North Korean weapons threats and diminishing prospects for trilateral cooperation with the U.S. may soon leave South Korea and Japan with little choice but to go nuclear, according to Francis Fukuyama, one of the world’s most influential international relations scholars.

In a wide-ranging virtual symposium organized by the Institute for Corean-American Studies, Fukuyama said U.S. President Donald Trump will likely take a “particularly unpredictable” approach to dealing with the DPRK, highlighting his quest to make “the biggest deal in human history” with Kim Jong Un during a period of summits in 2018 and 2019.

Unlike his first term, when Trump