Filmed January 21, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, welcome to Conversations. Bill Kristol here. Very pleased to be joined today—what is today, Wednesday, January 21st, I have to say the day now in the era of Trump, because God knows how much will change—by Frank Fukuyama, who needs no introduction, professor now at Stanford, author of many important books and articles. Most recently, the book Liberalism and its Discontents, which I highly recommend. We could talk about liberalism and we should at some point more broadly, but I think in the world crisis that we’re seeing unfold, we should probably discuss geopolitics and what the situation is with the US and the world, if that’s okay, Frank.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Sure.
BILL KRISTOL:
Good. So, today is Wednesday. President spoke at Davos this morning. We don’t need to get into the weeds, I guess, of every little zig and zag, but I mean, what is your take basically on the situation with Trump, Greenland, Denmark, NATO, that whole thing?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, there’s so many different things that you could say about this. In terms of geopolitics and world order, the United States has not simply dropped out of the kind of traditional supportive roles for that liberal order that we’ve come to expect, it’s actually turned into an aggressive force. We’ve kind of openly embraced naked imperialism, territorial conquest for the sake of exploiting the resources on that territory and then keeping it for ourselves. And so the Europeans are in this very weird situation where they’ve been in this alliance to protect themselves largely from Russia and other aggressors. And now it’s got an aggressor within the gates, so to speak. And that’s quite an extraordinary situation. And I think they’re all scratching their heads as to how to deal with it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Do you think they’re… I mean, I think they have been scratching their heads. I kind of have the sense this week they might be saying, okay, if this is the new world, we really have to … They’re still scratching their hands, but it’s not easy to deal with it. But the question about the US and US reliability, and is this just a little weirdness from Trump’s part? The fact that it’s gone, he’s been able to push it so far without much opposition here and putting on threatening tariffs on allies because they’re not going along with our bullying? I mean, I feel a little like we’re in the frog in the water and people in the US domestically who aren’t paying close attention to this don’t quite understand that we’re into such a different place than we were a year ago. Do you think that’s correct?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
No, absolutely. So just to stick with the Europeans, I have a big worry about what they’re going to do in reaction to all of this because up till now, their way of dealing with Trump has been appeasement that Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO is a good example of this, that you compliment Trump and you bring him gifts and you say, oh, let’s talk about everything. And I think that we’re at a point where that just doesn’t work. I mean, in my view, they made a big mistake last year when Trump first hit them with tariffs not to have responded with tariffs of their own. And instead, they basically accepted a 15% across the board tariff on their products with no corresponding concessions from the United States. And that policy of appeasement simply has not worked because Trump does not respect weakness, and he sees all of these acts as acts of weakness, and therefore he’s just going to push on further.
So I think they’ve got a very critical decision coming up whether they actually agree to negotiate with Trump over Greenland. I really hope they don’t. The Danish foreign minister has already said that they’re not going to negotiate about this, and I hope that the rest of the NATO allies and the other Europeans back him on this. You’re just not going to talk about it. And then if he wants to then go on and threaten tariffs, if they don’t negotiate, they got to prepare a package of tariffs, counter-tariffs of their own. And I’m really worried that their past behavior is just not … They’re just not in the mood to really be confrontational in that manner. But I think that this kind of realist world into which we’ve descended really demands that kind of an attitude on their part.
BILL KRISTOL:
Why wouldn’t—to play devil’s advocate for one second, I’m in agreement with you, but—why shouldn’t they just keep on kind of stretching it out and appeasing and being nice and having fake negotiations for a long time and just trying to make it through these next three years? I mean, was that—
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, three years is an awfully long time.
BILL KRISTOL:
Good point.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
You could say, hang on until the November elections when Trump is really weakened. I mean, that’s a more reasonable time period. But like I said, I just don’t think that Trump responds to appeasement other than by escalating. And I think there’s a lot of other things that he will decide that he wants to do. So this is a very weird period because, you know, I’m in an international affairs institute. We teach students to use political science, economics, sociology to analyze the world. But I think the point we’re at, you actually need a different set of skills, which is psychology, because so much of what Trump has been doing doesn’t stem from any kind of thought-out set of ideas trying to find a pattern in what he’s doing is very difficult. And he kind of underlined that when he admitted openly in this message to the Norwegian Prime Minister that the reason I’m going after Greenland is I didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize.
I mean, who the hell would’ve imagined that an American president would be so openly admitting that it’s this psychological need on his part for the affirmation of a Nobel Peace Prize that’s causing him to threaten war against a friendly NATO ally. I mean, it’s just insane. So I think that this is a further complication that you really need to think about Trump, the narcissist and how you deal with him. And I think that, again, everybody has thought, well, we have to feed that narcissism. And I think that it’s increasingly not going to work. I sort of think that since the bombing of Fordow, the enrichment plant in Iran, there was a kind of turning point because up till then he had been relatively cautious about the use of military force. He’d certainly run as an isolationist and being opposed to forever wars, but he got away with this thing because Netanyahu had prepared the ground for it.
And he sort of said to himself, wow, I can do this. I’ve got this big military stick that I can use to beat other people with. And I think since then in his mind, that’s just escalated. So that kind of explains why he goes on to just attack Venezuela and capture Maduro, and now he’s turning his attention to Greenland. And so the appeasement strategy isn’t going to work because you’ve got this kind of lunatic on the other end that has got this tool that he thinks he can use as freely as he wants. And I think you’re just going to see more and more of this unless he runs into a real opposition.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, he’s cited Venezuela several times in the last few days as he’s gone ahead with the threats on Greenland as kind of proving that we can do anything. It does seem like the narcissism has expanded. I mean, it’s so personal, as you said, about the Nobel Prize and all. There’s also this kind of megalomania about the US and we have as if we have just infinite power to because the Venezuela thing went well in a very limited way, and the Iran bombing, I guess, went well enough. He thinks that we can just … I don’t know if he really thinks it, or one does have the impression that this happens, I guess, to a certain kind of authoritarian who if they have success a couple of times, the normal high ego content of an authoritarian becomes really megalomaniacal, don’t you think, I mean?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think Trump started with a big overestimation of American power. His whole narrative is that we were always that powerful, but our stupid leaders never really exercised it in a proper way and allowed people to take advantage of it. But he was wrong about that. So he thought that he could really force China into a corner because they were so dependent on the American market, and he just didn’t realize that they can choke off rare earth’s supply and then cripple the American economy. And he simply didn’t understand that they would retaliate. And so he was surprised and then immediately had to back down on his trade threats once he saw that the whole US aerospace industry and the automotive industry would be crippled by this retaliation. And that’s why I think that other countries like the Europeans have to think about ways to retaliate that demonstrate that the United States isn’t as powerful as Trump thinks it is.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s I hadn’t really put those two together. That’s a very good example of, yeah, that he did back off. And now in fact, if anything, he’s appeasing China, it seems like, right? And so that’s also, I guess, characteristic of a certain kind of bully. But your emphasis on the negotiations of the Greenland… just take a minute more than that, I think that’s very interesting because that’s really the … Once you start negotiating about something that’s the part of another of a NATO ally and about … You’re not negotiating about base access, which there’s no issue about. They’re happy to give us more base access if we want that, or we’re not negotiating about the normal things NATO countries negotiate about— reimbursements, whatever, and deployments of sharing, burden sharing.
You’re just in a different world, right? And there are plenty of other little countries that Trump can bully and plenty of medium-sized countries he can bully if the EU doesn’t band together, it seems like, behind Denmark. I know you know a lot about … Talk a little bit about Denmark, and they’ve been attacking Denmark, Trump, and several of his cabinet officers ridiculing it, small country and all. I don’t know. It’s just pretty shocking, honestly.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
It is shocking. I had a visiting professorship for a number of years at Aarhus University, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Denmark. And in one of my books, I used the phrase “getting to Denmark” as an objective of modernization. I don’t like Denmark for the reasons that Bernie Sanders does because it’s a social democratic welfare state. I mean, it does that pretty well. What I admire about Denmark is that they run one of the cleanest, most effective governments in the world. It was really a fascinating experience because they have very high taxes in Denmark. It used to be about 60% of every Euro that you earn the government would take in revenues. If you bought a used car, there’d like be a 300% sales tax on it. And I never saw a single Dane that was unhappy about this because they said, well, look at what we get in return.
We get free education, including higher education. We get healthcare, we get pensions. It’s this cradle to grave welfare state, and we think it’s worth paying these taxes in order to get that. Now, you couldn’t do that in the United States because the American state is not capable of providing those kinds of services on the kind of efficient, impartial way that the Danish state does it because they have a very high quality government. In the whole of Scandinavia, there’s hardly any corruption. You’ve had historical instances of that, but they’re one of the cleanest governments and they’re very effective. And this is one of the problems I think that the United States has wrestled with is that we don’t have a modern, good, effective state. We’re very ineffective in providing social services in … There’s certain things we can do very well. We got a great military. We’ve got certain specialized areas we’re pretty good at, but the general quality of American government isn’t anything like that of Denmark.
And so that’s why it’s always been a kind of model for me. I always marveled at the fact that the Danes started out as these ferocious Vikings that would use babies as target practice in their rampaging, and now they wouldn’t hurt a fly in terms of foreign policy. They’ve kind of gone over to, I think, in a sort of law-based world that I had always associated with the end of history. I thought this is what the end of history would actually look like. It’s something like Scandinavia where everything occurs according to well-established, legitimate rules and so forth. So that’s why I think it’s a really good country and a good model. And so it’s particularly ironic that Trump has managed to pick on this country of all the countries in the world to go after.
BILL KRISTOL:
And my impression is it’s been a good ally. It’s a small country. Obviously, you’re not talking about huge numbers of troops that they’ve sent to places like Afghanistan, but my impression is they’ve been a good ally, I mean, and tried to be a constructive ally in the US.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah. And on a per capita basis, they lost more people in Afghanistan than we did, and they’ve been very good on Ukraine. They’ve been one of the most forward-leaning of all of the NATO allies in terms of their support for Ukraine and then urging the alliance as a whole to get behind Ukraine. So yeah, they’ve been very good at that. Now, of course, if you’ve abandoned Ukraine and want to side with Russia, then they’re not such a good ally, but I think that’s unfortunately where we are right now.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, we should, let’s get to that in a minute, because I think that’s the other very important, almost flip side, of what’s happening. So what do you think, will the EU and/or NATO, let’s just say the Europeans, rally behind Denmark and understand they got to get off this slippery slope of appeasement? Or do you think they will still try the flattery in the appeasement? And how does that play out in either case?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
I’m very worried about this. I think that Starmer has, he’s already stayed at a fairly supportive position, but the appeasement is so bred into the way that they deal with the outside world that I’m very worried that they’re just going to go down the slope and accept some kind of a negotiation saying, well, we have to be open to that. We can build up our forces, but we have to still show that we’re willing to talk. And I just think that they’re going to slide down that slope. I hope I’m wrong about this, but there’s very little in their past behavior that suggests that they’re really going to suddenly acquire backbone over this issue. And just to underline something you said, sovereignty over Greenland is not something you can negotiate about. I mean, it’s such a fundamental principle that you can’t give away 50% of your sovereignty. I mean, you really have to hold the line on this.
BILL KRISTOL:
Do you think if they go down that slope that meanwhile in private, the bigger countries at least, the Germanys, the Polands, are saying, “Of course, this is totally intolerable, and we have to think about defense arrangements, including maybe nuclear weapons down the road or pretty soon down the road”? I mean, how much is this them buying time as opposed to just being willing to just give up any notion of Europe being able to stand up to the US and, well—
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah, I think that they’re actually doing more than a lot of Americans realize, I mean, especially the Germans. They really are upping their defense spending and trying to restore some of their defense industrial base. So I think that would happen regardless of what happens with this Greenland negotiation. The way you put it is the best possible interpretation. This is actually a clever strategy to buy time so that they can prepare themselves to be more autonomous. I just don’t think the EU unfortunately works that way. I think that all of the politicians have a much more short-term time horizon and they basically want to buy peace for themselves, and I think that’s the way that they’re going to go.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s interesting, if depressing. I had a friend who just came back from Europe who works in the electric vehicle world, and he was very struck on this last visit that… And this is before the last week, but it was maybe three, four weeks ago, one year into Trump’s second term. I mean, the degree of willingness… So we had pushed them for 10 years, all these European nations, to be tougher on China, and they were getting tougher on China is my impression. I’m not an expert on this, but it seems like they were. And he said what struck him was that this is snapped, basically, and that the people he was talking to were like, “Hey, look, if you’re going to be bullies and you’re going to put tariffs on and off randomly because Trump’s offended by something, or it’s all about you and have to pay off people to get good deals and so forth,” I mean, A, they don’t want to deal with Russia, they don’t want to become subservient to Russia, obviously, but China’s kind of far away; it’s not a very nice regime; it’s not a great trading partner because they steal intellectual property and all this. But they aren’t actually crazy, and they sort of seem to deliver stuff when they say they’re going to and stuff.
I mean, longer-run, is it good for Europe to become dependent on China in a million different ways? Presumably not. But I’ve got to wonder if just fitting in with Europe, if the Europeans go in that direction, don’t you think that’s another effect, short-term prosperity, cheaper goods? Why not open up to China? I mean, all of Trump’s talk about being tough on China gets totally undercut, no?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah, no, it’s a very dangerous path to go down. I think that what we decided under the Biden administration is that in dealing with China, the economic benefits should not trump the social disruption that that’s going to cause. Janet Yellen went to Beijing the last year of the Biden administration, basically said that, that we’re not going to allow another China shock to happen, this time with solar panels and windmills and so forth. And we do this in the name of social stability.
Now, I thought that the Europeans were actually being… They weren’t being tough enough on China because if you think of how important the German auto industry is to Germany and then to Europe as a whole, the idea that they would allow Chinese EVs into Europe could be devastating in terms of their social stability. And I was always wondering why they weren’t doing what the Biden administration did, which is basically to put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to protect their auto industry. And they were moving in that direction. But I think as I talked to a lot of Germans, they said, “Well, the problem is that we are so dependent on the Chinese market and we actually get technology from them, and we can’t go that route.”
So I think they’re just screwed. I mean, they’re really in this impossible situation where they want to reduce dependence on the United States, they kind of understand the dangers of growing dependence on China, but they feel that they’ve got no choice at this point. So they’re in trouble regardless of which way they go, I think.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yikes. I mean, let’s talk about Ukraine, which you mentioned, which you’ve been to and know a ton about. Worked with them over the years quite a lot. And that was what we focused on three years ago when we had this conversation a year into the war. I think generally, I think we were a little bit surprised by the unity, well, how well Ukraine was doing, and that was due to them mostly, very admirable, but also the pretty good unity behind them and a little bit of mobilization, as you said, by Germany and other smaller nations, and obviously the Nordic nations coming into Sweden and Finland, coming into NATO. It seemed like a moment of maybe, I mean, this is great irony, of relative strength and unity for the Western Alliance after many years of drift, and then suddenly to have this level of reversible… What does all this mean for Ukraine?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, it’s bad. It’s really painful to think about the situation they’re in. They just got hit with another… So Trump just put Putin on this Board of Peace that he’s trying to create at a moment when the Russians have attacked the power grid in Ukraine. And I think for the first time in the war, Kyiv itself is now suffering from blackouts and heating shortage in the middle of winter. It hasn’t broken their will so far, but it’s very hard to see how they get out of this, because without the kind of long-range weapons that we could potentially provide, they really have very few other points of leverage against Russia.
So I do think in general that we’ve tended at every point to underestimate Ukraine, and I think that even though they’re suffering from manpower shortages and now weapons shortages, that they’re tougher than people expect. And I think the Russians are more vulnerable than a lot of people think because the Ukrainians have been able to hit back with long-range strikes of their own. So I don’t anticipate a sudden collapse of the Ukrainian state, but the trend is just not good. It really needs to be reversed with outside help, and I think the politics really is not looking good on that front right now.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, when we talked three years ago, there was bipartisan support here for Ukraine; it looked like that could be sustained quite a long time, honestly. That respect, the degree of just willfully torpedoing things by Trump is really astonishing. That is to say one can imagine situations, well, just the 30s, there was appeasement and slide in a very bad direction, but there was huge pressure to go in that direction. You know what I mean? That is to say you can understand why people felt they didn’t have that much choice or they had to buy time and so forth, and they were weaker and they had had World War I and the Great Depression and all.
This was sort of the opposite situation, I feel like. I mean, if anything, Trump came in at a moment of reasonable unity with our European allies, we’ll get to Asia in a minute, but reasonable unity with Japan and South Korea and so forth, and the degree to which we’ve reversed it all in a year is really astonishing. I mean—
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, there’s something very sinister about it because Trump actively does not like Zelensky and he actively does like Putin. It’s just been remarkable this past year as they were pursuing these so-called negotiations, which really were not serious to begin with. He’s basically accepted the whole Russian narrative, that the Ukrainians provoked the war by not resisting, by resisting the initial Russian invasion. And I think that his admiration for Putin, I mean, we’ve been talking about this for such a long time. It’s so hard to understand, except in the context of his belief in strongman rule, that he likes people that are tough, and he sees Putin in that regard, and he sees Ukraine and the European supporters of Ukraine in the opposite way. So it really is a question of having switched sides. In the Biden period, there was a reasonable argument as an American that you could have made: why are we spending so much money supporting Ukraine when our people are suffering from shortages of this and that? I mean, I didn’t buy that argument at the time, but from an American perspective, you could say, “Okay, this is a kind of specialized interest that doesn’t affect ordinary Americans,” that is support of Ukraine is, but that’s not the argument that’s being made. The argument is that we shouldn’t be supporting Ukraine because they’re, I don’t know, they’re somehow not like us. So I don’t know. It’s very discouraging and it’s very deeply offensive to anyone that really believes in the democratic core values of the United States.
BILL KRISTOL:
I think it’s such an important point, but I do think a lot of the discourse they say about this has been, I mean, understandably about Trump being kind of erratic, and he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize and this and that. At the end of the day, though, the pattern of what’s happening is so consistently in favor of Putin, and I would say in favor of autocrats basically, and against the democracies. I’m not saying that’s a well worked-out political philosophy of his or something like that, or some deep dark conspiracy even. It’s just pretty clear that that’s what he… He either prefers that or he thinks they are going to win anyway, so we should be on their side. I don’t know.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
There’s a professor at George Mason, Philip Auerswald, who has been writing this long series about Trump’s origin story. And the one thing that he makes very clear is that the Trump preference for not just Russia, but for the Soviet Union extends all the way back to the early 1980s, that in the 1980s, he was taking out full-page ads blasting NATO and saying that NATO was just exploiting the United States and essentially taking the Soviet line that NATO is an aggressive alliance aimed at them. And so there’s something very, very weird about his admiration for that regime that I think, again, needs to be explained somehow psychologically rather than through any kind of rational set of ideas going through Trump’s head.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. What about Asia? I mean, you’ve done a lot of work over there and know a lot of people over there. I mean, if you’re a Japanese leader, what does this look like to you?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, they’ve been doing pretty much the same thing as the Europeans, is basically trying to appease Trump as best they can. I think that they benefit from the fact that Trump and particularly J.D. Vance just have contempt for the Europeans. I mean, they actively don’t like the Europeans, and I don’t think that they’ve got the same kind of deep animus towards Japan and Korea that they exhibit towards Europe. So both Japan and Korea have been pretty good at buttering him up. Abe was a master of this when he was still alive. And I think the current prime minister is following in his footsteps. It’s interesting what’s happened with her because she’s become incredibly popular in Japan. I think you can sort of see why, because she’s very diminutive, but she seems like she’s really tough and speaks frankly and so forth. And Trump, I think, has responded to that well.
The big question, of course, is what’s going to happen with Taiwan. Most of the Taiwan experts that I talk to are not worried in the short run because they calculate, or rather that Beijing probably calculates that Taiwan is going to fall into their hands without their having to do anything. There’s going to be a presidential election coming up. If the KMT candidate wins, you actually have one of the two big parties in Taiwan that’s actively considering unification with China. And if they do well, Chinese may not have to take any military action at all and they’ll simply have a Hong Kong-like situation where there’ll be a negotiated return of Taiwan to China. I think the probability of that actually happening is still fairly low.
So then the question is, if Xi decides that he really wants to ramp up pressure, and there’s all sorts of ways he can do that without invading, throwing a blockade around the island, squeezing it economically in all sorts of different ways, what is Trump going to do? And that becomes a pretty dicey thing because he’s told himself that he can get away with using military force against these weak countries, Iran and Venezuela and so forth, but China’s a serious country. And the risk of a really big war if he goes head-to-head with them over Taiwan is pretty big, and I think he probably understands that. I personally don’t see any way that he’s actually going to support Taiwan to that extent, and so then it’s kind of up to Xi Jinping and his capacity for risk-taking as to how he wants… the degree to which he actually wants to take that risk. So it’s very worrisome, in other words, not as immediately problematic as Greenland and NATO and all that, but I think you still got a lot of instability.
Also, the nuclear thing is a big deal there as well because Japan, they think, is probably about six months away from actually having a nuclear weapon. They just have not developed it, for obvious reasons, but if they felt they had to because they really couldn’t count on the United States, they could get a bomb in six months. The Koreans are further away from that, but there’s actively talk in Korea about whether they need to do that. And they’ve got this particular problem with North Korea, which is an immediate threat to them, and whether they can depend onagain, the United States deterring North Korea from nuclear use against them is more and more questionable. So you have to ask yourself, supposing that there’s actually a confrontation and North Koreans actually use a nuclear weapon against South Korea, are we actually going to then use it against them, use one of our own against them when they have actually now the capability of hitting an American city with an ICBM? It gets pretty scary if you think through these scenarios.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I was talking at, I was at our friend Aaron Friedberg at a retirement, this little event firm at Princeton. A lot of Asia experts since Aaron is an Asia expert, and people who’ve come back from Japan recently, some military administration there. And it’s all kind of off the record and all this, but they were in these conversations at least, but the degree to which they said things have changed in their conversations, the people are now thinking seriously, in the sense they just don’t know if they can count on the US. That’s one of those stable relationships, US, Jaan, for what, 70 years now, 60, 70 years. Have a lot of troops there. We have an actual defense treaty. And then they are not going to let themselves be left naked before China, I don’t think, do you think that?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
No, I think that’s true. But like I said, they do have a nuclear option that they could exercise, a previous pretty easily [inaudible] —
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s what I mean, but that could be pretty fair. But then South Korea is looking at that. Then you think, oh my God, just the degree to which that could start… These things in one part of the world do have effects at other part of the world, right?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah, definitely.
BILL KRISTOL:
Latin America, we’ll take a minute on that and then we’ll get back to the US. I don’t know what happens now in Venezuela. What happens in the region? People… Again, Trump thinks of it as a bunch of little pipsqueak countries, I guess, but they’re kind of big countries down there, Mexico and Brazil and important countries.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
So in terms of Venezuela, I do think that there’s a good likelihood that there’s going to be mission creep. So Trump right now thinks that he can run the country through remote control just by giving orders to Delcy Rodriguez, the acting president. And I think that in terms of short run issues of opening up the country to American oil companies, that’s probably going to work.
The major problem there is that the companies themselves don’t want to invest huge bucks because there are just too many risks involved in that. But the thing is that Venezuela is basically run by a bunch of criminal gangs right now. The government is actually one of those criminal gangs, but they’ve got a lot of other people running around. And it’s going to likely get worse because I don’t believe that Delcy Rodriguez has the complete support of all of the military guys that are standing below her. And if she looks like she’s working too closely with the Americans, that’s not going to help her legitimacy in that crowd.
And so I just think the potential for continuing disorder is pretty great because of the way we basically prohibited oil from leaving Venezuela by going after these tankers. There is a growing humanitarian crisis. And even for Donald Trump, it’s going to look bad if you get starving babies in Caracas because of… In the wake of our intervention.
And so then you’ve got this big issue of how to stabilize that situation. And I think there’s going to be pressure for actual boots on the ground. Trump obviously wants to avoid that, but there could easily come a point where it’s kind of unavoidable to have any kind of stability in that country so that you can pump oil, for example.
The rest of the region, I think the problem is that it’s not susceptible… So there’s no question that many of those countries have very, very serious problems with narco trafficking and very highly organized gangs. A number of Mexican states are basically being run by criminal organizations and their president doesn’t have the power to really subdue them.
But again, this is one of the problems with the limitations of American power. Although we can perform a strike and we can do this amazing extraction of the leader of one of these countries from his bed in Caracas, it’s hard to deal with a problem like narco gangs by just bombing people. And I think that if he gets into that business, he’s going to get very frustrated because he’s going to realize that you can’t deal with these things using the instruments that he’s got. And then he’s got this question of, do we go in further in more intrusive ways? And that gets him embroiled with his domestic base. So there’s a lot of uncertainties and dangers, I think, in the path that he’s chosen.
BILL KRISTOL:
I’ve sort of assumed, but I could just be wrong, that he wouldn’t actually go down that path, that it’ll be… It’s kind of a crazy comparison, so like Gaza, he talked a big game, it’s going to be huge, it’s going to be the Mediterranean Riviera, and then the whole thing’s a mess. Maybe it’s slightly better off with a ceasefire than that one. I’m not begrudging that accomplishment, to the degree he was involved in that.
But we’re not going to send anyone in there, I don’t think. And if it falls apart gradually, it falls apart gradually, and Trump forgets about it. I guess a little harder to do with the country that you’ve made… You did go and snatch the president with a kind of much hyped American military mission. I’m not sure if you just walk away from that. That’s an interesting question. But again, what lesson does that send to everyone? If we’re now too terrified to go into a place we’ve actually… This again, how powerful are we if we aren’t going to follow up at all? And I’m not even saying we should. I’m just saying once you start down that path, yeah, other countries look up and say, okay, well, they’re not willing to use power.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
And he does have a stated objective in Venezuela, which is to pump oil, to have American companies pump oil, and they’re not going to invest if they can’t guarantee the security of their own workers. PDVSA, the national oil company in Venezuela was really stripped of its capacity by Hugo Chávez. So this goes back very many years. It’s only pumping a fraction of what it was before Chávez came to power.
If you want that to get going again, you have to have oil engineers that go back into the country and are willing to run the state oil company, and they’re not going to do that if you have a high level of insecurity with colectivos toting guns all over downtown Caracas. So I do think that simply to accomplish his narrow self-interested objectives, you have to be in much better control of the situation on the ground in Venezuela than we are right now.
So I agree with you that he’s got a big… There’s a lot of reasons why he is not going to want to put boots on the ground, but there are also going to be reasons why he may feel he needs to.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, interesting. And how does this all dovetail with what’s happening here in the US as we enter the second year of Trump’s second term?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah. Well…
BILL KRISTOL:
Two separate tracks, the authoritarianism here and the bullying abroad or related, or?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
No, I think they’re the same … Well, Bill, this is something you’re perfectly qualified yourself to talk about. But I think they’re perfectly parallel, that Trump doesn’t like constraints of any sort. He doesn’t like them internationally where they are much weaker than they are domestically, but he also doesn’t like them domestically. And I think that the concentration of power in the office of the president… So it’s not even in the executive branch, it’s just in the office of the president, has been really remarkable and his batting down of constraints.
The one that I follow the most closely, I actually care about the American bureaucracy, and that was an institution that was always relatively weak, but it was protected by certain kinds of prohibitions for cause, firing requirements, removal requirements. And Trump obviously hates all of them. Everybody’s been focused on the Fed because of its obvious importance to the economy.
But in general, there are many parts of the American government that are subject to these kinds of protections because they’re basically protecting expertise, that you don’t want a unified unitary executive because you actually do have to have these little bastions of separated powers within the executive branch itself where you can protect people that actually know what they’re doing. And this is something that obviously bugs him, and so he’s been trying to erode that as much as he can.
I think the betting is still that the Supreme Court is going to overturn Humphrey’s Executor in the Sullivan case and basically get rid of for cause protections. Trump is also basically taken control of the Fed. In fact, it’s a little bit strange the way he’s proceeded on this, because he actually could force… He has the power to force Jerome Powell to step down as a chair of the Fed. That’s not a protected position. Powell’s position as a member of the Federal Reserve Board is protected, but not his role as chair.
And why he felt he had to use criminal charges against Powell, again is one of these really just crazy psychological things that you have to explain psychologically, because he really didn’t need to do this. And I think it sends a terrible general message about the way he’s going to use the powers of his office, because it not only corrupts the independence of the Fed, but it also is further evidence of the corruption of the Justice Department that they can launch charges like this.
So in every respect, I think he’s doing the same thing domestically that he’s doing internationally. He’s trying to erode all of the existing constraints and his ability to use power. But I think in the United States, we still have stronger… The rule of law still means something here, fortunately.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I guess I’m struck by just on the bureaucracy side and the actual competence of government side. I guess people like me have been probably a little more focused on the authoritarian threat, the acceleration of the authoritarianism, what its implications are for elections and the rule of law in the sense of not persecuting people and then the immigration stuff, obviously.
But it’s also just a practical question. Can the government function well in this way? And then what are the actual outputs, so to speak, of the government going to be? And what is going to the implications for NIH and for a million other agencies? I guess it’s just too… Well, it’s not too early to know. I guess we haven’t seen the practical effects too much yet, but of course we’re only a few months in really.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Our mutual friend, Yuval Levin, did a really interesting podcast with Ezra Klein this past week, and Yuval’s argument is that if you look closely, the impact of Trump has been much less severe than a lot of us feared, because he is not an institutionalist. And so he does these one-off spectacular attacks on an individual, but this Republican Congress has been very bad at passing legislation. So once Trump is gone, there isn’t going to be that kind of legacy. You have a lot of one-off deals. But even in terms of the administrative state and new regulations that his agencies have put out, there hasn’t been much output.
And so Trump’s main… Yuval’s argument is that Trump is interested in the showmanship and the appearance of activity. So he goes after one particular company and forces it to do something that he… Like fire that Ford worker that heckled him. But in terms of actual changes in the legal structure, it hasn’t been that great.
So one of the things that Yuval was saying is that the NIH, actually funding is exactly at the same level that it was a year ago under Biden, that he actually hasn’t cut it, and that the Congress has actually restored the money that DOGE and the Trump people tried to cut in the first half of the year. So there’s actually been a lot more continuity in American government than we think there has been. And again, this is all due to Trump’s weird kind of personalization of everything. He doesn’t think in terms of institutions, and therefore the only lasting changes that really will have an effect are institutional ones, and he just doesn’t think that way. So I don’t know, this is Yuval’s opinion, and I think there may be something to that.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess I’ve tended to assume just the chaos itself, of course, causes, you pay a price for that. How many people are not coming to study in the US, and postdocs at NIH? You can tell them that NIH is funded at the same level. They don’t think this is a secure place to launch a five-year research project, is my sense. Now, maybe that’s been overstated too. I guess we’ll learn as we go forward in a whole bunch of these areas. Immigration, I’ve got to think though, don’t you think the practical effects of going to basically net-zero immigration?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah. No, that’s big.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s not nothing, right? That’s not just… What about the immigration stuff? I guess I’m so freaked out about just seeing it and how un-American it seems to me, but I don’t know. I suppose that could happen, continue for a year or two and then stop and that would be…we’d get beyond it.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Okay. So this is a good excuse for a little sermon here.
BILL KRISTOL:
Good.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Back in the early 2000s, I was on this Brookings study group that was chaired by Peter Skerry and Bill Galston on comprehensive immigration reform. And we produced a report at the end of that, which I thought was the only way I could see towards a kind of sensible immigration reform. It’s the same one that’s been proposed over and over that’s been rejected by Congress.
So basically on the one hand, you do enforcement not by ICE Agents kidnapping people, but through employer sanctions. And on the other hand, you have a path towards citizenship, so you can legalize people that have been peacefully working in the United States for many years without criminal records and so forth. It’s just such an obvious way to deal with this problem. And my worry really is that the Democrats are not interested in taking up a sensible policy like this, and that Trump has generated so much hostility as a result of the way that he’s used ICE, that if they come back into power, they’re going to snap back to a Biden-like policy without actually having a real way in the long run of dealing with immigration sensibly.
And so my position on this has always been that immigration is a good thing for the United States. We ought to increase actually the amount of legal immigration to this country. By the way, the Brookings Report advocated that, but we need to be more selective in the kinds of people that we let in, the way Canada and Australia are. But there also has to be what the Republicans denounced at the time as amnesty, that there has to be a path towards citizenship. And I would really like to see somebody taking up the opportunity of putting forward a real solution to the immigration problem.
And I don’t know, what’s your opinion? I mean, does all this stuff with ICE just mean that we have to go back to the opposite of it? Or do you think that there’s actually a ground being prepared for a kind of more moderate and more sensible long-term solution to this?
BILL KRISTOL:
I think both are possible in a sense. I think people are overly sometimes deterministic about this. I mean, yes, the initial reaction, of course, will be, as mine has been, horror. I said maybe incidentally we’ll abolish ICE or radically change it or change the structure of DHS. That’s not inconsistent, then, with on the one hand—and insist on really strict rules for the way they behave, and they can’t go around with masks and all that stuff—that’s not inconsistent with three months later proposing the kind of bill you’re talking about. And it’s not inconsistent with a party that has elements that do both.
I suppose it’s not even inconsistent theoretically with some Republicans deciding after Trump that if they get beyond Trump, that this is a reasonable way to go in the future. So I think it’s very, I guess it’s so indeterminate, I feel like, what the future is like. We’ve not been through this experience of Trump, so we don’t know what the post-Trump experience will be, is my sense. I don’t know. I mean, I’m pessimistic in general, and that’s just because awful lot of destruction to American norms and mores and habits of governance and so forth, which weren’t great always, as you say, has happened. But maybe, I don’t know, maybe one snaps back faster or something than I think. I don’t know.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Yeah. Abolishing ICE has got a lot of dangers because it sounds too much like defund the police, but it’s possible that you actually would have to disband it just because it’s kind of this malformed birth. It was created as this personal instrument of Donald Trump. And the people that have been recruited into it are really a bunch of thugs, and it could be that it’s not really reformable unless you start over again with a real police force that actually showed the kind of restraint that is necessary. But nonetheless, I think that’s one of the things we’ve got to think about for the future is how do we deal with this sort of monster that he’s created?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I think there is a Democratic bill, I think actually maybe even now in the appropriations, that wants to rechannel some of the money to the local police forces. I mean, so they can try to square that circle, I think, somewhat plausibly. I mean, the police really don’t behave the way ICE does. I mean, police have their own issues. At times, individual or small groups of cops have behaved that way, but most American police forces do not do what ICE does literally. So it’s just a kind of weird quirk of immigration law that they aren’t constrained quite the way other law enforcement officers seem to be. Not a quirk, but…
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Is it your expectation that Trump is going to continue to escalate his threats against blue states using ICE and these other levers that he’s got?
BILL KRISTOL:
I don’t know. I mean, what do you think?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, he certainly seems to be relishing, that I think he’s wanted to do this ever since his first term, and I think he’s probably going to take any opportunity he’s got to try again. The courts have been pretty good so far, that telling them that they couldn’t do this in Illinois and then in other states. But then the Supreme Court, we’ll have to see what they finally decide on the legality of all of this.
BILL KRISTOL:
2026 will be a big year because I mean, a lot of these things are up in the air. And I mean, a lot of this comes down to the elections, and does he think at the end of the day he’s serving his four years and out? He may personally think that because he’ll be quite old, but man, there’s been so much corruption.
One thing that really gives me pause is there’s been so much corruption with so many people under Trump. We’re talking hundreds of people, maybe thousands. Not Trump and eight other people. What do they all think? Do they think it’s going to be fine to just lose power and leave? I mean, they are making a fortune. And the way in which they made those fortunes probably wouldn’t look very good if some new administration came in and turned over those rocks.
So I think the degree of pressure, unlike 2020 where this was Trump and a few people, and Bill Barr didn’t care if he went to a law firm that much, and others didn’t care that much, certainly the intelligence community and FBI director, that’s not going to be the case now. I mean, that’s for me, I think, has been underestimated a little bit, the degree to which we have a big authoritarian movement on the outside, obviously the sort of MAGA world, which has been radicalized. I guess that’s what authoritarian movements do, happens to them. And a big inside government kind of group who have a big interest in holding onto power if possible. That’s kind of a worrisome combination.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
That’s scary. Yeah. In particular, Pam Bondi has a law partner that got $847 million in payment. Basically, it looks like it was Russian money. And that came in right at the time that she was advocating for a loosening of controls on those kinds of money transfers. And she was confronted by Elizabeth Warren about this. Elizabeth Warren was really well-prepared and she had all the documents, saying, “This amount of money was transferred on this date and so forth.”
And Pam Bondi, it was kind of an amazing thing. For a couple of minutes, she just stood there and didn’t say anything. Warren would say, “Is this true? Did you actually do this?” And she obviously didn’t want to perjure herself because they had proof that this stuff had happened, but she also couldn’t come up with a innocent explanation for why this stuff was happening. And so here you have the attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer in this administration, that herself may be guilty of pretty massive corruption. So that seems to me a great example of she’s not going to be a Bill Barr that’ll just go to a law firm after this. She may go to jail.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Or try not to leave power, or have someone take over who won’t enforce accountability. Final thing, I’m going to let you go. 2026, it’s probably too hard to look out over three years, but what are you looking for, particular, I don’t know, signs, inflection points, concerns that aren’t totally obvious? Or I mean, do you have a view on what this next 6-12 months, 6-10 months, I guess, till the election could look like?
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
You mean until the November election?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Yeah, basically, I think. Yeah.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, I guess I’m expecting a lot more international turmoil because it does seem to me that Trump is reading the handwriting on the wall that the Republicans are going to get plastered in November. And this is just a typical thing that authoritarian rulers do is you distract people by foreign policy. And I sort of think that this was in the back of his mind with Venezuela and now with Greenland, nobody’s talking about Jeffrey Epstein now. And so it’s working. And you still got, what is it, 10 months where he could move on to a lot of other foreign policy kinds of issues. So I guess that would be my expectation is that he’s not going to stop at Greenland.
BILL KRISTOL:
And even Greenland, of course, we’ll have to see what happens. I mean, what would he accept just to close on that? I mean, let’s assume there’s some, well, I don’t know what we should assume, but I mean, he sort of ruled out the use of force today in Davos kind of. He’s capable of ruling it back in tomorrow, obviously. I never quite believe we’re actually going to land troops there, but maybe that’s just my lack of imagination. But of course we could put all kinds of pressure on Denmark, and as you said, and the EU, right? I mean—
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Well, That’s going to be very complicated. He’s threatened these tariffs on the eight EU countries that sent troops to Greenland, but the Supreme Court could tomorrow issue its ruling on tariffs that’ll completely take that power away. So then if you play that out, he’s obviously going to try to come up with other authorities. But I don’t think that if the court rules against him, he’s going to be able to be so free at just using his discretionary authority to hit this country and that country. Although I was thinking that the reason that the authority is being contested in the court right now is that it’s a taxing authority, and that that’s an Article I power assigned to Congress. He could say that, actually, no, these tariffs are a foreign policy tool in order to get countries to do what the United States wants them to do, and that that’s the grounds on which they’re being used, and leading to a whole legal reinterpretation of tariffs basically as a form of leverage against other countries, not for economic reasons, but for political reasons. So all of that, I think, has still got to play out in the coming weeks and months.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I guess we just don’t know, the NATO thing, one kind of assumes still, even I do, and I’m pretty radical in my notions of what could happen, I think, or I think there’s a higher chance than a lot of other people do of really things really breaking apart in dramatic ways. I guess I sort of assume there’ll be an annual NATO summit this year and a G7 or G8, and they’ll all show up and there’ll be the usual back and forth. But I don’t know, maybe that’s just wrong. I mean, maybe there won’t be a NATO. Maybe there won’t be a functioning NATO. Maybe we’ll be leaving the headquarters in Brussels three months from now. That’s not totally out of the question, right? I mean—
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
No, that’s right. You could have an escalation where the administration moves on Greenland and they shut down American bases in Europe. And yeah, it’s terrible.
BILL KRISTOL:
Amazing. Yeah, it is depressing though. And depressing because, as you’ve done so much work on Ukraine and I mean, this terrible war, biggest war since World War II in Europe, maybe in the world, I don’t know, close to it in the world. And the idea that that’s just frittering away the incredible sacrifices made there by Ukraine, and the reasonable support, as I said, by a lot of countries, including ones that hadn’t been doing much, of Ukraine. And just for what? Well, because Trump likes Putin better. I mean, it’s really… And if that happens, incidentally, people haven’t thought that through in my opinion. What does that look like if Ukraine really starts to be in bad shape six or nine months from now? I mean, that’s—
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
No, I take this all very personally. So I and my center at Stanford have been running all these programs for mid-career Ukrainians. And so we have a lot of friends there that have been through one of our programs at one time or another. A lot of them have assumed very responsible positions in Zelensky’s government. And I just feel terrible. I don’t know what to say to them. Say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that we betrayed you,” but that’s not a fun thing to have to say to anybody.
BILL KRISTOL:
Hate to end on that note, but look, we have to be, as Prime Minister Carney of Canada said, we’ve got to be hardheaded and realistic about this moment, and if we’re going to think about how to recover from it. So either in the short-term or in the medium or long-term. So Frank, thank you for a very interesting, not always upbeat, but very enlightening, really, conversation. I think putting a lot of these pieces together that we tend to see little fragments of. So thanks for doing this, Frank.
FRANK FUKUYAMA:
Thanks for having me, Bill.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
