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 what the flurry of executive orders really means; how the civil service needs to change; Trump’s plans for Greenland; and what China will do next.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: The last time we talked was briefly after Donald Trump was elected. Well, now we're talking again briefly, which is to say five days—as we're recording this—after Donald Trump took office. What is your first assessment?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, prior to the election, a lot of moderate Republicans, including a lot of my conservative friends, made the argument that a second Trump term wouldn't be that different from the first Trump term and that he actually didn't accomplish all that much in the first term, either because he couldn't implement or he just didn't have the will or the intention. And I think now it's very clear that that's completely wrong, that he has come into office really seeking revenge.
I think that's the single thing that has been driving him. He is just as radical as many people feared in terms of his assault on the American system, and he's much, much better prepared to accomplish what he wants to do. He's actually added a few things like taking over Panama and Greenland that we hadn't anticipated. So, I'm really expecting the worst in many ways.
Mounk: Many people have made the argument over the last months that Trump this time around is going to hold a lot more power. The form in which I made the argument is that in 2016, he didn't have political experience. He didn't truly have power over the Republican Party. He didn't have a lot of nominees that he could put in place who were actually loyal to him and so on.
This time around, we sort of knew that he had much more control over the Republican Party, that he obviously had ruled for four years, that he had built a cadre of loyalist staffers. It's still striking how organized the administration has been so far. And at some level, it's quite impressive, having 100 executive orders ready to sign in the first hours.
So the question now is: we seem to be facing somebody with a much more concrete plan for what he wants to do and a much greater capacity for carrying it out. What exactly is that going to entail and how far is that going to go?
Fukuyama: Let me talk about the stuff that I’ve been following most closely, which is the assault on the federal bureaucracy. In the past year, people have been worried about the Schedule F executive order that he issued at the end of his first term, which basically would have allowed him to fire any American civil servant. Just as an example of how much better prepared they are this time around, they actually have not reissued Schedule F because that presented a big target for their opponents to shoot at.
Now DOGE is this committee that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been put in charge of. It’s the Department of Government Efficiency, self-titled, that was supposed to cut $2 trillion from the budget and make the government work like a Silicon Valley company. I don't think Elon Musk really has the attention span to really do that work seriously.
Mounk: And Vivek Rameswamy has already pulled out of DOGE, ostensibly in order to pursue his run for the governor of Ohio, but in part because there seem to have been mounting tensions with Elon Musk. But it shows some of the first fissures within the administration, even in a week where they've been quite strikingly efficient and effective.
Fukuyama: Well, I think that DOGE in general was just created to give a title to Elon Musk to keep him busy and not interfere with the real agenda, which is being run by Russ Vought, who's going to be the new head of the Office of Management and Budget. And he is very smart. He worked in that office in the first administration. He really understands how the U.S. government works.
It's been kind of amazing the level of detail with which they've been going after their opponents. So for just one example, one thing that happened this past week is a number of Stanford Law School students had been given summer internships at the Justice Department, and they were all told that they no longer had them. It was a kind of retribution against Stanford. So it's at that level where you're actually kicking interns off of the summer payroll.
They've been very clever. They didn't try to revive Schedule F since that’s become such a big target, but they've done the same thing. They've said that they don't actually need to fire masses of civil servants, they just need to intimidate the real policy makers.
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Mounk: You've written, most notably in your two-volume “political order” books, about the rise of the modern state and modern democracies, but also, in our context, about the importance of a professional, apolitical civil service. At the same time, you yourself are quite critical of some of the ways in which the federal bureaucracy has worked for the last years. So if you don't mind, explain why is it so important to have a civil service where the most important jobs are not politicized, where there is a professional staff that remains in place between very different administrations?
Fukuyama: Well, a civil service provides all of the functions of government basically—agricultural subsidies, social security, public health, physical security against criminals, foreign policy—all of this stuff needs to be run by bureaucracies of various sorts. I think there was a period when ideas about government were dominated by economists who thought in terms of resources, but even the economists now have woken up to the fact that you need state capacity, that there are certain public goods that only a state can provide, and if you don't have competent people that know what they're doing, you're not going to have effective services. The problem right now is that what governments do is incredibly complex and requires a high degree of training and skill.
One thing that people may not have noticed is that NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—which launches weather satellites among other things—has been getting much better. Hurricane warnings are much more accurate. Weather reports across the country are much better. And that's because they employ a lot of really highly skilled professional meteorologists. It really threatens a shutdown of many of the basic functions of government if we don't have a professional modern civil service.
Mounk: So there's two kinds of problems here, which are sort of interrelated, right? One is a question of competence. So if you're hired because you are a loyalist rather than because you're the most qualified person on the job, then you're just going to be less good at doing this. A conceptually separate if related worry is that if you have politicized people in those agencies, then they may not be willing to help all Americans on the same terms, right? They might start to say, this area that voted Republican, we're going to help, and that area that voted Democrat, we're not going to help.
Fukuyama: The fundamental characteristic of a modern government is impersonality, meaning that you provide services equally to all citizens just because they're citizens. And that contrasts with a patrimonial or a patronage-based system in which you basically use political power to reward your friends. And you can see this in disaster relief. Donald Trump has been trying to push our system back to a patrimonial one. He actually didn't want to provide disaster relief when he was president to California because California is a Democratic state. If a similar disaster—like a hurricane—hits Louisiana, the aid is going to go there immediately because it's a reliably red state. And so this kind of politicization really degrades the ability of the American government to actually be a modern state and do things equitably.
Mounk: Let me play devil's advocate for a second if you don't mind. The other side of this argument is that the solution to this is an impersonal civil service that simply applies the laws that are passed by the legislature, that is politically neutral, that does not impose its own values on the function of the state.
But of course, the problem in the United States today and in many other Western democracies is that there's such a strong correlation between education and political leaning and political ideology. You have a very important set of institutions like the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control run in large part by public health experts. And you see some of the most influential public health experts in the country signing a letter at the height of COVID to say that mass gatherings to protest for racial justice are in fact good for public health because racial inequities are themselves a threat to public health. Then people look at that and say, well, how can I trust this current civil service to actually be impersonal in that kind of way?
How do we deal with the quite widespread sense that these experts claim to be apolitical and impersonal, but in example after example it turns out that they're pretty damn ideological and are using the office, which is meant to serve in an apolitical way the goals set by a legislature, to advance their own values and their own view of the world?
Fukuyama: Well, I'm glad you said that because that queues up my general point about the nature of the bureaucracy. Because I think your basic premise is completely wrong. There has been a longstanding conservative critique of the administrative state saying that it is run by bureaucrats who are out of the control of elected authorities and who’ve got a liberal bias. But the problem with the bureaucracy is not that they have too much discretionary authority and that they're operating outside of political control. The problem with the bureaucracy is that they are over-controlled, over-regulated and they do not have enough discretion to use their own judgment to do their jobs. If you really want to fix the bureaucracy, you have to empower them to be able to use their own judgment. If you just take that public health case, the problem with public health professionals is that they want to maximize one social good, which is public health.
Mounk: There's two different critiques of public health folks, right? One critique is they prioritize public health over other goods like being able to attend the funeral of your aunt or something like that. I think it’s more understandable that they kind of have their hammer and they only see a nail. The other critique is that then some of the most influential public health people in the country, over a thousand people, signed this letter—at the height of the George Floyd protests after telling people you can't go and attend the funeral of your aunt—to say: go out in the streets in order to protest because that somehow helps public health.
Fukuyama: Yeah, they've got a liberal bias. I just don't think that that was that important. I don't think anyone listened to that letter. The biggest problem was that the political authorities did not do what they should have done, which is to make a serious effort to balance different social goods. The failure was not, you know, the fact that these bureaucrats wrote a letter, which had zero impact on anybody. The failure was the political authorities did not do their job of actually trying to reconcile and balance different social objectives, and they had excessive deference to those authorities.
The single biggest thing that needs to be deregulated—and this is where I agree with DOGE and the general thrust of the Trump administration—has to do with the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats live under this incredible burden of accumulated rules. Do you have any idea how many annual reports the federal bureaucracy, beginning with the Pentagon, are required to file with Congress every year?
Mounk: Hundreds or thousands, I'm guessing.
Fukuyama: The number is in the hundreds of thousands.
Mounk: Wow. Nobody in Congress actually has the time to read a hundred thousand reports that are filed every year.
Fukuyama: For example, one of the reports that the Federal Reserve is required to file with Congress is a report on the dollar coin. Now when’s the last time you saw a dollar coin anywhere in the United States? This is a requirement that's like 100 years old, but it's never been taken off the books. And there's some bureaucrat in the Federal Reserve that has to spend several days every year writing up a report to Congress about what's going on with the dollar coin. There's just endless ways in which this ramifies through the government.
The problem is that many reformers think the way we deal with government dysfunction is to write more rules, to make sure that they do what they're supposed to do. And that just works in completely the wrong direction. They need to be given more discretionary authority to carry out the mandates that the political authorities set for them.
Mounk: Let's broaden the conversation out to some of the other executive orders and some of the other announcements that the Trump administration has made. There's over a hundred of them, so it's very hard to summarize, but it seems like a sort of hodgepodge of different kinds of measures, right? Some of them are targeting the DEI bureaucracy that really has overgrown in many parts of the federal state. And to those of us who are worried about certain forms of left-identitarian ideology, there may be things to value in that regard. Others seem to potentially be unconstitutional, like the particular set of measures about birthright citizenship and one of the ones that I've been worried about this week, which is the announcement that Trump wants to deploy the U.S. military on the southern border. What do you think about these executive orders?
Fukuyama: This instinct to rule by executive order is something that's been growing over time. The reason it's been growing is that Congress itself, which should be the source of these policies, is dysfunctional. And I think the Trump people are very impatient. They don't even want to wait for a Congress that they control to actually pass rules. And so they want to bypass the legislature by simply doing everything out of the White House. And that is extremely dangerous because there are definitely many of these orders that will be overturned by a court. I think you put your finger exactly on the coming constitutional crisis because there will be a justice and it could even be nine justices, several of whom were appointed by Trump himself, who tell him that he can't do something. And that's going to create a real crisis if he wants to simply ignore what they said.
Mounk: Let's touch a little bit on foreign policy. You invoked earlier the fact that Trump does appear to be serious about wanting to retake or enlarge American control over the Panama Canal. This is one of the things that he talked about in his inaugural address. He did not mention Greenland or Denmark in the inaugural address, but there's reports in the press that he had a call with Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, in which he insisted quite strongly that he is serious about wanting to cut a deal with Denmark. That would give the U.S. legal control over Greenland. Of course, the U.S. already has a military base there.
We've seen what is happening in his dealings with Russia which are somewhat confusing. There's reports that aid for Ukraine may already have been curtailed or stopped—a situation that may have evolved or changed by the time this podcast is released. At the same time, we've seen a surprisingly strong tweet by Trump about Putin, where he says, I like Russia and I want to come to a deal, but you can have this the easy way or the hard way. And if you don't play ball, then you're going to have it the hard way. And it sounded to me surprisingly like a mobster pretending to be nice, but actually saying, if you don't play ball, we're going to get pretty mean with you.
And then, of course, there's a question about China on which Trump, I think, has a genuine sense that America is in competition with the country, that China is taking advantage of America. If you remember the 2016 campaign, this was one of his big obsessions, first the amazing supercut of Trump saying China, China, 200 times. At the same time, one of the first things he did was to stop the mandate for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. owner in order to be allowed to continue operating it in the U.S., and he said things about Taiwan that implied that he wouldn't really mind that strongly if Beijing tried to reunify the country. So how should we understand all of these different pieces? My instinct is that it's a form of generalized sphere of influence thinking, that Trump is saying we can do whatever we want in our sphere of influence.
Fukuyama: Well, I think it's a kind of hard-nosed realism that we really haven't seen in an American president in a very long time. He keeps referring to McKinley as his model, and McKinley actually did expand the American empire, but it really is in contradiction to his isolationist instincts. I think that Greenland and Panama don't promise dragging the U.S. into a forever war, but I think it speaks to a very old understanding of national power that we thought that we had abandoned after 1945, which is that great powers simply want to maximize their territorial control. The thing about Greenland, which I think is really the most disturbing, is that Trump could have had everything he wanted with regard to Greenland in a quiet, peaceful negotiation with Denmark. But he insists on this very loud campaign against a traditional ally that's actually done quite a lot to support American foreign policy in other areas. It looks like he really is going to insist on U.S. sovereignty—not just access, but sovereignty. And I think the reason is that he's thinking about a time when the maps of the world will be redrawn and when there's a picture of the United States it's going to have this huge island with an American flag covering it and I honestly think that's really what's driving this—it's actually not strategic self-interest, but impact.
Mounk: How would that play out? I saw a tweet from a Danish politician saying, look, we may not be a powerful country and the U.S. is a powerful country, but we're not under any circumstances going to give up our right over Greenland. America will have to come and take it. And clearly Denmark is not in a military position to defend Greenland.
If U.S. troops just march into the territory of an EU country and declare that Greenland is now part of the United States, surely that would lead to a very significant rift in the transatlantic alliance. Let's take this seriously for a moment. I mean, there's negotiations, Denmark says, no, we're not coming to a deal. The U.S. expands its base and marches into whatever the larger towns or villages of Greenland are and says, here's a U.S. flag. What would happen?
Fukuyama: Right, the Article 5 NATO guarantee says you need to come to the defense of any of the NATO allies that's being attacked. So what happens if one NATO ally is attacking another NATO ally? Do they come to Greenland's defense or Denmark's defense? I don't know. It's so inconceivable that it's very hard to even speculate about what the long-term fallout effects are, but it certainly will destroy, in a moral sense, any kind of idea of shared community of values that NATO used to encompass. We saw a little bit of this with the Iraq War, where there was so much European opposition to the invasion that people started saying, well, we're actually not part of the same moral universe. But this would be that on steroids. And I think it's going to have a lot of knock-on effects beyond these geopolitical realignments that are certain to follow. Because I think the whole concept of the West as being a community of liberal values has been really, really important over the past decades. And I think that'll just go down the tubes.
Mounk: Yeah, it would be very, very striking. Europe would at that point be much more inclined to actually pursue some kind of strategic autonomy. But of course, it would also be far too divided to do that in any meaningful way, which would leave Europe very weakened because then you just have a bunch of individual European countries without the protection of the United States or its ability to coordinate with the United States, subject to tremendous pressure from Russia and perhaps China, to cut side deals that favor those countries.
Whatever one's view about the very complicated issue of Taiwan's independence or the historical relationship between those two, it is obvious that the United States has less of a historical claim to Greenland than the mainland has to be the island of Taiwan.
Fukuyama: I don't think that Donald Trump ever had an intention of lifting a finger to defend Taiwan. It's all based on smoke and mirrors. You have this potential threat to intervene that there's no consensus over. I don't think Trump has really ever taken that seriously as something that he would risk American blood and treasure to do. And if the United States is now embroiled in a big fight with its own allies over Greenland, why not just march into Taipei? That's the perfect opportunity.
Mounk: I do think one of the main reasons why Beijing so far hasn't tried to forcibly reunify with Taiwan is that they assumed that there would be real consequences for the country's international standing and trade relationships and so on. Now, if the United States has just invaded Greenland and then perhaps is invading Panama, it's much harder to see why the international community would go along with any U.S. attempts to impose sanctions on China over this.
Fukuyama: I think the big countries in the Global South—India, South Africa, Brazil—they're not going to support the United States. There may be some authoritarian countries that will see this as an opportunity to validate stuff that they've wanted to do. But, you know, no other important country would be on America's side in a Greenland scenario like the one we've been envisioning. The U.S. would not get any support, it’d get global condemnation, I think.
Mounk: What about America's relationship to China? So it seems simultaneously that the Trump administration might be soft in some aspects of its relationship with China, in part because I think Trump has been more strategic than people recognize in expanding his support base. He seems to have decided that he might curry some favor and popularity with younger voters by giving TikTok this somewhat surprising reprieve. We talked about the fact that it does not appear that Trump would be willing to risk American blood and treasure for maintaining the current status of Taiwan.
On the other hand, there are also real China hawks in the administration. And as I was invoking earlier, Trump does seem to have been obsessed with at least trade competition from China and perhaps competition for power and influence on the international stage for quite a long time. Is the Trump administration going to be soft on China or tough on China or some strange mix of those? What do you think is going to happen to relationships between America and China over the coming years?
Fukuyama: Well, again, Yascha, you're asking a question that's impossible to answer because he has given very contradictory signals there. I would have thought that it would be quite easy for him to take a very explicitly hawkish line towards China.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Francis discuss trade with China, the future of the war in Ukraine, the rise of populist forces, and the unnoticed death of the WASP. This discussion is reserved for paying members…
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