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Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, author, and the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Fukuyama’s notable works include The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. You can find his blog, “Frankly Fukuyama,” at Persuasion.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss talks of a ceasefire in Ukraine and what this means, what the impact of Donald Trump’s foreign policy might be on the Far East, and why we should be concerned by Trump’s domestic policy.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We last spoke on this podcast a few days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, at a time when it was already becoming clear that the new administration would be quite energetic—he’d signed over 100 executive orders in the first few hours and so on. But I think even at that point, we wouldn't have predicted just how much would happen in the following six weeks. So nearly two months on from Trump's inauguration, what do you think have been the most important developments? What concerns you the most? Are there any bright spots?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it's a little bit hard to know where to begin because virtually everything concerns me. I think there have been massive changes in America's direction, both internationally and domestically. If we just begin with the international, I think that the United States has, after a period of some 70 years, checked out of the Western democratic alliance and has aligned itself with Russia and other authoritarian countries in a very peculiar way that just seems to stem from Trump's own personal resentments. I think that the evidence for this has been unfortunately very clear. We voted with Russia at the UN. Even China abstained, but Russia, Nicaragua, Cuba all voted against a resolution condemning Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. Then you had that disastrous meeting in the Oval Office where Volodymyr Zelenskyy was dressed down by the vice president, humiliated in front of the cameras. I don't think there's ever been an Oval Office meeting where that was done so deliberately.
There was an announcement that we're cutting off intelligence sharing with Ukraine, that we're stopping the weapons flow. That may have been started again, but we don't really know since the administration is very unpredictable. So in what I regard as the major fight, a literal war between a democratic regime and an authoritarian regime, we've taken the side of the authoritarian regime. The realization, I think, has finally sunk in with a lot of Europeans that things are not going to snap back to normal, that even if a Democrat is elected once again in 2028, something has changed fundamentally about the United States, and they cannot rely on the American guarantee in the future. That’s going to shift the whole nature of international politics in many other theaters, not just Europe, but in Asia and in other places.
Since the first live Q&A was really fun, we’ll try to make this a monthly feature! So please join me for the second iteration on Monday, March 31 at 6pm Eastern. I will once again try to answer any questions you may have—whether about my writing, the current state of the world, or what might happen next. Join us on Zoom here. —Yascha
Mounk: Well, that was quite a tour de force of some of the changes we've seen, and we'll have our work cut out just going through that for the next hour or so. Let’s start with Ukraine—what is the situation on the ground there now? It looks as though Ukraine has now made a proposal for a ceasefire. What will that mean for the future of that conflict?
I do think there's a question that people haven't thought carefully about, which is which side would benefit more from a ceasefire? There's an argument that it’s Russia because they've depleted a lot of their forces, they need a breathing pause, they can build more armory and artillery and everything over the course of the next years if fighting stops, and then Putin can decide to reignite the conflict at the moment of his choosing. But there may also be an argument that such a ceasefire could benefit Ukraine because it allows the West, and particularly European countries, to build up more material that they can send to Ukraine. It allows Ukraine more time to train on some of the weaponry that has been delivered over the last years like F-16s. And of course, it could allow time for some kind of change in the Kremlin. Perhaps in two or four years Vladimir Putin passes away of natural causes or he loses domestic support or something else happens and for whatever reason Russia's presumptive intention to reignite the war doesn't come to pass. What should we think about the prospects of this ceasefire?
Fukuyama: Well, at the moment, I think it's only going to bring a temporary respite. There was a big change in Ukrainian thinking after the failure of their planned counter-offensive in late 2023. Up to that point, they were saying that they're only going to accept a plan that would restore every inch of territory taken from them since 2014 when Russia occupied Crimea and the Eastern Donbas. Even at that time, that was a pretty unrealistic hope, although they had been doing well enough in the war that they felt they might be able to push the Russians out.
Since then, the military situation has deteriorated. I think they still retain the kind of qualitative edge over Russia that they've had right from the beginning of the war. But I think that, at this point, this sheer weight of numbers and the Russian economy that still is chugging along has ground them down. Their biggest problem right now is manpower. They simply have a smaller population base than Russia does. They don't have foreign forces like the North Koreans to help them. And so their ability to hold the Russians off has deteriorated (although I wouldn't overestimate that). I think that in the end, since the initial onslaught, they've only traded like 1% of the total territory of Ukraine, so the front lines have actually been remarkably stable. Now, it was never the case that the Ukrainian government would be willing to sign a peace treaty in which they basically say, yes, the Russians have taken Donbas and parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and we are ceding that, and that's now Russian territory. There's no conceivable Ukrainian government now or in the future that would be willing to sign that.
So the question really for the past year and a half has been, could you get a ceasefire agreement like the one on the Korean Peninsula that basically freezes the fighting along current front lines? There can be this fiction that this is a temporary thing that will only hold until there's a negotiation of a permanent settlement, but in fact that becomes a de facto new territorial line. The South Koreans and the United States never accepted the ceasefire in 1954, and that has held up until the present moment. So that was really what was on offer. Certainly in the short run, this has been very, very costly to Ukraine. Although the Russians have been losing men and equipment at a higher rate than Ukraine, Ukrainians can afford it less well.
So in that sense, a ceasefire is beneficial to Ukraine. In the longer run, however, it really comes down to Russian long-term intentions. I think that Putin has been pretty clear that this is really not just a fight over these four oblasts that he's claiming he’s already incorporated into Russia. This is really about the survival of Ukraine as an independent country. He's been pretty clear that that's really what this war has been about from the beginning.
What that means is that the ceasefire will survive only until the point where Russia feels strong enough to resume its effort to absorb the whole of Ukraine. That's why the whole issue of guarantees has been really important. I think that's really the object of any coming negotiation.
Mounk: What do you think Vladimir Putin's goal is at this point? One question to ask is, if Putin had known how this war would go, would he have undertaken what they initially called the “special operation”? And at this point, one should hope that Russians recognize that any occupation of Kyiv, for example, would effectively mean a decade of urban guerrilla warfare, of attacks on Russian officials and troops and so on. So, what is Putin’s goal?
Fukuyama: We have no idea, if Putin could roll the clock back to before February 2022, whether he would have launched the invasion. That argument cuts both ways. Having lost nearly, I don't know, 700,000 dead and wounded in this “special military operation,” you could make the argument that anything short of the complete absorption of Ukraine would be a bad deal for him because they've already invested so much time and effort into this objective, and if all they get is one percent of Ukrainian territory over what they had previously that's not going to make Putin satisfied. It's not as if there's been any reflection on the part of Putin or his allies as to the long-term war aims.
Putin’s said that the greatest tragedy in his life was the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. He’s said this many times. And it's not just Ukraine that's in danger—you've got Georgia, you've got Moldova, you've got the Baltic states. There are many other parts of what had been the former Soviet Union that I think he still has designs on. I think that any prudent strategic planner would assume that this is an ongoing danger.
Mounk: One problem I have is that if a ceasefire is used by Ukraine—but mostly by Ukraine's European partners—to strengthen its position, then it's not obvious to me that it's tactically or strategically to Russia's benefit. But of course, one of the concerns is that even though European countries are talking a big game about stepping into the breach left by the desertion of the United States right now, once the conflict is frozen, it would be very easy for European politicians to feel that the pressure is off and that perhaps their promises to support Ukraine aren't as urgent as other budgetary constraints. What do you think Europe needs to do without the cooperation of the United States?
Fukuyama: I think the whole future of this conflict really does reside in what the Europeans actually decide to do. Now, there are some developments that I think are positive. The most important is the election of Friedrich Merz and the renewal of some leadership in Germany, the ending of the debt break that he's promised and the promise to spend substantially more money both in military spending and in rebuilding German infrastructure. This has great promise to actually restart economic growth in Germany and also finally to fulfill some of the promises of the Zeitenwende, which really never came about under Chancellor Scholz. So, yes, it's possible that the Europeans could fill some of that vacuum, but I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of doing that.
Mounk: That seems right to me. I have to say that I can see the case for a ceasefire, particularly at a moment when, as you were saying, the boundaries of the conflict don't seem to be moving a lot. It doesn't look like Ukraine is about to have a breakthrough. And of course, a lot of people are continuing to die. That does depend on Europe not using that ceasefire as an excuse to think, well, actually, this no longer has such a big priority, we can fall back asleep at the wheel, and then inviting further aggression from Russia. I hope that Friedrich Merz has understood that lesson. I do think that European politicians are generally spooked at this moment. But whether they will actually walk the walk is very much an open question to me, and that worries me. How are you thinking more broadly about the state of transatlantic relations?
Fukuyama: I would point to a new article by Dalibor Rohac that should be up on American Purpose at Persuasion by the time this podcast is available. He talks about this big change that has occurred in the internal politics of NATO. There was a big division between the eastern and western parts of the alliance where the French for many years had been arguing for an independent European defense capability. The Eastern Europeans, who are the most threatened by Russia, have always been very skeptical of that because they simply didn't believe that Europe would ever be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to develop a true independent capability and that it was an illusion to pretend that you could do this without the United States. What Dalibor points out is that that's really changed. The Eastern Europeans have come to the realization that their position is not tenable, that the United States is not reliable and that therefore they do have to support the development of an independent European defense capability. And that's a tall order because it really does depend on Germany and France being willing to substantially increase their investments in defense.
I think that's a major shift in the thinking of Europeans, and is going to have long-term consequences. It also has this other nuclear dimension that people haven't talked about so much. There's been discussion in Europe about whether the American nuclear guarantee is still there. During the Cold War, when we tried to have a system of extended deterrence where we claimed that our nuclear umbrella would defend Europe even in the event of a conventional Soviet attack on NATO, people were skeptical whether the United States would risk Washington and New York in exchange for Hamburg and Berlin. With President Trump in office, nobody is under the illusion that someone like Trump would actually risk nuclear war with Russia in order to protect Europe. So this issue of a nuclear guarantee becomes much more critical.
Mounk: I have two questions about that. The first is about the European defense capability. I see absolutely from a European perspective why the continent feels that they need to be able to act on their own. And I've always thought that this is something that would prepare the continent for a situation like the one we are now apparently in, in which the United States is not willing to stand by the kind of security guarantees that it issued in the past. And it would actually also help to preserve the relationship with the United States since it makes it harder for those voices that want to weaken that alliance to say that Europe is somehow free-riding on the United States in those ways.
One thing that worries me, though, is what the governance structure of such a defense force would be. At the moment you can more or less get unanimous consent among a decently large number of European countries to help Ukraine. Obviously, Hungary is not on board and some other countries in Central Europe are a little bit on the fence. But by and large, you're able to get agreement. But that depends on a number of strokes of good luck. I think it's a complete coincidence that Giorgia Meloni is prime minister of Italy at the moment and that she has turned out to be quite a staunch ally of Ukraine rather than somebody like Matteo Salvini, who was the leader of the right-wing populist forces in Italy until quite recently, who has maintained quite close ties with Russia in the past. There is nothing to guarantee that, at a time when such a European defense force is needed, you're not going to have Marine Le Pen as president of France or another leader of a core European country that simply isn't willing to go along with that.
Is it possible to build this force in such a way that if Italy or France or Spain says, I'm out, you're still able to deploy it?
Fukuyama: Well, look, there's no way of answering that. We'll just have to see how the politics works out. I think that at this point, the idea that you need complete consensus among all 31 NATO members to do anything is out the door. I think that if France and Germany decide that they're going to make the investments and they're going to shoulder a lot of the burden, then it'll happen. And I don't think Slovakia is going to block the alliance from doing what it needs to. I'm not sure that Giorgia Meloni is such a unique phenomenon—what Marine Le Pen decides to do if she becomes the next president of France is, I think, still a little bit up in the air—but yeah, there are a lot of questions about whether Europe can actually find the willpower to do this.
I think this is going to create a governance crisis within both NATO and the EU, where this veto system where they need complete consensus in order to move ahead on foreign policy issues is going to have to be rethought because it's intolerable. It's sort of like the old system in Poland where the nobles had created a veto system where you had many, many veto players and it really crippled the Polish Kingdom. You know, that's kind of the situation of both the EU and NATO right now. I think that one of the reforms that needs to happen is to get past that very awkward decision-making process.
Mounk: My other question was going to be about nuclear. I was struck to read some suggestions in the press, and I don't know whether it's true or not, that even the United Kingdom doesn't actually have an independent nuclear deterrent. That not just for the long-term development or maintenance of its nuclear facilities, but even for a short-term deployment, it may rely on the United States, which would suggest that actually Europe at the moment doesn't really have an independent nuclear deterrent (or perhaps France does).
As you were saying, in Japan and South Korea and Poland, but slowly also in Germany, in a world in which these countries can't rely on security guarantees from the United States and in which they face hostile adversaries in their neighborhood, the one thing that ensures that you don't get messed with is having a nuclear weapon. I think there's a strong, compelling logic for that from the perspective of Poland, from the perspective of Japan and South Korea.
But of course, it would lead to a further global proliferation of nuclear weapons and it's hard to see what history has around the corner. Perhaps in 30 or 50 or 75 years, there might be huge tensions between some of those countries that would now suddenly have nuclear weapons and that could become a real danger down the road. So how should we think about that? What advice would you give to the Polish or the German government?
Fukuyama: I think that every ally of the United States needs to think about this very seriously. Before you get to this question of who really controls the nuclear weapons, you've got a much more immediate question about the dependence of a lot of the conventional weapons that the Europeans and the Koreans and the Japanese have on the United States. There's been this discussion about whether there's a hidden kill switch embedded in the software of an F-35, because a lot of European allies are in the process of acquiring this American aircraft. If you have a truly hostile United States, there's a fear that the United States could simply disable the ability of its former allies to operate this equipment.
Even if there's no kill switch, they're completely dependent on U.S. contractors for operating and maintaining the aircraft. If the United States truly becomes a hostile player, they can really undermine the conventional capability of European allies. And so that's one of the places where we don't know what the truth is, and we don't know what American intentions will be in the future. Presumably a lot of these American defense contractors don't simply want to cut off a really major source of revenue for them. So just in terms of American politics, there'll be a lot of pressure not to hit a kill switch. We're living in such a different world. If the United States truly has switched sides and is now aligning with Russia rather than with Europe, that creates a huge number of vulnerabilities.
Mounk: Let's move beyond Europe to the broader world. What are some developments in foreign policy that listeners to this podcast may not have caught or may not have paid that much attention to?
Fukuyama: I think the obvious focal point is going to be Taiwan. I think that the prospect of China putting the squeeze on Taiwan at this point has gone way up since Trump took office. And I think people in Taiwan are very aware of this—that if Trump was willing to throw Ukraine under the bus, then the same thing could very well happen to them. Trump has not shown any particular fondness for Taiwan. He's complained about how they stole semiconductor manufacturing capability from the United States and he's made various demands of Taiwan to turn over both capital and intellectual property to America. Most of that is completely bogus. But if Taiwan is squeezed through a blockade or through an actual overt military invasion by China, what is the likelihood that Trump's Washington will come to Taiwan's defense? I think even if Biden had remained president and promised to do this, I'm not sure that the United States would follow through, but I'm almost positive that a Trump administration is not going to risk a major war with China to defend Taiwan.
I think what's much more likely to happen is that Trump will have a big meeting with Xi Jinping, basically concede Chinese control over Taiwan, and claim that he saved the world from World War Three. That has a lot of implications for our other allies, Japan and South Korea. Unlike the Europeans, they don't get along with each other. There's very little defense cooperation between those two. Therefore, some kind of a joint defense capability minus the United States is really not on the cards, and that, I think inevitably, is going to raise the incentives for both countries to acquire their own independent nuclear capabilities. I think they're in a technological position to do that, so the likelihood of nuclear proliferation in the Far East has gone up substantially.
Mounk: Roughly how long would it take for a country like Japan or South Korea to develop that kind of nuclear deterrent? And more broadly, what should we think about Chinese strategic objectives in East Asia? Taiwan, from the perspective of Beijing, is a sui generis case because they think of it as part of the territorial integrity of historic China and, of course, for a long time so did the government of Taiwan, which claimed to be the true government of the whole of China. There's one way of reading Chinese foreign policy intentions—that they've always been clear that they want to, in their language, reunify the mainland with Taiwan. But that doesn't mean that they have any other kind of territorial aspirations in East Asia beyond questions about some small disputed territories like a couple of very small islands and so on.
Fukuyama: That’s not a correct way of interpreting what China has done in the South China Sea. It's not just a couple of islands. They basically claimed this nine-dash line as their territorial waters. It’s not just a couple of islands, it's a gigantic part of the Pacific that overlaps all of the shipping lanes between the Indian Ocean and East Asia, and they've militarized these islands. It used to be the case that we thought we could push them off very easily, but they've now provided air defenses and they've built up naval bases and air bases on all of them. One of the things that people are not aware of is that they've got this plan for small, basically floating nuclear reactors, because one of the problems with some of these coral reefs is that they don't have good sources of energy. So they have a plan to basically tow small reactors on barges and then equip these islands with basically endless sources of electricity. They sit across all of the shipping lanes that the rest of the world is dependent on for the bulk of goods. And so it's not just Taiwan that is at risk.
Like Russia, China has not been secretive about their ambitions. They not only want to unify with Taiwan. The Chinese want a world order that's not dominated by the West. They've been saying this for a long time—they want a world in which their role is recognized and they get to set the international rules and not the United States. So I think it’s a broad threat that goes way beyond just the reincorporation of Taiwan.
Mounk: What would such a world look like? The broad tendency of Trump's foreign policy—I'm not sure that it’s fully coherent, but to the extent that it seems to have some kind of coherent set of assumptions behind it, it’s basically the idea that what's natural in the world is spheres of influence. Therefore, in his mind, Taiwan and perhaps other parts of East Asia are a natural part of Beijing's sphere of influence; Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe are a natural part of Russia's sphere of influence; and the United States is going to dominate its own sphere of influence, which partly explains Trump's rhetoric on the Panama Canal and Greenland. If that’s the world we end up in and China ends up being able to dominate its “sphere of influence” in East Asia, including presumably a Japan or South Korea that somehow is under the sway of Beijing or has to make nice with Beijing, what would that do to the world?
Fukuyama: Well, you've kind of described it already. I think that they've talked about the first island chain that includes Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and so forth—they want to bring it under their sphere of influence. I don't think they will try to absorb powerful countries like Japan and South Korea, but they want to go back to what they regard as a natural order in which these countries are deferential to Beijing. That means they don't have independent foreign policies. They don't buy American military equipment. They’ve been trying to unwind a lot of their investments and their trade relations with China because they realize that this kind of dependence makes them vulnerable. But that's going to stop and they're going to economically integrate themselves with China and then pull out of their tight relations with the United States. That's going to be true of Southeast Asia. This is the center of global manufacturing and all of that comes under Chinese control in this kind of scenario.
Mounk: One part of the foreign policy of the Trump administration is tariffs. This is one of the policies that Trump’s supporters in the business world were hoping he wouldn’t implement. It is true that he has announced and then walked back tariffs a number of times, but it does look as though the administration is quite in earnest about imposing some significant tariffs on China and Mexico and Canada, and also on Europe. What do you think the impact of these tariffs is going to be? There's words, there's murmurings, whispers of a potential recession around the corner. How do you think all of that is going to play out?
Fukuyama: If there's a ray of hope for checking Trump, I think it's in the sphere of the economy. The recession may happen, but it very well may not. Trump's economic policies are self-contradictory. He was promising that prices would start coming down even before he was inaugurated as president. But what he's done is create a situation where you're going to get really large-scale inflation if he fulfills these promises with tariffs. And even short of fulfilling the promises, the incredible yo-yo nature of his tariff threats is really creating a business environment where companies are just not going to be willing to make big investment decisions, because they're just not sure.
For example, what he wants to happen is for the auto companies to pull out of their manufacturing plants in Canada and Mexico and put all of that money, which would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, into manufacturing in the United States. Now that in itself is very problematic because it's much more expensive—it's not just the initial investment but labor costs are higher, and so forth, so no auto company is going to make that kind of commitment given the erratic nature of Trump's tariff threats. I think what's going to happen is a big drop in business investment as everybody waits to see how this plays out, and a general slowing of the economy. At the end of that, what you're actually likely to get is something like stagflation, where you get elevated rates of inflation but also higher unemployment and a slowing economy. This is the one thing that people are going to notice. Trump can get away with claiming all sorts of ridiculous things about how much money DOGE is saving the American taxpayer, but they're going to really notice if unemployment and inflation start to go up simultaneously.
Mounk: That seems right to me and perhaps that is a natural way to turn to some of the domestic considerations of what's been going on. It seems to me very hard to predict how successful the Trump administration is going to be at expanding the power of the executive and testing the limits on its power. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what the Trump administration has done so far, which parts are perhaps concerning or distasteful, but not a fire alarm, and which parts are so bad that you really think it is pushing us towards a constitutional crisis or to some form of democratic backsliding.
The thing I'm wondering about in particular is, what role is his popularity going to play in this? My hunch is that when you look at countries where populists got into power and ultimately destroyed the democratic system, even clear-cut cases like Venezuela took a long period of time–it took 10, 12, 15 years for that process to complete itself. And it succeeded in part because a positive economic environment made those governments quite popular. Both Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Vladimir Putin in Russia got relatively lucky with the fact that they're from countries that have a lot of oil and gas to export, and they first came to power at the beginning of a period of very elevated energy prices. So I guess one question is, does Trump need to sustain quite high levels of popularity for some of his attacks on independent institutions to succeed?
Fukuyama: Well, those are two rather separate questions. I think that in terms of what he wants to do, it's pretty clear. There was a discussion in the lead-up to the election about whether Trump was a fascist. I think that was kind of a red herring. There are very specific implications of fascism that I think weren’t really on the cards for a second Trump administration. I do think it's quite reasonable to say at this point that he is an authoritarian, in that he’d prefer to rule as a person who can just issue executive orders without having to get permission from Congress or the courts. That's really what he's been doing ever since January 20. All of his big initiatives so far, his hundred executive orders—he could have gone to Congress. His party controls both houses of Congress. The normal way that the American system is supposed to work is for Congress to approve legislation and for the president to execute it. But he obviously has a preference for simply ordering the policy and then having a client Congress that will follow-up with a retroactive approval. That's what it means to be authoritarian, so we're in that constitutional crisis already.
I think you have to distinguish between three levels of bad. So there's some things that he's done that are pretty plainly unconstitutional, like the attempt to rescind birthright citizenship. I don't think there's a single constitutional scholar that thinks you can do this by an executive order. There are other things that are illegal. In American Purpose at Persuasion, we've been trying to cover this. There are a lot of rules about how to fire an employee. There are a lot of employees who are considered to have “for cause” removal protection where you can't just fire them arbitrarily. He's done that with hundreds of people in federal agencies and in multi-member commissions.
Then there are other things that are simply bad governance—they may be constitutional and they may be legal but they're just bad procedure. He’s violated rules in all three of these categories. The illegal stuff is now being litigated in the courts because there are many lawsuits now to prevent Trump from doing the things that he's tried to do with executive orders, and we'll just have to see. In a lot of the cases, the courts have actually told him he can't do things. But there are indications that people around him don't believe that they necessarily have to follow the will or the ruling of a federal judge.
Mounk: That seems to be the key question, right? I don't want to understate the radicalism of what Trump has been doing for the last months. But every administration issues executive orders that are then ruled unconstitutional by the courts. And they sort of walk away with their tail behind their legs and say, all right, fine, we'll try again a different way or we'll let it drop. We recognize the authority of the court. That isn’t, to me, overly shocking. What would be overly shocking is if they then say, well, you know what? This is just the court being un-American and being a traitor to the American people and we're going to do it anyway. We haven't gotten to that point yet, but of course we have had rhetoric from a number of members of the administration suggesting that they may go there. Tell me about how you think that's going to play out.
Fukuyama: Not quite. I think that this is qualitative. I guess it actually kind of annoys me when people say, well, other presidents have done this. Biden issued a lot of executive orders that were probably, in the end, not legal. The courts never really adjudicated them. But I just think that the volume of orders, the shocking nature of the illegality of some of them, and various assertions from Trump that the judges are simply standing in the way of the people, or that if you're saving the country then no law can stop you—that seems to be a statement of principle that is totally un-American. But the president said that. I think you shouldn't underestimate their willingness to defy the courts. There's a lot of talk on the MAGA right that these judges need to be impeached because they're obstructing the will of the people.
Mounk: I'm not predicting that he’s going to back down. I agree with you that there's a lot of very concerning rhetoric from the president, from the vice president, from a bunch of other people in the MAGA universe that seems to suggest they would be willing to disobey the courts. I guess what I'm trying to say is that what's very worrying is that they are telegraphing a willingness to do that. And that's different from previous administrations. But what would it take to cross the Rubicon would be actually doing it.
Fukuyama: Well, unfortunately, I don't think there's going to be a clear Rubicon. There have already been cases where they've defied a court order, right? They have one judgment that said they had to turn back on USAID funding and they haven't done that yet. So they're already acting in defiance of a federal judge. You can get away with that for a certain amount of time, but we'll have to see how that ultimately plays out. The big question is: would they actually defy a Supreme Court ruling? There have been suggestions that they would be interested in doing that, but yeah, that hasn't happened yet.
Let me just get to the third category—so you have unconstitutional, you have illegal, and then you have just plain bad governance. And this is the thing that's most apparent right now in the activities of DOGE, where you have these 20-something engineers that are just scanning the line items in federal spending and simply canceling entire programs that have been approved by Congress. It's bad governance because these kids have no idea what these programs are about. Some of it is intentional. My particular concern has been for the National Endowment for Democracy and its institutes. They are independently funded by Congress. This is not part of any other agency budget. There's this one guy that's been sitting on their ability to get money into their bank account and pay their employees. As a result, they've had to lay off 75% of their employees.
It's going to be very hard to reconstitute what they're doing, so even if this is ruled illegal, it'll be too late by the time the funding is restored because their staff will have gone and found other jobs. Reconstituting these functions is going to be very, very hard. So on all three of these levels, I think you've had challenges that are just off the scale in terms of what other administrations have tried to do, which I do think really demonstrates an authoritarian intent.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Frank discuss how intellectuals, civil society organizations and the Democrats should respond to the Trump administration, as well as predictions for what may happen next. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
