Fareed Zakaria on the Moral Cost of Trump’s War

28:36Fareed Zakaria:But I would argue that Iran had been contained in many significant ways, particularly after the Obama nuclear deal. Remember, no enrichment. 98 % of its enriched uranium had been taken out of the country. Israeli intelligence, American intelligence, and the International Atomic Energy Agency all said that the Iranians were following the deal. And you had the reality that you had the most intrusive inspections regime that you had ever had in the history of nuclear terror. So was it possible they could be cheating a little bit on the side? It's possible. Very, very few serious observers of it think that that was going on.

29:15Fareed Zakaria:So there was a way to contain Iran without the extraordinary destruction. But I think that what Israel has done has come at a cost. I look at Bibi Netanyahu's long reign as prime minister, and I wonder if in the long run, what people will notice is that his legacy was to split apart the alliance between the United States and Israel. He began by politicizing it in a poisonous way when Obama was president. He went and did an end run around Obama went and addressed Congress. He openly fought with Obama and tried to turn the issue of Israel into a partisan issue and then has unleashed so much firepower.

30:02Fareed Zakaria:Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. Israel is currently occupying 10 % of Lebanon. It has displaced 1 million people. And this - And said 600 ,000 of them may never be allowed to come back to their homes. Right, exactly. And you look at all of that. I mean, that on scale is a second Nakba. Right. And just remember, you know, these are 600 ,000 human beings. That's women, that's children who did nothing, who were in no way involved in Hezbollah's rocket campaign against Israel. So you ask yourself, is the price that now a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel, that a majority of young people have a very unfavorable view of Israel?

30:46Fareed Zakaria:And if you look beyond America, it's not just America. I think the Dutch just joined the South African case in the international court. To look at what's happening even in Germany, which for obvious historical reasons has a very strong, you know, moral urge to always see things from Israel's point of view. In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see and what they, so, you know, is that really good for Israel in the long run? And for what? It was already the most powerful country in the Middle East. It was able to defend itself. It was able to deter in a kind of short term, narrow sense, yes, Bibi Netanyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of Israel's enemies.

31:29Fareed Zakaria:And some of it, like Hezbollah was a really nasty organization doing bad things in terms of the way it was attacking Israel. But you put it all together. I mean, what Ben-Gurion said, Israel, you know, when it was founded, should be a light unto nations. I think for most people in the world today, that is not the way they look at Israel. And that is a huge loss. And that is a huge moral loss because Israel had a moral claim when it was founded. I want to go back to where we began, which was Trump's threat to wipe out a civilization. And in a way, I thought that wasn't entirely empty. It's just that it might have been our own.

32:09I think Trump has wiped out the sense that America is a civilized nation. I think that it is actually core to his politics and in a way his appeal that he routinely violates what we might have at another time called civilized behavior, the way he talks, the way he tweets or put things on truth social, the way he goes after his enemies. And, you know, you talk a lot about the rules-based international order that Trump is destroying. and I always think that language sort of obscures that beneath the rules are values and what Trump has gleefully done from the beginning of his time in politics is to try to violate those values in such a public way as to show them to be hollow unenforceable that these things we thought were boundaries or moral guardrails or nothing.

33:10And I think it forces some, you know, reckoning with what those values really were. So when you talk about that order, when you lament the way Trump has undermined it, underneath the rules, what do you feel is being lost?

33:30Fareed Zakaria:I think at heart, the Enlightenment project that the United States is the fullest expression of it. It's the only country really founded as almost a political experiment of enlightenment ideas that at the core of any value system had to be the dignity and life of an individual human being. Those were not pawns in some larger struggle. I've been reading a lot about Franklin Roosevelt recently because Roosevelt is probably the man most responsible for dreaming up that post-war order. What you see is he goes at one point to Casablanca and he meets with the Moroccans. And he said he came to realize just how savagely the French had ruled over these people.

34:18Fareed Zakaria:And he said, we are not going to have fought this war to allow the French to go back and do what they've been doing for these past centuries. And we're not going to allow the British to go back and do what they're doing. that if we are going to get in this war and save the West, as it were, there's going to be a different set of values. And much of that post-war order comes out of that. Why did he want free trade and openness? Because he thought there had to be a way for countries to grow to wealth and grow to feel their power without conquering other countries. So I think you're exactly right, that it comes out of a very deep moral sense, that there is a way to structure international life differently than it's been done for centuries.

35:06Fareed Zakaria:And the thing I worry most about is that what Trump is doing is irreparable. Because even if you get another American president in, the world will have watched this display and said, oh, America can be just another imperial rapacious power and we need to start protecting ourselves and we need to start buying insurance and we need to start freelancing in the same way and protecting ourselves. And then, you know, you get into a downward spiral, right? Because if you think the other guy is going to defect, you're going to defect first. And that's what I worry is going to start happening. The Canadians, you know, you look at what the Canadians did over the last 30 or 40 years, they basically made a single bet that their future was with a tight, close integration with the United States, politically, economically, in every way.

36:00Fareed Zakaria:And they now look at the way in which the United States use that dependence to try to extract concessions from them. And they're now saying to themselves, well, we need to buy insurance. We need to have better relations with China and with India. And once you start going down that path, that becomes difficult to reverse. Even if, you know, a wonderful, more internationally minded, more value-based president comes into power, the Indians, the same way, have been thinking to themselves, oh, we need to course correct and we need to take care of our own situation. And if everyone does that, at some point you're in a very different world than the world that we created after 1945.

36:43You know, I remember during the Bush era when people said that Bush had done irreparable damage to America standing in the world, its global leadership, to international institutions. Then came Obama, and it turned out the damage wasn't irreparable. Go to the first Trump term, and, you know, again, you hear the same things. And then comes Joe Biden as thoroughly a liberal internationalist. I think too much, frankly. but as thoroughly a liberal denounsious as you could get and it turns out much of the world is very happy to welcome america back into the same role i can't tell if the two trump terms the going back to it the sort of erraticness of american leadership now has made this something different where the structures are changing around us as you were saying in a way that makes this a structural change, or in fact, you know, if Trump is succeeded by a more conventional figure or a more alliance-oriented figure, this all snaps back into something more like its previous place.

37:53Fareed Zakaria:Yeah, some of it will depend on whether is there an election that is a kind of complete repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in 28, and the world would read that in a particular way. Look, there's a demand for American leadership. I mean, look at the Europeans who were very reluctant allies at various points during the Cold War and now are desperate for an America that will simply commit to the alliance. The more the world imagines what a world without American leadership and without American power looks like, the more they want it. The problem is the world has changed. You know, during the Iraq War, China was not nearly as powerful as it is today.

38:35Fareed Zakaria:Russia had not been able to revive itself through all the oil revenues, consolidate power as Putin has. The world is different today. And America is different. Look, Bush, for all his flaws, always tried to appeal to broader principles. The Iraq War, he went to the UN. He tried to get UN resolutions. He went to Congress. He articulated it as part of a much larger issue of terrorism. He assembled an alliance of whatever 45 countries. Trump, with this Iran war, basically revels in the unilateralism of it. He revels in the fact that he does it all by himself. He doesn't want to bother with Congress, to bother with the UN, to bother with allies until, you know, things are going badly and then he starts screaming that he wants them.

39:23Fareed Zakaria:But if Trump represents something in America that is deep and lasting, then it's very different America. It's an America that really has not just tired, but soured on the role that it has played as this country that had an enlightened self-interest that looked long, that was willing to forego the short-term extractive benefits. I hope that that America is still around. But as with everything that's happened with Trump, there are points at which I've watched Donald Trump success and thought to myself, I can't believe that Americans want this. I just, you know, and I still have difficulty with that.

40:04But there's also always been this leftist critique that the story you're telling, something that we're telling here about America, where we say it had this humanitarian vision and these ideals, and sometimes didn't live up to them, but broadly did, that that's always been false. that Trump is America with the mask off. Trump has brought what we've done elsewhere home. And he has given up on ways we hid what we were actually doing. Was his promise to destroy civilian infrastructure and bridges and power plants to destroy civilization, is that so different than what we did when we napalmed Vietnam?

40:46So there is this idea that Trumpism actually isn't different. and its continuity, and its explicit and aesthetically brutish, but honest. What do you think of that?

40:58Fareed Zakaria:I totally disagree. I mean, I think that you can only compare a hegemon to other hegemons. In other words, yes, the United States looks like it has its hands much dirtier than Costa Rica, which doesn't even have an army, right? But let's think about the last three or 400 years. Has the United States been qualitatively different as the greatest global power compared with the Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, the Kaiser's Germany, Imperial France, Imperial Britain, Imperial Holland? Yes, those were all rapacious colonial empires. If you think about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, obviously much, much worse.

41:44Fareed Zakaria:And the United States used its power to rebuild Europe, to bring East Asia out of poverty. It created, as I said, foreign aid. Of course, we made lots of mistakes. And what tends to happen is when you have an ideological conception of your foreign policy and you think you have to save Vietnam from these evil communists, you end up destroying villages to save them. But that doesn't change this basic fact that I'm talking about, which is in the broad continuity of history, when you look at other great global powers, what did we use our influence for? What did we use our power for? Until World War II, every power that had won extracted tribute from the powers that lost, including in World War I, people forget.

42:32Fareed Zakaria:So I see the argument about, you know, American hypocrisy, because we do have done many, many bad things. But I think when you step back and think about it in a broader historical sense, the United States has a lot to be proud of. off.

43:37Let me try a thought on you that I've been wrestling with for bigger reasons, which is that I've been thinking a lot about why liberalism in its various manifestations feel so exhausted and uninspiring. Here at this moment, when what so many people are afraid of and reacting to is liberalism's achievements being wiped away, right? How has that not created

44:14a revival of its strength or a recognition of its moral ambition. And I think one of the reasons is this, that liberalism begins with profoundly ambitious moral ideas about the dignity of the individual and what it means to be free. Over time, and particularly in the post-war period, it encodes those ideas and ideals into institutions, laws, rules. We keep calling it the rules-based international order. And then it becomes the movement, the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions. And institutions fail, and they fall short, and they bureaucratize. And the problem liberalism has, the problem of the ideas that you're voicing so eloquently have right now in acting as an answer to Trump is that what we are left offending are institutions that don't really work as opposed to values that really do.

45:21And I don't really know where that goes because, of course, in the real world, you need to do things and act through institutions. But as an answer to what he is, I don't think you can go back to where, say, Joe Biden was talking endlessly about NATO and its importance. It's not like a stirring call for more participation in the UN. That Trump challenges something deeper. And I think liberals fall back on a defense of institutions in a way that makes me feel like there's been either a losing of touch with or a loss of faith in the moral concepts that once animated the creation of those institutions.

46:02Fareed Zakaria:there's a lot in there. So let me try and respond to several elements of it because you put a lot into that. One part of what liberalism's problem, and we both mean liberalism small l, you know, the kind of liberal enlightenment project, is it's won too much over the last two, three hundred years. Think of everything that liberalism has advocated from, you know, the emancipation of slaves to women's equality, to racial equality, to child working laws, to minimal work, you know, everything has happened. And if you look at the things that, you know, the classical conservatives argued for - Religious toleration.

46:43Fareed Zakaria:Right. Radical in its time. Right. You think about all the things the classical conservatives argued for, you know, for a powerful king, for a powerful church, for the domination of a certain church-based morality over life, for women to be kept in their place. All those things have lost, right? So at one level, the problem is, as you say, that liberalism not only has won, but then institutionalized itself, and those institutions inevitably become fat and corrupt and non-responsive. And I think this is a real problem. And what Trump can present is the kind of fiery, insurgent spoiler, which always has a little bit more drama to it.

47:24Fareed Zakaria:You know, in the 60s, that came from the radical left. Now it's coming from the right. But there is always that ability to kind of say, I'm going to upset the apple cart. And that, you know, there's a certain energy there that the people holding the cart together aren't able to exercise. I think that's a real problem. And, you know, I mean, somebody like a Mamdani has a way of infusing it with a greater sense of passion, because maybe he goes directly to the values. And even though some cases I don't agree with his policies, I think he's a master communicator. And he has solved in a way that problem that you're describing.

48:01Fareed Zakaria:But I think there are also two other problems. Liberalism has always been somewhat agnostic about the ultimate purpose of life. The whole idea, because it came out of the religious wars, was you get to decide what your best life is, and we're not going to have a dictator or a pope or a commissar tell you that. But that leaves people unsatisfied. I think there's a part of people that want to be told what is a great life, what is this cause greater than themselves? And, you know, the conservative answer is, well, it's God, family, traditional morality, and those are the things that matter a lot.

48:41Fareed Zakaria:If you listen to Vance in Hungary, you know, he says, go out there and bring back the God of our fathers. Trump represents something different. Trump is appealing to the most naked selfishness in people. He's saying, what's in it for you? Why aren't we getting more out of this? That's one of the reasons I think that he is so comfortable with the kind of open corruption that he represents. Because in a sense, he's saying, look, those guys had a whole system and it looked very fancy and meritocratic, but they got the spoils. Now I'm going to get the spoils. In a way, he's, I think, think of themselves representing his people, but in any case, they seem comfortable with him getting them.

49:27Fareed Zakaria:But there is this sense of an appeal to naked selfishness, self-interest, short-term extraction. And that's, to me, much more worrying. Because the problem with liberalism not having this answer for the meaning of life, that's an old problem. And it's a hard one to solve because the whole point of liberalism is that human beings get to decide that, and it's not being forced on them. I am more skeptical than some that the absence of meaning at the center of liberalism is the problem that the post-liberal right wants to make it out to be and that it's a problem here. But maybe to boil down what you actually said about Trump, I think Trump's core argument is that didn't work.

50:11This does. Now, the thing that he is doing is proving that this doesn't work. What he is attempting doesn't work. His administration is not going well. People do not like the tariffs. They don't like the war. They don't like him. That will probably be enough for Democrats to win the midterms, but philosophically in this moment of rupture, it's not enough to build something new. The Trumpism doesn't work. It doesn't solve the problem if people think that what you were doing doesn't work either. you know i was reading the saying that drew some dem sis who's the editor and founder of the publication the argument wrote and she was writing about the u.n and liberal institutions and in the ways they've both failed often to live up to their moral commitments but also the way that trump makes you miss them anyway and she writes watching the trump administration rip up even the pretense of caring about liberal internationalism is a reminder that sometimes virtue signaling and hypocrisy are a preferable equilibrium.

51:18And I agree with her in the sense that that realism is true. I would much prefer imperfectly trying to live up to real values than this. And also it's a political message that I think liberalism is kind of settled into. Our institutions suck, but you should defend them anyway. It sucks.

51:35Fareed Zakaria:I think it's, I can't remember who said, but hypocrisy is the homage that vice plays to virtue. But I guess the point I'm pushing, not because I think you necessarily have the answer, but because I think it's something people need to, they need to be replying to this challenge more on the level it's actually being posed. A movement that has adopted the institutional view can only ever really be a movement of the status quo and modest reform. And I think it's not about having the meaning of life, but it is about some mission about interest. And what Trump says is your interest is purely economic, extractive, power domination.

52:15It's a very old vision of interest. Interest can also be values. They can also be moral. They can also be about identity. But this question of what is the answer to Donald Trump's way of describing what you should be interested in, what is in the national interest, what is in your interest, is, I think a pretty deep one, because I don't think to say, you know, you know, recommitting to alliances, I don't think that's enough for it. That's not a moral mission. That's a procedural

52:45Fareed Zakaria:tactic. So I think you're getting at something very important. And I was trying to get at it when saying, you know, if you looked at the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was probably the most advanced Social Democratic Party in Europe in, say, 1905, almost everything that it had on its party platform is now been adopted by every Western country. So in some ways, what has happened is liberalism has succeeded. And these societies that have come out of it as a result are wildly successful. People will often say that, you know, there was a great clash in the 20th century between communism and capitalism and capitalism won.

53:24Fareed Zakaria:But actually, in the political scientist, Sherry Berman makes this point very well. What actually won at the end was social democracy, was a mixture of the welfare state and capitalism everywhere, even including the United States. We have a vast welfare state. And so once you have created that, once the basic conditions of creating a middle-class democratic society in which there are protections for the poor, for the unemployed, you know, there is healthcare of some kind, where do you go? And part of what happened is I think the left in some areas went too far left and in an illiberal fashion, you know, the emphasis on quotas and DEI and all that kind of thing.

54:10Fareed Zakaria:In other areas, it decided they wanted to go even further left, right? So the challenge is I see the problem with saying, okay, you know, we've arrived at this stage. And a lot of people, I have to confess, like me thought, and maybe this is because I grew up in India, this is pretty amazing what you have been able to achieve. And you look at the historical achievement of being able to have these stable middle-class societies in which individual rights are protected, where poor people are taken care of. This is amazing. Now, let's try to get it right. Let's try to get the Rube Goldberg of American healthcare to work better so that you actually cover that last 20-something million or however many it is.

54:54Fareed Zakaria:But that is unsatisfying. Nobody writes poems about expanding Obamacare. So I see the problem, but I think that that is the reality. And when you start trying to find things to write poems and hymns and fight battles for, you're often going in dangerous places. Now, that's the liberal in me. I'm suspicious of that much passion put into politics and look at what the passion on the right looks like. I'm sure that the fundamental critique that Trump comes at this from, which is that the United States has done terribly over the last 30 or 40 years, it's just nonsense. The United States has done extraordinarily well over the last 100 years, and in particular over the last 30 years, with one big caveat where we have not been as good on distributional issues, which we could easily have done.

55:47Yeah, if Donald Trump and the people in this party would have led us, we would have.

55:50Fareed Zakaria:Exactly. I'm wary of saying that the left needs to go somewhere where there's going to be a lot of drama and energy and people are going to be singing songs again because that often leads you in bad places. Look, liberalism was born out of this distrust of all that passion that religion and hierarchy came from with the state and the church telling you this is the right thing to do. You know, here are the values. So there is a moderation. Romanticism in politics is something to be viewed with a certain degree of skepticism. I think I've been coming to a more opposite view, but I'm going to pick that thread up with you another time.

56:29Fareed Zakaria:You're going to go back to the 60s and start some new cult movement. I think that the—I do not think that in the way politics and attention works today, you can have a political movement that is afraid of inspiration and afraid of passion. I was reading Adrian Woldridge's new book on liberalism, and he sort of has this paragraph early on, it's really his thesis paragraph, where he talks about both liberalism's radicalism, it's sort of radical imagination, but then also, exactly as you just were, the importance of its moderate temperament that distrusts the passions and wants to keep a lid on things.

57:12And I just don't think those two things hold together that well. Now, I can come up with balances of things. I do believe liberalism to be fundamentally a balancing act. And I think of it as a balancing act between moral imagination, sort of plurality, or what I often think of as liberality, and institutions and your relationship to institutions. So you are balancing things if they come out of alignment, I think push liberalism into failure modes. But I do think as liberals and became the party of people for whom institutions have worked, its temperament has become too institutional and too afraid of things that could upset the structures.

57:58And so then if people don't believe the structures are working for them, then it really has nothing to say to them because it just fundamentally disagrees.

58:06Fareed Zakaria:No, I agree with that. And I think, you know, the way I would like to see the radicalism and the kind of reform is, you know, when I look at the issue of affirmative action, to me, I was always very uncomfortable with it. I always thought Lyndon Johnson's explanation of why you needed it to help formerly enslaved and black people who had then lived under 100 years of Jim Crow made perfect sense. But then it starts getting expanded and starts being expanded to all kinds of people, you know, like people like me, which I thought made no sense. I mean, America has been particularly bad to African-Americans.

58:43Fareed Zakaria:It has been particularly good to other immigrants. That's why people from all over the world have tried desperately to come to America for hundreds of years, because the United States is unusually good at welcoming and accepting. So there shouldn't have been affirmative action for people of color, whatever that means, or things like that. And then it becomes, it goes from being affirmative action to quotas, and then it becomes diversity mandates. And I feel as though there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying, wait, have we completely lost track of what the core of liberalism, which was about, as Martin Luther King put it, judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skins.

59:23Fareed Zakaria:And those are the kind of things where I think, you know, liberalism gets so institutionalized and conventional wisdom forms and it becomes impossible to course correct. What I worry about is, you know, kind of romanticism for romanticism's sake. The people who run around today, they call themselves the principalists because they believe they are adhering to the original ideals and ideas of the 1979 revolution, unlike the terrible pragmatists who have been trying to find a way to compromise with the West. There's another dimension of all this that is not philosophical that I want to touch before we end, which is one way of understanding the predatory hegemon moment is that it is the gasp of a dying hegemon that only has a limited amount of time left in which it can extract these kinds of rents.

1:00:18now i would like to believe that that is not true but there are ways in which it obviously seems to be how donald trump acts personally he's only got so much time left on this earth only so much time left in this presidency and he and his family are going to try to like pull out everything they can from it and he's always been very obsessed with the rise of China, before that, the rise of Japan. And, you know, you could understand him as trying to monetize America's power while it still has it. And in doing, hastening America's loss of it. You wrote a piece that said, like, the post-American world is coming into view.

1:00:57What did you mean by that?

1:01:00Fareed Zakaria:I think that you are seeing countries around the world find ways to make accommodations around America. So it's not purely a kind of question of American decline. It's that we are no longer leading. So you take something like protectionism. Yeah, we've become very protectionist. And what you notice is very interesting. Other countries regard the United States as, okay, you're the problem we have to deal with and we'll cut some deal with you because you're too important for us not to. But outside of that, countries are making more free trade deals with one another. You know, the Indians with the Europeans, the Europeans with those Latin Americans, the Canadians with.

1:01:39Fareed Zakaria:So in other words, the one thing that the U.S. had going for it was this agenda setting power. And that's gone. The U.S. is viewed as on its own weird track. Everyone has to deal with it because it's too important. And that is a sign of a certain kind of decline. And the other one is this obsession to have enormous geopolitical control. You know, one of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 30, 40 years. People forget, but after World War I, the British Empire expanded to its largest state ever, to its largest size ever, only 20 or 30 years before it collapsed.

1:02:21Fareed Zakaria:And the reason was that the British elites got very engaged and enamored with the idea of controlling Iraq and controlling Afghanistan and controlling, you know, they would find these, there was this wonderful book called Africa and the Victorians by Robinson and Gallagher, in which they talk about how, why the British annexed Fashoda in the south of Sudan. Well, because they thought you needed to control the Suez Canal to control the route to India, where if you needed to control the Suez Canal, you needed to control Egypt. But if you needed to control Egypt, you needed to control Upper Sudan.

1:02:56Fareed Zakaria:But to control Upper Sudan, you needed to control Lower Sudan. So boing, there you were sending troops to Fashoda, which nobody anywhere in Britain would have any idea where it was and why were they doing that. Meanwhile, what they were neglecting was the reality that Germany was becoming much more productive. America was becoming much more productive. And I look at what we're doing today. I mean, you think about it, right? This is the third Middle Eastern war we have fought in 25 years. I do worry that this imperial temptation to have so much of the focus and the resources of the country placed in these faraway parts of the world, where it's not clear we're actually gaining much, we're expending enormous energy, and we're expending a lot of our moral capital, our political capital, our actual financial capital, that part is very similar to what happened to Britain.

1:03:50Fareed Zakaria:And I don't know whether it's exhaustion or whether it's a kind of imperial arrogance or maybe a combination of the two, but that feels hauntingly reminiscent. I saw a Gallup poll that was coming from their world survey. So polls, people all across the world and approval of Chinese leadership had passed approval of American leadership. neither was that high, it was 36 % to 31%, but that the world now prefers Chinese leadership to ours struck me as, if we were trying to just make America great again, I mean, that might be one of the indicators you would look at to see if it was working or failing.

1:04:28Fareed Zakaria:And it's actually mostly a vote against us because nobody actually wants Chinese leadership. I think they don't know what it would mean. The Chinese, for the most part, don't seem to want to offer it. Look at what has happened with this recent crisis. They got involved a little bit. Mostly what they're involved in is trying to see that the currency settlements are made in Chinese currency. The Chinese are a free rider. They want a free ride on the benefits of American hegemony while criticizing it. They don't have an alternate conception. So what people are going to find is, unfortunately, a world without American power is going to be a less open, a less liberal, a less rule-based world.

1:05:09Fareed Zakaria:But it's not going to magically reconstitute itself around a Chinese hegemon because that is not China's conception of its world role. It's not going to be able to do it. It does not have the trust. We still, for good reasons, have an enormous amount of trust because we built it over 80 years. you know, look at, we have, I don't know, 55 treaty allies in the world. China has one, North Korea. If you want to add Russia and Iran, find three, you know. So the truth is, a world without American power will be a worse world for the rest of the world as well. And I think many of them feel a certain nostalgia for the old American power that they used to denounce.

1:05:53Fareed Zakaria:I have somewhat rose-colored glasses about these things, but I think America was very special in its world role, and I don't think China will be able to do that. I noticed the was in that. It certainly was. Right now, we are definitely speaking in the past tense. The United States is currently not exercising its world role with the same level of strategic thought, with the same moral vision, and with the same humanitarian impulse that it has done, albeit imperfectly. I hope that that can come back. But my great worry, as I said, is some of these things are very hard to reconstitute. The world moves on, the world changes.

1:06:36Fareed Zakaria:People, reputations take a lifetime to build and it's very easy to destroy. It's true for human beings and it's true for nations, maybe. And now is our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So one book I thought, since we do often talk about the rules-based international order, and it does sound so wonky that I would suggest a wonky book that explains it. The best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Eikenberry at Princeton. And I think the book is called A World Safe for Democracy. And encapsulates what is this thing, the rules-based international order, the liberal international order that the U.S.

1:07:15Fareed Zakaria:created. The second is a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called The Irony of American History. And it's really all about the great danger when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that, you know, might is right and the call for humility. It ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism in American foreign policy. And the Christian there really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity, which sometimes we forget when listening to Pete Hexet. And the final one, a similar vein, is Graham Greene's book, The Quiet American. I think that one of the, sometimes novels do it better than anything else.

1:08:02Fareed Zakaria:There's a novel set in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour, dyspeptic, world-weary British journalist who sees this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be able to, you know, bring peace, justice, and virtue to Vietnam. And you can imagine it doesn't quite work out that way. Fareed Zakaria, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.

1:08:39This episode of The Azkran Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Jack McCordick, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristen Lynn, Emek Helbeck, and Jan Koble. Original music by Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Roy-Strosser.