have talked about
02:14their fear that Vladimir Putin, somebody that I know you've studied and followed for a long time,
02:19might be backed into a corner as we approach the fifth-year mark of this full-on incursion of
02:24Ukraine. And they're worried about him using a nuclear weapon. Given what you've observed about
02:29his behavior, how he's waged this war, how he's exhibited venturism elsewhere in the world,
02:35do you share those fears?
02:37Well, look, I think anytime you're dealing with a nuclear power, you have to take that possibility
02:41seriously. But I think that if you observe his behavior, he's actually really cautious
02:47about crossing that particular red line. He's gotten a lot of mileage by suggesting he might
02:52do that. I think the Biden administration really pulled back on a lot of weapons to Ukraine because
02:57of that fear. But I think it was actually an exaggerated fear. I mean, he knows if he uses
03:02nuclear weapons, then all bets are off in terms of what's going to happen to his country.
03:07And so I think that's really not going to be in the cards, even with a real deterioration of the
03:14situation in Ukraine.
03:16You call yourself a Wilsonian realist. How do you define that term?
03:21Well, I think that I believe in terms of the ends of American foreign policy, we ought to be
03:27supporting other democracies. Democratic solidarity was very important in the period after the
03:35Second World War. It created this liberal international order that was very peaceful and prosperous.
03:42But the way that you go about doing that, I think, is not military. I mean, obviously,
03:47you have to have NATO to defend yourself against conventional powers like Russia. But basically,
03:54the power of democracy is in its example. It's what's called soft power. I think that the United
04:01States really was influential because people looked up to it. People said, you know, I want my country
04:07to be a democracy like the United States. And, you know, that's, I think, what's become problematic in the
04:14last few years.
04:15Let me linger on that. You quote Tocqueville in the book, who talked a lot about American exceptionalism.
04:20So sticking with soft power here, we've seen the evisceration and end of USAID, the real
04:25handicapping of soft power. Where does that leave the United States today?
04:30Well, I think that very few people are going to want to imitate the United States in the way,
04:35you know, my students, my Chinese students 20 years ago, all said they wanted China to be like
04:41the United States. None of them say that anymore. And in fact, you know, if you have a president that
04:47talks about grabbing Greenland, there are other authoritarian leaders around the world that would
04:52like to grab territory and, you know, that their neighbors hold. So it's not setting a very good
04:57example, I think, for any kind of world order. We had a norm after 1945 that you don't mobilize an
05:05army and march it across an international border and grab somebody's territory. That was violated by
05:10Putin. But, you know, we now have a United States that seems to be interested in grabbing Greenland or
05:16Panama or, you know, other parts of the world. And that's not, I think, that's really undermining that
05:22norm. You'll forgive me for paraphrasing you, but you say the end of America's fixation with
05:27exceptionalism might not be a bad thing. Why is that? Well, I think that we had this period of
05:35American hegemony from the fall of the Berlin Wall really up until about the financial crisis in 2008.
05:41And I think we misused our power. I mean, I think the invasion of Iraq was a big mistake. And
05:48it set off,
05:48it didn't really stabilize the area. It certainly destabilized American politics.
05:54And I think that, you know, if we had been more moderate in that period, we could have relied on
05:59our soft power really to do the heavy lifting. But instead, we, you know, we used hard power and we're
06:06still paying a price for that. Your book is a memoir and part, if you'll allow me, intellectual
06:13autobiography. You're charting through your scholarly growth over your life here. And something that
06:19comes up time and time again is your encouragement to young people in particular to read the classics,
06:24read classical philosophy. Make the case to viewers and to listeners why that is so important in this
06:30day and age. Well, I think that everybody has to start with a certain view about what's really
06:37important and what are the fundamental values that we want to pursue. And, you know, I started my
06:43undergraduate career taking a seminar on Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic asks this very basic
06:50question, what is justice? So the philosopher Socrates goes through several alternative definitions
06:56of justice, including, you know, it's just might makes right. And he tries to use reason to come up
07:03with a better, more sophisticated understanding. And so I think, you know, we're so pre-professional
07:09these days in our education. We want to make sure we land that great job at the end of four
07:14years of
07:15college. And we never take the time to actually think about these big questions. What is justice?
07:20What is human nature? You know, how does man interact with the rest of, you know, creation? And I think
07:27we
07:27need to do that in our, you know, that's what a liberal education ought to be about.
07:31You were a public policy practitioner. You became an academician. You were at
07:35George Mason and SAIS. Now you're at Stanford. Do you find students warming to that idea? How
07:40difficult is it to convince your students today that these ideas, these books, these texts are
07:45worth investing time in? I think there's a hunger for it. You know, there really was this period
07:51beginning in the 1980s where there was a rejection of a basic core course about Western civilization
07:59beginning at Stanford. That happened in the late 1980s with Jesse Jackson and so forth. I think that
08:05that was a big mistake because I don't think that you can be a good citizen of a constitutional
08:12democracy like the United States unless you have some grounding about where these ideas came from
08:18and how you can use reason to, you know, shape your understanding of what a good political
08:23institution is. I'd love to end by talking about AI and you're somebody who builds computers. You're a
08:29hobbyist computer maker. You program. You're somebody who's invested in technology. How do you think
08:35about the rate of technological change that we're experiencing right now? So much of what we hear
08:40certainly from Silicon Valley where you live is we're on the cusp of a transformative new
08:45technology. Do you feel that way? Are you living it that way? How do you think about AI?
08:49Yeah. Well, living in Silicon Valley, I don't think you can avoid it. You know, some technological
08:53revolutions aren't really. I think the whole crypto blockchain stuff was basically a big scam.
09:01But this one is real and it's going to have really huge consequences. And the problem with a technology
09:06that moves that fast is that the society can't adjust quickly enough. I mean, for example,
09:12people will say, OK, we've got a dangerous technology. We ought to regulate it. But the government
09:18has does not remotely have the capacity to regulate something that's this big and this
09:23fast moving. So I think it's going to be a real problem going forward. You're getting at something
09:28you highlight in the book, and that is this differential between technological change or
09:31the pace thereof and normative change. Are we experiencing kind of something different?
09:37Oh, absolutely. No, absolutely. I think that even to get your head around the way that this
09:43technology is going to change the way we live is difficult because it's hard to understand the
09:48technology itself. You know, I think even what I think is the most troublesome is that even the
09:54people that make these machines don't really understand how they work. You know, a computer
09:59scientist today is sort of like a zoologist that's confronting this new creature, and they don't quite
10:04understand how it behaves and so forth. And so they have to do experiments with it, you know,
10:09feed it a different kind of food and see how it, you know, behaves afterwards. And that
10:14indicates, you know, I think how radically different this is from previous technologies.
10:18The book is In the Realm of the Last Man, a nod to an earlier book you wrote that was
10:22quite
10:22successful, The End of History and the Last Man. This is a Nietzschean term. The last man
10:27is kind of the antithesis of the Ubermensch in Nietzsche's work. I was thinking about this in the context of
10:32AI
10:32and what were promised by the creators or the proponents of this technology, that there's going to be a life
10:37in
10:37which we're not going to have to work as hard on so many of the tasks that govern our day
10:41-to-day
10:42lives. How do you think about the last man in the context of AI? This is perhaps leading us to
10:47a
10:47world in which we're not going to have to be super engaged with the world around us or the rigor
10:51of
10:51ideas that we've been talking about. Yeah, and I don't think that kind of world is going to make
10:54people happy. I think that you get your basic pride and self-esteem from the fact that you have a
11:00job,
11:00that society pays you to do something that society thinks is useful. And if you have machines that are
11:07doing all that work and you're just free to live on universal basic income, what kind of pride are
11:13you going to have in your existence? I think that's really the big challenge that lies ahead of us.
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