Welcome to the fourth concert in Francis Fukuyama's Errors Tour. In this fourth episode of the series, we cover a very exciting part of Frank's life in American history. We start by discussing the run-up to the Iraq War: why Frank originally was part of the broader neoconservative milieu that supported the war, and why, just before the war broke out, he started to change his mind, ultimately breaking with his long-standing friends and collaborators over the wisdom of this kind of intervention. We speak about how these questions got Frank to investigate the origins of the modern state, how the difficulties of state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan led him to pose questions about how it is that we got the emergence of political orders in some countries but not in other parts of the world, and how it is that some parts of the world managed to get to Denmark, to build democratic, prosperous states, when other parts of the world still struggle with that.
Finally, in the last part of the conversation, which is reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about the dangers of repatrimonialization: the danger that modern states might slide back, might lose some of their achievements like the rule of law, like the separation of offices from the people who inhabit them, might become more corrupt than they have been for the last decades. This is something that Frank warned about in his work in the early 2010s. It has obviously, in many ways, been vindicated by the enormous corruption in the Donald Trump administration. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support the work we do here, to make it possible for us to do ambitious projects like having Frank talk through all of his life and work, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to writing.jashinmonk.com to sign up. And today we are throwing in a special discount. Go to writing.jashinmonk.com/2026 for 30% off your first year of subscription. That's writing.jashinmonk.com/2026 for 30% off your first year, which makes one week of this podcast cost about a dollar. Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the latest concert on the Errors Tour.
Thank you very much, Yasha. It's been a fun journey so far.
It's been really fun and interesting. We left in the 1990s, or I suppose the early 2000s, with your writing about human nature. So I think we're going to try and cover the next 15 or 20 years in this conversation. And the starting point to a lot of political debate, and perhaps to some big changes in your reflections about the world, was the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11 and the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq. You initially supported that idea and then changed your mind about it. Tell us about that time.
Well, I had fallen in with a group of people that later became known as the neoconservatives. These were people like Bill Kristol and his Project for the New American Century that started in the 1990s. You know, it was a pretty hawkish group of policy intellectuals. And I frankly hadn't been thinking about foreign policy all that much in the 1990s. I was more interested in things like, you know, let's say the wars in Central America or the peacekeeping, you know, missions that had been undertaken in that period. It's so long ago, you know, we had this thing called the responsibility to protect at the time when the West seemed so overpoweringly powerful and influential. And, you know, the question was when were we going to intervene to restore order to disorderly, you know, developing countries.
And that now seems incredibly hubristic. And I remember being quite skeptical about that idea when I first came across it as a young student. But, of course, this came out of the failure to intervene in Rwanda, the sense that we had let these horrible genocides go on without doing anything. And so, if we had the power, if we had the ability, why shouldn't we go in and save people from genocide? And we have the ability to do that. Well, why shouldn't we take it one step further and spread the joys of democracy and good government around the world? You know, you have to give it its due. You have to place it in a historical context of where that instinct came from.
No, that's right. So, I had been thinking about, you know, developing world conflicts, civil wars, you know, intervention. And I hadn't paid that much attention to this ongoing crisis over Iraq, even though when I was an intern at the RAND Corporation back in 1978, that's what I did. I wrote a whole study that summer about Iraq's Saddam Hussein's relationship to the Soviet Union, which at that time was the most radical, you know, Arab rejectionist country. So, I did sign on to a letter that Bill Kristol had sent around urging intervention in Iraq. You know, to my embarrassment, you know, I actually hadn't thought that carefully about it.
Then September 11th happened. I was sitting in my office at SAIS on Massachusetts Avenue when the Pentagon was struck. You know, one of my colleagues came into my office and said, "You'd better turn on the TV because something big is happening." And we watched the second plane go into the second tower, and looking out the windows, we could actually see the smoke rising from the Pentagon, which had also been hit that morning. And, you know, everything seemed to change. And the question then was, "What did we do about this?" And this led to this really bitter and prolonged debate over the causes of September 11th, and the inclination of a lot of my conservative friends to try to link this to Saddam Hussein and this long-standing problem they'd had with Iraq and its attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction. I don't know that it's worth going through all of the ins and outs of that latter issue, you know, the elder Bush had intervened to get Iraq out of Kuwait back in 1991. They discovered, you know, in the subsequent years that they actually were working on a nuclear program. They sent nuclear inspectors in. Saddam Hussein kicked them out. And it did look like, you know, he was trying to do his best to deceive the outside world as to the existence of these WMD programs, but after September 11th, there was an attempt to link all of this to the September 11th attacks, and that kind of laid the ground for the disastrous intervention in 2003. So, that was the general background, you know, out of which I was operating back then.
I can't hear you now.
Oh. So, so at the time at which... Let me do this again. So, at the time when you favored this intervention, you know, which of the different kinds of justifications for the war did you find to be most compelling, right? There was the kind of most idealistic neoconservative, you know, we're going to turn Iraq into a flourishing democracy, and that'll be an example to the rest of the Middle East, and, you know, if it means that all of these other countries are also becoming these flourishing democratic, prosperous nations, then that's worth it. There was a kind of more security-minded, hard-nosed, you know, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. I believe one of the reasons why American intelligence was convinced that he had weapons of mass destruction is that he lied to his own generals about it. So, they had recordings of him telling his generals, "We have these amazing weapons of mass destruction, but you don't know the details about." And so, there was a kind of security-based reasoning for it. And then, of course, there was a kind of cynical reasoning, which I assume was not what was driving you, but which may have been driving certain parts of the American state, for I think I wouldn't overstate this, which is that, you know, Iraq had oil, and America needed, you know, a stable supply of oil. I mean, you know, from these different kinds of things, what was initially your reasoning, and what made you then change your mind?
Well, the oil thing I don't think ever was the driving force either for me or for the administration. No, it was the weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that Iraq would get them. The idea of democratizing Iraq was really not on anybody's radar at that point. That was a justification that George W. Bush began pushing after the failure of the intervention, you know, when he was in the midst of an insurgency and he had to come up with another reason for why he'd launched this war. That's the only point at which they started saying that they're going to bring democracy to Iraq, but I don't think that that was on anybody's agenda really back in, you know, the late '80s, early... I'm sorry, late '90s, early 2000s.
You know, for me, I didn't have a problem with the use of force to topple a dictator. It had been done, you know, we toppled Hitler and, you know, went to war with Japan and we did all of these things using force that brought about, you know, good results in the end. My real objection had to do with the practicalities of actually restoring order in the countries that we had intervened in, because my observation from Central America, from Vietnam, from the Philippines all the way back in the early 20th century was that that's the point at which American foreign policy failed. I had a mentor at the RAND Corporation, Steve Hosmer, who was a former Air Force officer that had worked very intensively. RAND at one point had a Saigon office when the Vietnam War was going on. He was a very wise person about Third World interventions, and his general warning was that the United States would get very invested in an intervention, the war would get a lot of support in the first year or two, but as time went on and we discovered how difficult these interventions were to stabilize the country that we were trying to ostensibly help, the American public would lose interest and then we would pull out and the whole thing would go to hell. And this has happened repeatedly in American foreign policy. It happened in the Philippines. It happened in El Salvador or in Central America, actually, in the 1930s when we sent the Marines into Nicaragua. It happened in Vietnam where we got tired after about five years and then decided we wanted to pull out. And so my real concern was, okay, you're going to take out this dictator, what is your plan to actually stabilize Iraq after that? And this is the point where I think, you know, the backgrounds of my neocon friends was really kind of a hindrance to clear thinking about this because they had all been in power in the first Bush administration, you know, from at the point where the Berlin Wall fell. And that was a historically unique moment where there actually were crowds in the streets demonstrating to celebrate the downfall of these communist dictators in Eastern Europe. And that was their experience of, you know, American power and influence, and I think that they at that time believed the same thing would happen in Iraq, you know, that the moment that you toppled Saddam Hussein, people would come out in the streets cheering, you know, the Americans on, and it failed to take account of all of the accumulated Arab grievances against the United States for its support of Israel, the general distrust, and then just the sheer cultural difference, you know, Eastern Europe had been part of the West, you know, for centuries, but the Middle East was a very different place. You had crazy radical Islamists running all over the place, which you didn't have in Eastern Europe. And so, I just think that the, you know, my friends in the administration just had a rather naive view of the likelihood that this kind of intervention would actually work, or that they had enough cultural and political knowledge to pull it off. So, that, you know, that was a situation, and that was my reason for becoming increasingly skeptical about the wisdom of the Iraq War.
And obviously one other factor that was very important was the split between Sunnis and Shias, and the fact that even though Saddam Hussein was certainly extremely unpopular among Shias and among many Sunnis, he was a terrible dictator, and that's something that we shouldn't forget in retelling the story. The moment that Sunnis felt like their power was being taken away and Shias were going to be in charge of the state, they had a very strong reason to try and organize against the new regime, and that's part of what then drove the civil war which ensued. At what point did you start to think this is really going the wrong way? And how did you decide to break with what at that point was, you know, the crowd of your friends and intellectual collaborators and professional network and so on? And this is a time at which, you know, your feelings about the Iraq War was perhaps the most important litmus test in American politics, and you broke with not just what had been the prevailing consensus of the Washington establishment and the media in the run-up to the war, but in particular with the project of some of the people who were your closest associates. That must not have been easy professionally or personally.
Well, as we got closer and closer to the actual invasion date, I was more and more skeptical. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post saying that we really shouldn't intervene unless we got a Security Council resolution, which we never ended up getting. But I guess the real moment when I went public about all this stuff was I think in February, January, February of 2004. So the intervention had... No, I'm sorry. It must have been earlier than that. It was still sometime in 2003, a few months after. But at this point an insurgency had already begun. American soldiers were already getting blown up by roadside bombs. There was a big conference to celebrate the war at the American Enterprise Institute, which at that point was the hotbed of neocon support, you know, for the war. My former SAIS colleague Fouad Ajami was there. Bernard Lewis, the Arabist, you know, both of whom had been counseling President Bush to do the intervention. And I was at this dinner, this very fancy formal dinner, and everybody was talking about what a great success the war was. I remember Norman Podhoretz, you know, the editor of Commentary, for whom I'd written quite a few pieces, said this was the biggest advance of democracy in the 20th century, right? And I just looked around and said, "What are these people smoking? You know, don't they understand that this is not going well and it's not going to end well?" And that's the point where I wrote a big piece in the, you know, for the New York Times about why this was a big mistake.
And what was the fallout from that?
Well, I didn't speak to a lot of my friends for several years. Some of them I never spoke to again, like Charles Krauthammer. I had a big break with Bill Kristol. You know, Bill had been a friend of mine from graduate school. I actually inherited his apartment in Cambridge when I was a year behind him. And we, you know, kind of broke off relations. I'm glad to say that we're back together again now that he's become a, you know, very enthusiastic Never Trumper. And he also, I think, had a, you know, big shift in his orientation towards a lot of political issues, you know, in the aftermath of that. But, yeah, I just had to hang out with a different group of friends at that point.
And so, one of the things that happened intellectually is that you started asking yourself questions about what the origin of stable political orders were. Am I reading too much into these events to think that sort of the failure of state-building in Iraq, the failure of being able to impose at least at first a durable, peaceful, democratic order on Iraq despite the overwhelming military strength, is part of what got you interested in this mammoth project that you end up publishing over the course of the 2010s?
Well, that's right. It wasn't just Iraq, it was Afghanistan, right? So, we did two interventions in 2001 and 2003 where basically we succeeded in collapsing an existing state. And both countries, you know, the famous Max Weber definition of the state, it's a legitimate monopoly of force over defined territory, and that had disappeared in both countries. They both fell into civil war. There were armed militias. There was no legitimate single monopoly of power. And what I immediately recognized was that Americans had absolutely no idea how to deal with this. They kind of assumed that the state would always exist and the main problem was to limit the power of the state and not to actually create state power in the first place. And they were at sea in trying to do this in both of these countries. And to create a state, it is really about force. So, you have to have a police and you have to have a military. So, the United States was busy trying to create these state structures in, you know, these extremely chaotic conditions. But, this is the point where I also realized that the fault went deeper. At another level, in my home discipline of political science, nobody at that point was thinking about state capacity, state building, you know, again, all... you know, for example, at Stanford when I finally got there in 2010, everybody was into rational choice political science in which they said, "Well, the state is predatory and the main question is how do you restrain the state?" And nobody was thinking about how you create state power in the first place and how you exercise state power legitimately. And that is further enhanced in an American political culture that is very anti-statist. One of my other great mentors was Seymour Martin Lipset, the great political scientist and sociologist who spent his whole career writing about American exceptionalism, about how America was really different from almost every other rich democracy. And one of the dimensions of that was anti-statism. You know, Lipset argued that this is one of the deepest aspects of American political culture is distrust of the state. So, in Europe, in Japan, Korea, in other democracies, people see the state as something positive. You know, the state is what protects them from foreign enemies, from, you know, the rigors of market capitalism, and so forth. But, in the United States, both on the left and the right, there's a distrust of the state that runs extremely deep. And that extends to, you know, American political scientists at that time weren't that interested in studying the state. They wanted to study voting and legislatures, public opinion, all these other topics, but really not, you know, how do you construct state authority and how do you make it work more effectively. And so, that's, you know, what then made me realize that this is a big gap and it needs to be filled both on a theoretical level and on a practical level.
So, these two books actually were my introduction to your work. They came out while I was in graduate school and I read them cover to cover at the time. They're The Origins of Political Order, which was published, I believe, in 2011, and then Political Order and Political Decay in 2014. It's a two-volume series that really is trying to understand, first of all, how the modern state arises, and then secondly, how you get certain states, you know, calling this somewhat seriously and somewhat jokingly, getting to Denmark, which have a lot of a kind of positive attributes that we might wish to have from a state, and what might eventually undermine those, how it is that it is actually very difficult to sustain those states, and what kind of dangers that poses to contemporary democracy, particularly in the United States. Let's go from the beginning. You know, why is it that the United States or France or China have capacious states that are able to shape significant parts of the social world in accordance with their will and their preferences? Whereas, you know, in a place like Somalia, we never got the emergence of a capacious state that is able to do that to nearly a comparable degree.
Well, it's very interesting. There's been a big academic debate over, you know, early state formation. And a lot of it arose actually in this period that I was writing in because it was not a topic that was addressed by political scientists by and large. It was addressed by a lot of anthropologists and archaeologists. And there were various theories of state formation. There's this hydraulic theory associated with Wittfogel that said that it's, you know, states were needed to create irrigation systems, manage rivers, and so forth. That's not really believed very much. Probably the most prominent theory is that of the sociologist Charles Tilly, who talked about early modern Europe and the pressure of military competition enforcing state formation. So, you had political orders that were basically based on kinship. Right? That you have some marauding band, roving bandits, and they conquer a territory, they kill off the men, they marry the women, and they settle down. And it's all based on friends and family. And the question is, how do you get to a more modern state that is more impersonal, that has permanent bureaucratic structures that can administer territory, and isn't dependent on a single charismatic authority of the, you know, the guy that led the marauding band in the first place. And Tilly's thesis was that, you know, this was the result of military competition where if you hired your cousin to be your commanding general and he was incompetent, you're going to lose the war. You and your family would get killed, and that's a pretty powerful incentive to pick a competent person. And so, you know, the idea of meritocracy, for example, arises under these circumstances where you desperately need people who actually know what they're doing. And if your friends and family can't provide that, you're going to have to go out to, you know, to somebody different. Now, this is, you know, as I started looking around the world, this became evident as a general problem. You know, you have to get beyond kinship. The earliest types of social formations are all kin-based. Hunter-gatherer societies have, you know, basically very small groups of relatives, bands of 40 to 50 people. The first states are created that have a hierarchical and centralized form of authority. But again, they are what Max Weber called patrimonial because they all arise out of the household of the ruler. And then the state bureaucracy is just the cousins, sons-in-law, you know, so forth of the ruler. But it was only in the early modern period when you had intense conflict between, you know, these European early states that they suddenly realized, "Ah, we need tax collection." That means we need a cadastral survey to find out who owns property because those are the people we want to tax. We need a bureaucracy to collect the taxes. We need an army that's recruited based on merit rather than, you know, simply kinship ties. And that's really his explanation for how the modern state began to originate.
So, when I started looking at this, I suddenly realized that this is absolutely true in China as well. And that China had followed this exact same path, but a couple of thousand years before any society in Europe had gotten there. You had basically a very decentralized Chinese political system in 1000 BC. Maybe a thousand political units consolidated themselves down to about seven by the time you got to the Warring States period. And then, after the Warring States, a single one of those seven states, the state of Qin, was like the Prussia of Chinese history and consolidated everything into a single Qin Empire. And the word China comes from the state of Qin, you know, this Chinese Prussia. And ever since then, they've had a centralized state. And, you know, the one thing I began to realize is that they discovered, you know, the Tilly process had driven modern state formation in China in very much the way that Tilly anticipated, you know, said had happened in Europe. And they developed the same sorts of ideas, meritocracy. Meritocracy is one of the deepest aspects of Chinese culture. Everybody takes a civil service exam. That's the way if you're a poor boy growing up in rural China, if you take the exam and you do well, you could end up as one of the most powerful men, you know, in the empire.
Because they, you know, they promoted on the basis of merit. And all of these modern features of states, centralization, uniform weights and measures, cadastral surveys, you know, trying to know what your population, where your population lives and how you can tax it, all of these things happened in China, you know, after the Qin unification.
And so, I mean, your argument here is that basically this mechanism that Charles Tilly identified whereby states rise because they're in competition with other geographical areas. And unless you're able to run an efficient military, unless you're able to raise a budget for that military, unless you're able to put competent generals in charge, this other state is going to conquer you. And in a sense we could think of it as merely as a kind of evolutionary competition between different...
kinds of states. Now, obviously, let me just give you one more example of that. The United States in the 19th century did not have a modern state.
At the time of the Civil War, we were in the midst of what was known as a patronage or spoils system, where basically every public official got there by supporting a politician, and the politician promoted them. Sometimes it was friends and family, a lot of times it was just political supporters. Abraham Lincoln was absolutely overwhelmed by office seekers, and a lot of his senior generals early in the Civil War were basically politicians that he owed favors to.
