Well, first of all, it's not clear what Donald Trump's objectives are. This is what a lot of people have been saying is that he never explained either to the American people and may not have clearly in his own mind what he hopes to accomplish by this.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

Well, when I'm up on Saturday morning to learn that the United States and Israel had

flown major strikes on Iran and when I learned over the course of the day that it seems

likely that they have succeeded in killing Ayatollah Khomeini.

I immediately wanted to get a wiser perspective on these events from my friend Francis Fukuyama.

And so I emailed him and asked whether he would agree to do a podcast in Substack Live.

And he agreed to do that.

So this is what we're recording today, slightly out of schedule day earlier than we would normally

release our midweek episode.

We talked about the nature of these strikes, what the likely future is for Iran, the risk

of a broader regional war, what position Israel is in a number of years after

October 7th and how its international standing has evolved, how it has achieved a number of

big military successes, but also seen its international standing reputation significantly erode.

And finally, in the last part of this conversation, we talked about what all of this means

for domestic American politics. I asked Frank how the natural experiment that he diagnosed

in late 2016 and early 2017 is going, whether it

turns out that historically grown strong political culture and well-written constitution is

enough to maintain democracy or whether somebody who has taken as extreme steps to undermine

that political order as Donald Trump

is likely to succeed in doing.

So, spoiler alert.

...