The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own
April 10, 2026
By Ezra Klein
Produced by Annie Galvin
The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our OwnThe foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria explains how the Iran war has been a turning point in America’s standing in the world.
This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.”
You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
A few weeks back, we did a show on whether the Iran war would break Trumpism. What we’ve seen over the past week is more specific: The Iran war is breaking Trump.
At 8:03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to Truth Social:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
That is even crazier when you read it aloud. But Trump followed up with another post on Tuesday that began:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.
It didn’t happen. Trump backed down, agreeing to a two-week cease-fire with Iran. Then on Wednesday he wrote:
The United States will work closely with Iran, which we have determined has gone through what will be a very productive Regime Change!
In the course of days, even hours, Trump has oscillated from threatening an apparent genocide to then excitedly musing about partnering with Iran to charge tolls to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and giving them relief from sanctions and tariffs.
This is not the art of the deal. This is behavior that should trigger a wellness check.
And look, maybe you’d expect a liberal like me to say that. But listen to some of the traditional Trumper voices on the right. Here’s Tucker Carlson:
Archival clip of Tucker Carlson: On every level — it is vile on every level. It begins with a promise to use the U.S. military — our military — to destroy civilian infrastructure in another country. Which is to say, to commit a war crime. It is a moral crime against the people of a country whose welfare was supposedly one of the reasons we went into this war in the first place: They’re being killed by their government; we have to rescue them. And now here’s our president, not even a month and a half into a conflict we are not winning, saying we’re going to use our military to kill the civilians of this country, who didn’t choose the war. They’ve got nothing to do with it.
I don’t agree with Carlson on all that much. I do appreciate the register he found there. Because he’s right about what that was: a moral crime.
To even conceive of erasing Iranian civilization — much less threaten it in public — is a horrific act on its own. Just imagine being an Iranian parent that night, unsure whether you could protect your child. Imagine being an Iranian living here, worried about your family back home.
Carlson correctly centered on something Trump forgot — or didn’t care about as soon as it was convenient: Iranians are human beings. To annihilate them to salvage a war you started is a crime against humanity. It’s the act of a war criminal. It’s the act of a monster.
I know there are those who say this is all just a negotiation. This was Trump crushing Iran to fold. But there are two problems with that. The first is that Iran didn’t fold. We did.
Trump appears ready to accept a level of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz that would have been unimaginable two months ago. You have JD Vance saying that Iran might not even give up its right to nuclear enrichment. This is what it looks like when you lose a war, not when you win one.
The second is that this is an immoral way and a dangerous way to negotiate, because what it does is it commits you to war crimes if your bid is rejected.
Megyn Kelly said this well:
Archival clip of Megyn Kelly: This is completely irresponsible and disgusting. This is wrong. It’s wrong. He should not be doing it. I don’t care that it’s a negotiation. His negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women and children — an American president — so that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened. It’s just wrong.
I could go on with a list of the Trumpy or formerly Trumpy figures who have seemed appalled. You had Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment and Trump’s removal from office. She said what Trump was doing was evil. And madness. You had Alex Jones agreeing with her, also calling for the 25th Amendment to be used. You had Candace Owens calling Trump a “genocidal lunatic.”
I am glad and relieved that Tuesday night brought a cease-fire rather than a war crime. The Iranian people have suffered plenty. They do not deserve to be buried in rubble to salvage Trump’s pride.
But I am not sure that, in the end, what Trump said was that far off. I am worried a civilization died that night — our civilization: in the sense that America is a civilized nation, a nation that binds itself to the rules of law, to a basic morality led by people with at least a shred of virtue.
It is very hard to see Donald Trump — to listen to him and watch him — and not think that this grand experiment in self-governance is falling into ruin in just the way the founders feared. We’ve entrusted tremendous power to a self-dealing narcissist and demagogue who is becoming more perilous and erratic as he ages and as his presidency fails.
Donald Trump is a 79-year-old man in uncertain health in the final years of his presidency. He is hideously unpopular. What we saw over the last week was how dangerous Trump becomes when he feels himself losing, when he feels control is slipping from his grasp.
Even now, his party is very likely going to lose midterm elections, and then he and his family and associates will face a raft of investigations. How much Gulf money has made its way into Trump family pockets? Who has bought all that crypto from them? What kind of deals got made with the Trump family before the country saw their tariffs knocked down?
Trump cares about nothing so much as winning. He lashes out when he feels himself at risk of losing. The next few years will for him carry the potential of terrible loss.
I don’t think this is the last time Trump is going to endanger a country in a desperate gamble to avoid the consequences of his own failures. But that country oftentimes is going to be our own.
Joining me now is Fareed Zakaria, the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of, among other books, “Age of Revolutions.”
Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.
Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure.
I want to start with Trump’s now infamous post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
What did you think when you saw that?
I was horrified. But it goes beyond that.
It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while — which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.
Not to sound too corny about it, because, of course, we made mistakes, and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different.
After 1945, it said: We’re not going to be another imperial hegemon. We’re not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We’re actually going to try to build them, and we’re going to give them foreign aid.
That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away.
I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.
It just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been so distinctive in its world mission — a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an immigrant — that its leader could threaten to annihilate an entire people.
And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract: “civilization.” What we are talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people. You’re talking about 93 million people.
One thing that has always felt core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels, to me, on a deep level, like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual human lives were just understood as pawns in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests.
I’m not saying that there has not been disrespect or disregard for human life in the postwar era. That would be absurd.
But there was a commitment and a structure of values in which you didn’t threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing.
You see this in DOGE and its approach to U.S.A.I.D. — that there is something about how you treat or don’t treat, how you weigh or don’t weigh, the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machinations and that he just wipes away, as a kind of weakness or liberal piety.
If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.
We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.
You almost miss that because, even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that we were trying to help this country do better, we were trying to help these people do better.
What you are describing, quite accurately, is that Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th century — because sometimes people talk about how he loves McKinley, and he liked tariffs, and he’s like McKinley in that imperialism.
No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th-century European imperialist. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place. There was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal.
As you say, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life and dignity were never at the center of it. It was all a self-interested, short-term, extractive game. And Trump is hearkening back to that.
It’s interesting to ask where he gets it from. Because it really is probably fair to say that nobody else on the American political spectrum, if they were president, would speak like that. I don’t think JD Vance would speak like that. I don’t think Marco Rubio would speak like that.
There’s something that he brings to it — which is a callousness and a contempt for any expression of those values. For him, that’s all a sign of weakness, that’s the kind of [expletive] people say. But the reality is that’s the way he looks at the world.
What you’ll hear from Trump’s defenders is that this is all liberal hysteria. That what we were watching was a brilliant negotiating tactic, that Trump frightened the Iranians. He frightened the whole world.
He put forward a maximalist and terrifying and immoral position and forced the Iranians to capitulate to a deal they would not otherwise have accepted. He did not destroy civilization that night. There was the announcement of a two-week cease-fire.
Are they right? Is that what happened?
Let’s just evaluate it on the merits of a genius negotiating strategy. What we have ended up with is a situation where we began the war with a country whose nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Those are Trump’s words, but those were words, by the way, echoed by the head of the Israel Defense Forces.
The Israel Atomic Energy Commission said Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed and can be kept destroyed indefinitely, as long as they don’t get access to nuclear materials, which we were actively denying them. So that was the reality of Iran. It had been pummeled; its nuclear program had been destroyed.
That was what we started with. What we have ended up with is a war in which Iran has lost its military and its navy and things like that. But, to be honest, it was not using those to attack anybody.
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What it has gained is a far more usable weapon than nuclear weapons. It has realized — and shown the world — that it can destroy the global economy, that it can block the Strait of Hormuz — and that it would have a cataclysmic follow-on effect.
It now seems poised to not simply be able to hold the Gulf states and much of the world hostage because of that pivotal position it has, but it’s now going to monetize that — presumably giving it $70 billion to $90 billion of revenue every year, which is about twice as much as it makes selling oil.
It has weakened the Gulf states, which now sit in the shadow of this tension that they have to worry about and navigate. It has brought China into the Gulf — we learned because the Chinese had to get the Iranians to agree to this. It has weakened the dollar because these payments that are being made through the Strait of Hormuz are now being made in crypto or in yuan, China’s currency.
It has strengthened Russia because Russia is now making something on the order of $4 billion to $5 billion extra per month because of the price of oil, which will probably stay elevated for a while.
And it has almost wrecked the Western alliance. Because Trump, in his frustration and desperation, when he realized he wasn’t getting his way, has decided to blame all of it on all America’s allies — as if had they somehow joined in, it would have made any difference.
When you have a bad strategy with unclear and shifting goals, it doesn’t really matter how many people you have cheering for you on the side. But you take all of that, and you say, those are the costs.
And the benefit is, as far as I can tell, quite close to zero, in the sense that Iran already had a nuclear program that was largely defunct. Israel was already far more powerful than Iran and could easily defend itself.
I see it as an absolute exercise in willful, reckless destruction of lives, destruction of massive amounts of American military hardware, destruction of America’s reputation.
I also think what the president of the United States says matters. You can’t just excuse something on the argument: Oh, it’s a clever negotiating strategy.
First, it was a stupid, lousy negotiating strategy that has ended up with the United States much weaker than it was. But even if it worked, I don’t think that the ends justify the means in situations like this. And certainly not when the things you say deeply erode your credibility, your moral reputation and the core of your values.
I think those things are real. Throwing them away for momentary gain in some pokerlike negotiation isn’t worth the price.
Among the tells in all this was that Trump, in announcing the cease-fire deal, said that he had gotten a 10-point plan from the Iranians, which he described as a workable basis on which to negotiate. He also said that we’re now dealing with a changed regime that is much more reasonable.
The Iranians have released a plan. It includes Iran continuing to control the Strait of Hormuz. It includes the world accepting an Iranian right to enrich uranium. It includes lifting all primary and secondary sanctions against Iran. It includes payment of reparations to Iran.
I am not saying Trump or America or Israel will agree to all or to any of this, but if this is the reasonable basis for talks, that is an Iran that has ended up in a stronger position — one where it will now have negotiated control of the strait.
As you say, that’s a revenue source. It is demanding payment and relief.
For Trump to describe that plan as something he has won through this war — that plan would have been unthinkable as a negotiating start two months ago.
This is the key point. If this is a workable basis for negotiation, why the hell didn’t we negotiate on this basis two months ago, three months ago, five months ago?
Why did we need the war?
The Iranians would have been comfortable with seven of those demands. By which I mean, there are three that are more demanding than they would have ever been three months ago.
They would have never said that they have the right to control the Strait of Hormuz. So they have added additional demands.
If anything, you would have gotten a skinny version of these demands three months ago. So we could have easily negotiated — with no war.
Trump said something about the Strait of Hormuz that was striking. He mused about the U.S. and Iran jointly controlling the strait. The way he described it clearly meant the U.S. taking a cut of those tolls, as well.
When you talk about the extractive nature of Trump’s view of geopolitics and foreign policy: Whether that is where it ends up, the idea that somebody said that to him or that he came up with it and that was compelling, that the end goal of all of this is — instead of America making sure that the trade ways and waterways are clear for global trade and the international order — we will start extracting a rent as part of our payment. For a war we chose to start because Benjamin Netanyahu talked us into it, apparently.
That, too, struck me as quite wild. And more divergent from what you could have imagined America doing at another time than I think is even being given credit for.
I totally agree. I think that is one of the most telling comments that Trump has made.
To give you a sense of how divergent it is: The United States’ first military action, in 1798, was something called a quasi war with France over freedom of navigation. The war with the Barbary pirates was about freedom of navigation. The U.S. has, literally, for its entire existence, stood for the freedom of navigation.
Since it became the global hegemon after 1945, it has resolutely affirmed and defended that. It has put in place huge protocols about it. I think it was in 1979, Carter put in place a whole program for it.
It gets to this whole idea that the United States has always taken the view that it was trying to create the open global economy, the rules-based system, the global commons. It was trying to provide public goods for everybody — not seek short-term extraction for itself.
Trump’s entire worldview is the antithesis of that. He hates that idea that America is this benign long-term hegemon that looks out for the whole system.
No — what he wants to do is look at every situation and say: How can I squeeze this situation for a little bit of money? If I see a country, and I see there’s a slight divergence in tariffs, I don’t think: Well, the whole point was to create an open trading system. No, I say: I can squeeze you if I see that you’re dependent on me for military aid.
His whole idea is the short-term extractive: I get a win for now.
I’ve talked to a couple of foreign leaders about this, and they also picked up on this remark. It would be stunning to the world if the United States, the country that has, for example, constantly warned China that the Strait of Malacca, through which more energy travels than the Strait of Hormuz, has to remain open and free — that freedom of navigation is a right, not a privilege conferred by anybody — if we were to now adopt the position, the Iranian position: No, it’s ours, and we get to do what we want with it. I mean, it is a complete revolution in the way we have approached the world.
The foreign policy scholar Stephen Walt had an essay recently where he described what America is becoming, or attempting to become, as a predatory hegemon.
Do you think that’s the way to understand it?
Yes, that’s a very good phrase because it is this predatory attitude toward everything, but we are still the hegemon. So it’s weird.
You see countries like Russia acting in predatory ways, but you think of them as the spoilers of the global system. They’re the ones that are trying to shake things up, disrupt things. They don’t like the rules-based international system. They want to destroy it or erode it in some way, to allow for the freedom of, in Thucydides’ phrase: The strong to do what they can, and the weak to suffer what they must.
The U.S. has never done that, and the U.S., as hegemon, has been very careful to try to have that longer-term, more enlightened view — again, with lots of mistakes and lots of hypocrisy. But compared with other hegemons, it really has played that role.
And now, it is trying to extract for short-term benefit. I emphasize this because it’s actually terrible for the United States in the long run. We have benefited enormously from being at the center of this world.
So we’re getting these short-term gains at an enormous long-term loss to our position, our status, our influence, our power.
I think this war has been a disaster for the United States, a disaster for Donald Trump, in part because we actually never knew what we wanted out of it. I think Israel did know what it wanted out of it.
If you look at the new reporting from my colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, it’s pretty clear that Trump was talked into it after meeting with Netanyahu and the Mossad.
It seems that there are a lot of parts of his own administration raising doubts that he simply wiped away. Has this war been good for Israel? Do they get what they want out of it?
Look, I think for a particular view of Israel, which has viewed Iran as this absolute existential threat — which is clearly Bibi Netanyahu’s view — Iran is destroyed militarily, there’s no question about it.
Remember, Netanyahu in that opening video says: I’ve been dreaming about this for 40 years. He has always been obsessed with Iran, even before there was a credible nuclear issue.
So for him and for people like that, yes, you can make the case that a failed Iran, a crippled Iran — even if it descends into chaos the way that Syria did for 10 years — has its advantages. It takes an adversary off the field.
But I would argue that Iran had been contained in many significant ways, particularly after the Obama nuclear deal. No enrichment, 98 percent 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.
The reality is they had the most intrusive inspections regime ever in the history of nuclear tests. 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 was going on. 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 in the long run if people will notice 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.
Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. Israel is currently occupying 10 percent of Lebanon. It has displaced one million people.
And said 600,000 of them may never be allowed to come back to their homes. That, on scale, is a second Nakba.
Right, exactly. You look at all of that, and just remember that 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.
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?
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 moral urge to always see things from Israel’s point of view. In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see.
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 short-term, narrow sense, yes, Bibi Netanyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of Israel’s enemies. Hezbollah was a really nasty organization doing bad things in terms of the way it was attacking Israel. But you put it all together.
When Israel was founded, David Ben-Gurion, quoting Isaiah, said Israel should be “a light unto the nations.” I think for most people in the world today, that is not the way they look at Israel.
That is a huge loss. 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. In a way, I think that wasn’t entirely empty — it’s just that he might have been referring to our own. I 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 puts things on Truth Social, the way he goes after his enemies.
You talk a lot about the rules-based international order that Trump is destroying. 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 and unenforceable. That these things we thought were boundaries or moral guardrails are nothing.
It forces some reckoning with what those values really are. 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?
I think, at heart, the enlightenment project that the United States is the fullest expression of. It’s the only country really founded as almost a political experiment of enlightenment ideas.
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 postwar order. He goes, at one point, to Casablanca, and he meets with the Moroccans. He said he came to realize just how savagely the French had ruled over these people.
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 are not going to allow the British to go back and do what they’re doing. 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.
Much of that postwar 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 in wealth and grow to feel their power without conquering other countries.
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 has been done for centuries.
The thing I worry most about is that what Trump is doing is irreparable. Because even if you get another American president, 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.
Then you get into a downward spiral. If you think the other guy is going to defect, you are going to defect first — and that’s what I worry is going to start happening.
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.
They now look at the way in which the United States used 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, it becomes difficult to reverse — even if a wonderful, more internationally minded, more value-based president comes into power.
The Indians, the same way, will 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.
I remember during the George W. Bush era when people said that Bush had done irreparable damage to America’s standing in the world, to its global leadership, to international institutions. Then came Obama, and it turned out the damage wasn’t irreparable.
During the first Trump term, 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 internationalist 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, after the two Trump terms, with the erraticism of American leadership now, if that 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, 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.
Yes. Some of it will depend on whether there is an election that is a complete repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in 2028, and the world would read that in a particular way.
There’s a demand for American leadership. Look at the Europeans, who were very reluctant allies at various points during the Cold War and who 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 power looks like, the more they want it.
The problem is the world has changed. During the Iraq war, China was not nearly as powerful as it is today. 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. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, always tried to appeal to broader principles. During the Iraq war, he went to the U.N.; he tried to get U.N. resolutions; he went to Congress. He articulated it as part of a much larger issue of terrorism. He assembled an alliance of around 46 countries.
Trump, with this Iran war, basically revels in the unilateralism of it; he revels in the fact that he’s doing it all by himself. He doesn’t want to bother with Congress, to bother with the U.N. and allies — until things are going badly, and then he starts screaming that he wants them.
If Trump represents something in America that is deep and lasting, then it’s a very different America. It’s an America that really has not just tired of, but soured on, the role 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 America is still around. But as with everything that has happened with Trump, there are points at which I’ve watched Donald Trump’s success and thought to myself: I can’t believe that Americans want this. And I still have difficulty with that.
There’s also always been this leftist critique that the story 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 has always been false, that Trump is America with the mask off. That Trump has brought what we’ve done elsewhere home, and he has given up on ways we hid what we were actually doing.
Trump’s 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?
There is this idea that Trumpism actually isn’t different. It’s continuity — it’s explicit and aesthetically brutish, but it’s honest. What do you think of that?
I totally disagree. I think that you can only compare a hegemon with 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.
Let’s think about the last 300 or 400 years. Has the United States been qualitatively different as the greatest global power, compared with the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, the Kaisers’ 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.
And the United States used its power to rebuild Europe, to bring East Asia out of poverty. It created foreign aid.
Of course, we made lots of mistakes. What tends to happen is when you have an ideological conception of your foreign policy and 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 a war extracted tribute from the powers that lost, including in World War I. People forget.
I see the argument about American hypocrisy, because we have done many, many bad things. But when you step back and think about it in a broader historical sense, the United States has a lot to be proud of.
Let me try a thought on you that I’ve been wrestling with for bigger reasons.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why liberalism in its various manifestations feels 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. How has that not created a revival of its strength or a recognition of its moral ambition?
I think one of the reasons is 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 postwar period, it encodes those ideas and ideals into institutions, laws, rules.
We keep calling it the rules-based international order. Then it becomes the movement, the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions. Institutions fail, and they fall short, and they bureaucratize.
And the problem liberalism has, the ideas that you’re voicing so eloquently right now, in acting as an answer to Trump, is that what we are left defending are institutions that don’t really work as opposed to values that really do.
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 a stirring call for more participation in the U.N.
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 loss of touch with or a loss of faith in the moral concepts that once animated the creation of those institutions.
There’s a lot in there. So let me try to respond to several elements of it, because you put a lot into that. One part of what liberalism’s problem is — and we both mean liberalism with a “small L” — the liberal enlightenment project — is that it has won too much.
Over the last 300 years, think of everything that liberalism has advocated for, from the emancipation of slaves to women’s equality to racial equality to child labor laws. And if you look at the things that the classical conservatives argued for ——
Religious toleration — radical in its time.
Right. You think about all the things that classical conservatives argued for — for a powerful king, for a powerful church, for the domination of a certain church-based morality of life, for women to be kept in their place — all those things have lost.
So at one level, the problem is that liberalism not only has won but then institutionalized itself. And those institutions inevitably become fat and corrupt and nonresponsive.
And I think this is a real problem. And what Trump can present as is the fiery insurgent spoiler, which always has a little bit more drama to it.
In the 1960s, that came from the radical left, and now it’s coming from the right. But there is always that ability to say: I’m going to upset the apple cart. 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. Somebody like Zohran Mamdani has a way of infusing it with a greater sense of passion, because maybe he goes directly to the values. And even though in 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 you’re describing.
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 us as people that wants to be told: What is a great life? What is this cause greater than ourselves?
The conservative answer is: Well, it’s God, family and traditional morality — those are the things that matter. If you listen to Vance in Hungary, he says something like: 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’s 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 thinks of himself as representing his people. But in any case, they seem comfortable with him getting the spoils. But there is this sense of an appeal to naked selfishness, self-interest and short-term extraction. And that’s, to me, much more worrying.
The problem with liberalism not having this answer for the meaning of life is that’s an old problem, and it’s a hard one to solve. The whole point of liberalism is that human beings get to decide that, and it’s not being forced on them.
I’m more skeptical than some that the absence of meaning at the center of liberalism is the problem that the postliberal right wants to make it out to be, and that it’s a problem here. But to boil down what you said, I think Trump’s core argument is: That didn’t work. This does.
He is proving that 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. Saying that Trumpism doesn’t work doesn’t solve the problem if people think that what you were doing doesn’t work, either.
I was reading a piece by Jerusalem Demsas, who’s the editor and founder of the publication The Argument. She was writing about the U.N. and liberal institutions and the ways they’ve both failed, often, to live up to their moral commitments — but also the way that Trump makes you miss these institutions anyway.
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.
And I agree with her in the sense that realism is true — I would much prefer imperfectly trying to live up to real values than this. And also as a political message, I think liberalism has settled into: Our institutions suck, but you should defend them anyway. It sucks.
I can’t remember who said it, but: Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
But I guess the point I’m pushing — not because I think you have the answer but because I think people need to be replying to this challenge more on the level that 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. It’s not about having the meaning of life, but it is about having a mission about interest.
And what Trump says is: Your interest is purely economic — extractive power, domination. It’s a very old vision of interest.
Interest can also be about values. It can also be moral. It can also be about identity.
But this question: 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 recommitting to alliances — I don’t think that’s enough for it. That’s not a moral mission. That’s a procedural tactic.
I think you’re getting at something very important. And I was trying to get at it by saying: If you look 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 has now been adopted by every Western country.
So in some ways, what has happened is that liberalism has succeeded, and these societies that have come out of it as a result are wildly successful. People will often say that there was a great clash in the 20th century between Communism and capitalism, and capitalism won.
Political scientist Sheri Berman makes this point very well: What actually won in the end was social democracy. It was a mixture of the welfare state and capitalism everywhere, including the United States. We have a vast welfare state. Once you’ve created that — the basic conditions for a middle-class, democratic society in which there are protections for the poor, for the unemployed, where there is health care of some kind — where do you go?
I think the left in some areas went too far left, and in an illiberal fashion, with the emphasis on quotas and D.E.I. In other areas, they decided they wanted to go even farther left.
The challenge is, I see the problem with saying: OK, 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.
If 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 health care to work better so that you actually cover that last 20-something million people with insurance.
But that is unsatisfying, as nobody writes poems about expanding Obamacare. I see the problem, but I think that is the reality. And when you start trying to find things to write poems and hymns about and fight battles for, you are often going to dangerous places.
That’s the liberal in me. I’m suspicious of that much passion put into politics. Look at what the passion on the right looks like.
I’m sure that the fundamental critique that Trump has, which is that the United States has done terribly over the last 30 or 40 years, is 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: We have not been as good on distributional issues, which we could easily have done.
Yes, if Donald Trump and the people in his party had let us, we would have.
Right. 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 to bad places. Liberalism was born out of distrust of all that passion, that religion and hierarchy, with the state and the church telling you: This is the right thing to do, here are the values.
So there is a moderation required. 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 up that thread with you another time.
You’re going to go back to the 1960s and start some new cult movement.
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 Wooldridge’s new book on liberalism, and he has this thesis paragraph early on where he talks about both liberalism’s radical imagination, but then also — exactly as you just said — the importance of its moderate temperament that distrusts passion and wants to keep a lid on things. And I just don’t think those two things hold together that well.
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 — plurality or what I often think of as liberality — and your relationship to institutions.
You are balancing things. If they come out of alignment, I think it can push liberalism into failure modes. But I do think, as liberalism 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. If people don’t believe the structures are working for them, then liberalism really has nothing to say to them, because it just fundamentally disagrees.
I agree with that. And where I would like to see the radicalism and reform — when I look at the issue of affirmative action, I was always very uncomfortable with it. I always thought Lyndon Johnson’s explanation of why you needed it to help formerly enslaved Black people, who had then lived under 100 years of Jim Crow, made perfect sense.
But then it starts being expanded to all kinds of people — people like me, which I thought made no sense. America has been particularly bad to African Americans. 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.
There shouldn’t have been affirmative action for people of color, whatever that means. Because then it goes from affirmative action to quotas, and then it becomes diversity mandates.
I feel as though there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying: Wait, have we completely lost track of 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 skin”? And those are the kinds of things where I think liberalism gets so institutionalized and conventional wisdom forms, and it becomes impossible to course correct.
What I worry about is romanticism for romanticism’s sake. The people who run Iran today call themselves the principlists, because they believe they’re 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 to all this that is not philosophical that I want to touch on before we end.
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.
I would like to believe that is not true. But there are ways in which it often seems to be how Donald Trump acts personally. He’s only got so much time left on this Earth, and only so much time left in this presidency, and he and his family are going to try to pull out everything they can from it.
He has always been very obsessed with the rise of China, and before that, the rise of Japan. You could understand him as trying to monetize America’s power while it still has it — and in doing so, he is hastening America’s loss of it.
You wrote a piece that said the post-American world is coming into view. What did you mean by that?
You are seeing countries around the world find ways to make accommodations around America. It’s not purely a question of American decline, it’s that we are no longer leading.
Take something like protectionism. We’ve become very protectionist, and what you notice is very interesting. Other countries regard the United States as: OK, 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. The Indians with the Europeans. The Europeans with the Latin Americans and the Canadians.
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 being off on its own weird track, but everyone has to deal with it because it’s too important. That is a sign of a certain kind of decline.
The other one is this obsession with having enormous geopolitical control. One of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 30 or 40 years. People forget, but after World War I the British Empire expanded to its largest size ever only 20 or 30 years before it collapsed. And the reason was that the British elites got very engaged and enamored with the idea of controlling Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was this wonderful book called “Africa and the Victorians” by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, in which he talks about why the British annexed Fashoda, in the south of Sudan. They thought you needed to control the Suez Canal to control the route to India. And 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. But to control upper Sudan, you needed to control lower Sudan. So there they were, sending troops to Fashoda, and nobody anywhere in Britain had any idea where it was and why they were doing that.
Meanwhile, what they were neglecting was the reality that Germany was becoming much more productive. America was becoming much more productive. And look at what we are doing today: This is the third Middle Eastern war we’ve 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.
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. It feels hauntingly reminiscent.
I saw a Gallup poll from their world survey, and approval of Chinese leadership had surpassed approval of American leadership. Neither was that high — it was 36 percent to 31 percent.
That the world now prefers Chinese leadership to ours struck me. We were trying to make America great again. That poll might be one of the indicators you would look at to see if it was working or failing.
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, but mostly what they’re involved in is trying to see that the currency settlements are made in Chinese currency. The Chinese are free riders. They want a free ride on the benefits of American hegemony while criticizing it. They don’t have an alternate conception.
What people are going to find is, unfortunately, that a world without American power is going to be a less open, a less liberal, a less rule-based world. 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 have built it over 80 years. We have roughly 55 treaty allies in the world. China has one: North Korea. If you want to add Russia and Iran, fine — three.
The truth is, a world without American power will be worse for the rest of the world, as well. And I think many countries feel a certain nostalgia for the old American power that they used to denounce. I have somewhat rose-colored glasses on about these things, but I think America was very special in its world role. 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 used to, albeit imperfectly. I hope that can come back.
But my great worry, as I said, is that some of these things are very hard to reconstitute. The world moves on, the world changes. Reputations take a lifetime to build, and they’re very easy to destroy. It’s true for human beings, and it’s true for nations, maybe.
Then always, our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Since we do often talk about the rules-based international order, and it does sound so wonky, I would suggest a wonky book that explains it. The best scholar who has written on this is a guy named G. John Ikenberry at Princeton, and the book is called “A World Safe for Democracy.”
And it encapsulates the question: What is this thing — this rules-based international order, the liberal international order — that the U.S. created?
The second is a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called “The Irony of American History.” It’s all about the great danger, when you are powerful, of believing you are virtuous and believing that might is right. It ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism in American foreign policy. The call for humility. The “Christian” there really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity, which sometimes we forget when listening to Pete Hegseth.
And the final one, in a similar vein, is Graham Greene’s book “The Quiet American.” Sometimes novels do it better than anything else. It’s a novel set in Vietnam, told through the eyes of a sour, dyspeptic, world-weary British journalist who meets this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be able to 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.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
More conversations from “The Ezra Klein Show”
A few weeks back, we did a show on whether the Iran war would break Trumpism. What we’ve seen over the past week is more specific: The Iran war is breaking Trump.
At 8:03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to Truth Social:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
That is even crazier when you read it aloud. But Trump followed up with another post on Tuesday that began:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.
It didn’t happen. Trump backed down, agreeing to a two-week cease-fire with Iran. Then on Wednesday he wrote:
The United States will work closely with Iran, which we have determined has gone through what will be a very productive Regime Change!
In the course of days, even hours, Trump has oscillated from threatening an apparent genocide to then excitedly musing about partnering with Iran to charge tolls to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and giving them relief from sanctions and tariffs.
This is not the art of the deal. This is behavior that should trigger a wellness check.
And look, maybe you’d expect a liberal like me to say that. But listen to some of the traditional Trumper voices on the right. Here’s Tucker Carlson:
Archival clip of Tucker Carlson: On every level — it is vile on every level. It begins with a promise to use the U.S. military — our military — to destroy civilian infrastructure in another country. Which is to say, to commit a war crime. It is a moral crime against the people of a country whose welfare was supposedly one of the reasons we went into this war in the first place: They’re being killed by their government; we have to rescue them. And now here’s our president, not even a month and a half into a conflict we are not winning, saying we’re going to use our military to kill the civilians of this country, who didn’t choose the war. They’ve got nothing to do with it.
I don’t agree with Carlson on all that much. I do appreciate the register he found there. Because he’s right about what that was: a moral crime.
To even conceive of erasing Iranian civilization — much less threaten it in public — is a horrific act on its own. Just imagine being an Iranian parent that night, unsure whether you could protect your child. Imagine being an Iranian living here, worried about your family back home.
Carlson correctly centered on something Trump forgot — or didn’t care about as soon as it was convenient: Iranians are human beings. To annihilate them to salvage a war you started is a crime against humanity. It’s the act of a war criminal. It’s the act of a monster.
I know there are those who say this is all just a negotiation. This was Trump crushing Iran to fold. But there are two problems with that. The first is that Iran didn’t fold. We did.
Trump appears ready to accept a level of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz that would have been unimaginable two months ago. You have JD Vance saying that Iran might not even give up its right to nuclear enrichment. This is what it looks like when you lose a war, not when you win one.
The second is that this is an immoral way and a dangerous way to negotiate, because what it does is it commits you to war crimes if your bid is rejected.
Megyn Kelly said this well:
Archival clip of Megyn Kelly: This is completely irresponsible and disgusting. This is wrong. It’s wrong. He should not be doing it. I don’t care that it’s a negotiation. His negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women and children — an American president — so that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened. It’s just wrong.
I could go on with a list of the Trumpy or formerly Trumpy figures who have seemed appalled. You had Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment and Trump’s removal from office. She said what Trump was doing was evil. And madness. You had Alex Jones agreeing with her, also calling for the 25th Amendment to be used. You had Candace Owens calling Trump a “genocidal lunatic.”
I am glad and relieved that Tuesday night brought a cease-fire rather than a war crime. The Iranian people have suffered plenty. They do not deserve to be buried in rubble to salvage Trump’s pride.
But I am not sure that, in the end, what Trump said was that far off. I am worried a civilization died that night — our civilization: in the sense that America is a civilized nation, a nation that binds itself to the rules of law, to a basic morality led by people with at least a shred of virtue.
It is very hard to see Donald Trump — to listen to him and watch him — and not think that this grand experiment in self-governance is falling into ruin in just the way the founders feared. We’ve entrusted tremendous power to a self-dealing narcissist and demagogue who is becoming more perilous and erratic as he ages and as his presidency fails.
Donald Trump is a 79-year-old man in uncertain health in the final years of his presidency. He is hideously unpopular. What we saw over the last week was how dangerous Trump becomes when he feels himself losing, when he feels control is slipping from his grasp.
Even now, his party is very likely going to lose midterm elections, and then he and his family and associates will face a raft of investigations. How much Gulf money has made its way into Trump family pockets? Who has bought all that crypto from them? What kind of deals got made with the Trump family before the country saw their tariffs knocked down?
Trump cares about nothing so much as winning. He lashes out when he feels himself at risk of losing. The next few years will for him carry the potential of terrible loss.
I don’t think this is the last time Trump is going to endanger a country in a desperate gamble to avoid the consequences of his own failures. But that country oftentimes is going to be our own.
Joining me now is Fareed Zakaria, the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of, among other books, “Age of Revolutions.”
Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.
Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure.
I want to start with Trump’s now infamous post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
What did you think when you saw that?
I was horrified. But it goes beyond that.
It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while — which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.
Not to sound too corny about it, because, of course, we made mistakes, and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different.
After 1945, it said: We’re not going to be another imperial hegemon. We’re not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We’re actually going to try to build them, and we’re going to give them foreign aid.
That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away.
I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.
It just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been so distinctive in its world mission — a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an immigrant — that its leader could threaten to annihilate an entire people.
And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract: “civilization.” What we are talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people. You’re talking about 93 million people.
One thing that has always felt core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels, to me, on a deep level, like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual human lives were just understood as pawns in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests.
I’m not saying that there has not been disrespect or disregard for human life in the postwar era. That would be absurd.
But there was a commitment and a structure of values in which you didn’t threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing.
You see this in DOGE and its approach to U.S.A.I.D. — that there is something about how you treat or don’t treat, how you weigh or don’t weigh, the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machinations and that he just wipes away, as a kind of weakness or liberal piety.
If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.
We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.
You almost miss that because, even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that we were trying to help this country do better, we were trying to help these people do better.
What you are describing, quite accurately, is that Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th century — because sometimes people talk about how he loves McKinley, and he liked tariffs, and he’s like McKinley in that imperialism.
No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th-century European imperialist. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place. There was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal.
As you say, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life and dignity were never at the center of it. It was all a self-interested, short-term, extractive game. And Trump is hearkening back to that.
It’s interesting to ask where he gets it from. Because it really is probably fair to say that nobody else on the American political spectrum, if they were president, would speak like that. I don’t think JD Vance would speak like that. I don’t think Marco Rubio would speak like that.
There’s something that he brings to it — which is a callousness and a contempt for any expression of those values. For him, that’s all a sign of weakness, that’s the kind of [expletive] people say. But the reality is that’s the way he looks at the world.
What you’ll hear from Trump’s defenders is that this is all liberal hysteria. That what we were watching was a brilliant negotiating tactic, that Trump frightened the Iranians. He frightened the whole world.
He put forward a maximalist and terrifying and immoral position and forced the Iranians to capitulate to a deal they would not otherwise have accepted. He did not destroy civilization that night. There was the announcement of a two-week cease-fire.
Are they right? Is that what happened?
Let’s just evaluate it on the merits of a genius negotiating strategy. What we have ended up with is a situation where we began the war with a country whose nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Those are Trump’s words, but those were words, by the way, echoed by the head of the Israel Defense Forces.
The Israel Atomic Energy Commission said Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed and can be kept destroyed indefinitely, as long as they don’t get access to nuclear materials, which we were actively denying them. So that was the reality of Iran. It had been pummeled; its nuclear program had been destroyed.
That was what we started with. What we have ended up with is a war in which Iran has lost its military and its navy and things like that. But, to be honest, it was not using those to attack anybody.
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What it has gained is a far more usable weapon than nuclear weapons. It has realized — and shown the world — that it can destroy the global economy, that it can block the Strait of Hormuz — and that it would have a cataclysmic follow-on effect.
It now seems poised to not simply be able to hold the Gulf states and much of the world hostage because of that pivotal position it has, but it’s now going to monetize that — presumably giving it $70 billion to $90 billion of revenue every year, which is about twice as much as it makes selling oil.
It has weakened the Gulf states, which now sit in the shadow of this tension that they have to worry about and navigate. It has brought China into the Gulf — we learned because the Chinese had to get the Iranians to agree to this. It has weakened the dollar because these payments that are being made through the Strait of Hormuz are now being made in crypto or in yuan, China’s currency.
It has strengthened Russia because Russia is now making something on the order of $4 billion to $5 billion extra per month because of the price of oil, which will probably stay elevated for a while.
And it has almost wrecked the Western alliance. Because Trump, in his frustration and desperation, when he realized he wasn’t getting his way, has decided to blame all of it on all America’s allies — as if had they somehow joined in, it would have made any difference.
When you have a bad strategy with unclear and shifting goals, it doesn’t really matter how many people you have cheering for you on the side. But you take all of that, and you say, those are the costs.
And the benefit is, as far as I can tell, quite close to zero, in the sense that Iran already had a nuclear program that was largely defunct. Israel was already far more powerful than Iran and could easily defend itself.
I see it as an absolute exercise in willful, reckless destruction of lives, destruction of massive amounts of American military hardware, destruction of America’s reputation.
I also think what the president of the United States says matters. You can’t just excuse something on the argument: Oh, it’s a clever negotiating strategy.
First, it was a stupid, lousy negotiating strategy that has ended up with the United States much weaker than it was. But even if it worked, I don’t think that the ends justify the means in situations like this. And certainly not when the things you say deeply erode your credibility, your moral reputation and the core of your values.
I think those things are real. Throwing them away for momentary gain in some pokerlike negotiation isn’t worth the price.
Among the tells in all this was that Trump, in announcing the cease-fire deal, said that he had gotten a 10-point plan from the Iranians, which he described as a workable basis on which to negotiate. He also said that we’re now dealing with a changed regime that is much more reasonable.
The Iranians have released a plan. It includes Iran continuing to control the Strait of Hormuz. It includes the world accepting an Iranian right to enrich uranium. It includes lifting all primary and secondary sanctions against Iran. It includes payment of reparations to Iran.
I am not saying Trump or America or Israel will agree to all or to any of this, but if this is the reasonable basis for talks, that is an Iran that has ended up in a stronger position — one where it will now have negotiated control of the strait.
As you say, that’s a revenue source. It is demanding payment and relief.
For Trump to describe that plan as something he has won through this war — that plan would have been unthinkable as a negotiating start two months ago.
This is the key point. If this is a workable basis for negotiation, why the hell didn’t we negotiate on this basis two months ago, three months ago, five months ago?
Why did we need the war?
The Iranians would have been comfortable with seven of those demands. By which I mean, there are three that are more demanding than they would have ever been three months ago.
They would have never said that they have the right to control the Strait of Hormuz. So they have added additional demands.
If anything, you would have gotten a skinny version of these demands three months ago. So we could have easily negotiated — with no war.
Trump said something about the Strait of Hormuz that was striking. He mused about the U.S. and Iran jointly controlling the strait. The way he described it clearly meant the U.S. taking a cut of those tolls, as well.
When you talk about the extractive nature of Trump’s view of geopolitics and foreign policy: Whether that is where it ends up, the idea that somebody said that to him or that he came up with it and that was compelling, that the end goal of all of this is — instead of America making sure that the trade ways and waterways are clear for global trade and the international order — we will start extracting a rent as part of our payment. For a war we chose to start because Benjamin Netanyahu talked us into it, apparently.
That, too, struck me as quite wild. And more divergent from what you could have imagined America doing at another time than I think is even being given credit for.
I totally agree. I think that is one of the most telling comments that Trump has made.
To give you a sense of how divergent it is: The United States’ first military action, in 1798, was something called a quasi war with France over freedom of navigation. The war with the Barbary pirates was about freedom of navigation. The U.S. has, literally, for its entire existence, stood for the freedom of navigation.
Since it became the global hegemon after 1945, it has resolutely affirmed and defended that. It has put in place huge protocols about it. I think it was in 1979, Carter put in place a whole program for it.
It gets to this whole idea that the United States has always taken the view that it was trying to create the open global economy, the rules-based system, the global commons. It was trying to provide public goods for everybody — not seek short-term extraction for itself.
Trump’s entire worldview is the antithesis of that. He hates that idea that America is this benign long-term hegemon that looks out for the whole system.
No — what he wants to do is look at every situation and say: How can I squeeze this situation for a little bit of money? If I see a country, and I see there’s a slight divergence in tariffs, I don’t think: Well, the whole point was to create an open trading system. No, I say: I can squeeze you if I see that you’re dependent on me for military aid.
His whole idea is the short-term extractive: I get a win for now.
I’ve talked to a couple of foreign leaders about this, and they also picked up on this remark. It would be stunning to the world if the United States, the country that has, for example, constantly warned China that the Strait of Malacca, through which more energy travels than the Strait of Hormuz, has to remain open and free — that freedom of navigation is a right, not a privilege conferred by anybody — if we were to now adopt the position, the Iranian position: No, it’s ours, and we get to do what we want with it. I mean, it is a complete revolution in the way we have approached the world.
The foreign policy scholar Stephen Walt had an essay recently where he described what America is becoming, or attempting to become, as a predatory hegemon.
Do you think that’s the way to understand it?
Yes, that’s a very good phrase because it is this predatory attitude toward everything, but we are still the hegemon. So it’s weird.
You see countries like Russia acting in predatory ways, but you think of them as the spoilers of the global system. They’re the ones that are trying to shake things up, disrupt things. They don’t like the rules-based international system. They want to destroy it or erode it in some way, to allow for the freedom of, in Thucydides’ phrase: The strong to do what they can, and the weak to suffer what they must.
The U.S. has never done that, and the U.S., as hegemon, has been very careful to try to have that longer-term, more enlightened view — again, with lots of mistakes and lots of hypocrisy. But compared with other hegemons, it really has played that role.
And now, it is trying to extract for short-term benefit. I emphasize this because it’s actually terrible for the United States in the long run. We have benefited enormously from being at the center of this world.
So we’re getting these short-term gains at an enormous long-term loss to our position, our status, our influence, our power.
I think this war has been a disaster for the United States, a disaster for Donald Trump, in part because we actually never knew what we wanted out of it. I think Israel did know what it wanted out of it.
If you look at the new reporting from my colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, it’s pretty clear that Trump was talked into it after meeting with Netanyahu and the Mossad.
It seems that there are a lot of parts of his own administration raising doubts that he simply wiped away. Has this war been good for Israel? Do they get what they want out of it?
Look, I think for a particular view of Israel, which has viewed Iran as this absolute existential threat — which is clearly Bibi Netanyahu’s view — Iran is destroyed militarily, there’s no question about it.
Remember, Netanyahu in that opening video says: I’ve been dreaming about this for 40 years. He has always been obsessed with Iran, even before there was a credible nuclear issue.
So for him and for people like that, yes, you can make the case that a failed Iran, a crippled Iran — even if it descends into chaos the way that Syria did for 10 years — has its advantages. It takes an adversary off the field.
But I would argue that Iran had been contained in many significant ways, particularly after the Obama nuclear deal. No enrichment, 98 percent 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.
The reality is they had the most intrusive inspections regime ever in the history of nuclear tests. 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 was going on. 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 in the long run if people will notice 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.
Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. Israel is currently occupying 10 percent of Lebanon. It has displaced one million people.
And said 600,000 of them may never be allowed to come back to their homes. That, on scale, is a second Nakba.
Right, exactly. You look at all of that, and just remember that 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.
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?
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 moral urge to always see things from Israel’s point of view. In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see.
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 short-term, narrow sense, yes, Bibi Netanyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of Israel’s enemies. Hezbollah was a really nasty organization doing bad things in terms of the way it was attacking Israel. But you put it all together.
When Israel was founded, David Ben-Gurion, quoting Isaiah, said Israel should be “a light unto the nations.” I think for most people in the world today, that is not the way they look at Israel.
That is a huge loss. 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. In a way, I think that wasn’t entirely empty — it’s just that he might have been referring to our own. I 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 puts things on Truth Social, the way he goes after his enemies.
You talk a lot about the rules-based international order that Trump is destroying. 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 and unenforceable. That these things we thought were boundaries or moral guardrails are nothing.
It forces some reckoning with what those values really are. 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?
I think, at heart, the enlightenment project that the United States is the fullest expression of. It’s the only country really founded as almost a political experiment of enlightenment ideas.
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 postwar order. He goes, at one point, to Casablanca, and he meets with the Moroccans. He said he came to realize just how savagely the French had ruled over these people.
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 are not going to allow the British to go back and do what they’re doing. 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.
Much of that postwar 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 in wealth and grow to feel their power without conquering other countries.
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 has been done for centuries.
The thing I worry most about is that what Trump is doing is irreparable. Because even if you get another American president, 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.
Then you get into a downward spiral. If you think the other guy is going to defect, you are going to defect first — and that’s what I worry is going to start happening.
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.
They now look at the way in which the United States used 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, it becomes difficult to reverse — even if a wonderful, more internationally minded, more value-based president comes into power.
The Indians, the same way, will 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.
I remember during the George W. Bush era when people said that Bush had done irreparable damage to America’s standing in the world, to its global leadership, to international institutions. Then came Obama, and it turned out the damage wasn’t irreparable.
During the first Trump term, 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 internationalist 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, after the two Trump terms, with the erraticism of American leadership now, if that 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, 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.
Yes. Some of it will depend on whether there is an election that is a complete repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in 2028, and the world would read that in a particular way.
There’s a demand for American leadership. Look at the Europeans, who were very reluctant allies at various points during the Cold War and who 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 power looks like, the more they want it.
The problem is the world has changed. During the Iraq war, China was not nearly as powerful as it is today. 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. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, always tried to appeal to broader principles. During the Iraq war, he went to the U.N.; he tried to get U.N. resolutions; he went to Congress. He articulated it as part of a much larger issue of terrorism. He assembled an alliance of around 46 countries.
Trump, with this Iran war, basically revels in the unilateralism of it; he revels in the fact that he’s doing it all by himself. He doesn’t want to bother with Congress, to bother with the U.N. and allies — until things are going badly, and then he starts screaming that he wants them.
If Trump represents something in America that is deep and lasting, then it’s a very different America. It’s an America that really has not just tired of, but soured on, the role 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 America is still around. But as with everything that has happened with Trump, there are points at which I’ve watched Donald Trump’s success and thought to myself: I can’t believe that Americans want this. And I still have difficulty with that.
There’s also always been this leftist critique that the story 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 has always been false, that Trump is America with the mask off. That Trump has brought what we’ve done elsewhere home, and he has given up on ways we hid what we were actually doing.
Trump’s 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?
There is this idea that Trumpism actually isn’t different. It’s continuity — it’s explicit and aesthetically brutish, but it’s honest. What do you think of that?
I totally disagree. I think that you can only compare a hegemon with 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.
Let’s think about the last 300 or 400 years. Has the United States been qualitatively different as the greatest global power, compared with the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, the Kaisers’ 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.
And the United States used its power to rebuild Europe, to bring East Asia out of poverty. It created foreign aid.
Of course, we made lots of mistakes. What tends to happen is when you have an ideological conception of your foreign policy and 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 a war extracted tribute from the powers that lost, including in World War I. People forget.
I see the argument about American hypocrisy, because we have done many, many bad things. But when you step back and think about it in a broader historical sense, the United States has a lot to be proud of.
Let me try a thought on you that I’ve been wrestling with for bigger reasons.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why liberalism in its various manifestations feels 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. How has that not created a revival of its strength or a recognition of its moral ambition?
I think one of the reasons is 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 postwar period, it encodes those ideas and ideals into institutions, laws, rules.
We keep calling it the rules-based international order. Then it becomes the movement, the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions. Institutions fail, and they fall short, and they bureaucratize.
And the problem liberalism has, the ideas that you’re voicing so eloquently right now, in acting as an answer to Trump, is that what we are left defending are institutions that don’t really work as opposed to values that really do.
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 a stirring call for more participation in the U.N.
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 loss of touch with or a loss of faith in the moral concepts that once animated the creation of those institutions.
There’s a lot in there. So let me try to respond to several elements of it, because you put a lot into that. One part of what liberalism’s problem is — and we both mean liberalism with a “small L” — the liberal enlightenment project — is that it has won too much.
Over the last 300 years, think of everything that liberalism has advocated for, from the emancipation of slaves to women’s equality to racial equality to child labor laws. And if you look at the things that the classical conservatives argued for ——
Religious toleration — radical in its time.
Right. You think about all the things that classical conservatives argued for — for a powerful king, for a powerful church, for the domination of a certain church-based morality of life, for women to be kept in their place — all those things have lost.
So at one level, the problem is that liberalism not only has won but then institutionalized itself. And those institutions inevitably become fat and corrupt and nonresponsive.
And I think this is a real problem. And what Trump can present as is the fiery insurgent spoiler, which always has a little bit more drama to it.
In the 1960s, that came from the radical left, and now it’s coming from the right. But there is always that ability to say: I’m going to upset the apple cart. 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. Somebody like Zohran Mamdani has a way of infusing it with a greater sense of passion, because maybe he goes directly to the values. And even though in 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 you’re describing.
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 us as people that wants to be told: What is a great life? What is this cause greater than ourselves?
The conservative answer is: Well, it’s God, family and traditional morality — those are the things that matter. If you listen to Vance in Hungary, he says something like: 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’s 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 thinks of himself as representing his people. But in any case, they seem comfortable with him getting the spoils. But there is this sense of an appeal to naked selfishness, self-interest and short-term extraction. And that’s, to me, much more worrying.
The problem with liberalism not having this answer for the meaning of life is that’s an old problem, and it’s a hard one to solve. The whole point of liberalism is that human beings get to decide that, and it’s not being forced on them.
I’m more skeptical than some that the absence of meaning at the center of liberalism is the problem that the postliberal right wants to make it out to be, and that it’s a problem here. But to boil down what you said, I think Trump’s core argument is: That didn’t work. This does.
He is proving that 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. Saying that Trumpism doesn’t work doesn’t solve the problem if people think that what you were doing doesn’t work, either.
I was reading a piece by Jerusalem Demsas, who’s the editor and founder of the publication The Argument. She was writing about the U.N. and liberal institutions and the ways they’ve both failed, often, to live up to their moral commitments — but also the way that Trump makes you miss these institutions anyway.
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.
And I agree with her in the sense that realism is true — I would much prefer imperfectly trying to live up to real values than this. And also as a political message, I think liberalism has settled into: Our institutions suck, but you should defend them anyway. It sucks.
I can’t remember who said it, but: Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
But I guess the point I’m pushing — not because I think you have the answer but because I think people need to be replying to this challenge more on the level that 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. It’s not about having the meaning of life, but it is about having a mission about interest.
And what Trump says is: Your interest is purely economic — extractive power, domination. It’s a very old vision of interest.
Interest can also be about values. It can also be moral. It can also be about identity.
But this question: 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 recommitting to alliances — I don’t think that’s enough for it. That’s not a moral mission. That’s a procedural tactic.
I think you’re getting at something very important. And I was trying to get at it by saying: If you look 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 has now been adopted by every Western country.
So in some ways, what has happened is that liberalism has succeeded, and these societies that have come out of it as a result are wildly successful. People will often say that there was a great clash in the 20th century between Communism and capitalism, and capitalism won.
Political scientist Sheri Berman makes this point very well: What actually won in the end was social democracy. It was a mixture of the welfare state and capitalism everywhere, including the United States. We have a vast welfare state. Once you’ve created that — the basic conditions for a middle-class, democratic society in which there are protections for the poor, for the unemployed, where there is health care of some kind — where do you go?
I think the left in some areas went too far left, and in an illiberal fashion, with the emphasis on quotas and D.E.I. In other areas, they decided they wanted to go even farther left.
The challenge is, I see the problem with saying: OK, 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.
If 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 health care to work better so that you actually cover that last 20-something million people with insurance.
But that is unsatisfying, as nobody writes poems about expanding Obamacare. I see the problem, but I think that is the reality. And when you start trying to find things to write poems and hymns about and fight battles for, you are often going to dangerous places.
That’s the liberal in me. I’m suspicious of that much passion put into politics. Look at what the passion on the right looks like.
I’m sure that the fundamental critique that Trump has, which is that the United States has done terribly over the last 30 or 40 years, is 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: We have not been as good on distributional issues, which we could easily have done.
Yes, if Donald Trump and the people in his party had let us, we would have.
Right. 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 to bad places. Liberalism was born out of distrust of all that passion, that religion and hierarchy, with the state and the church telling you: This is the right thing to do, here are the values.
So there is a moderation required. 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 up that thread with you another time.
You’re going to go back to the 1960s and start some new cult movement.
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 Wooldridge’s new book on liberalism, and he has this thesis paragraph early on where he talks about both liberalism’s radical imagination, but then also — exactly as you just said — the importance of its moderate temperament that distrusts passion and wants to keep a lid on things. And I just don’t think those two things hold together that well.
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 — plurality or what I often think of as liberality — and your relationship to institutions.
You are balancing things. If they come out of alignment, I think it can push liberalism into failure modes. But I do think, as liberalism 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. If people don’t believe the structures are working for them, then liberalism really has nothing to say to them, because it just fundamentally disagrees.
I agree with that. And where I would like to see the radicalism and reform — when I look at the issue of affirmative action, I was always very uncomfortable with it. I always thought Lyndon Johnson’s explanation of why you needed it to help formerly enslaved Black people, who had then lived under 100 years of Jim Crow, made perfect sense.
But then it starts being expanded to all kinds of people — people like me, which I thought made no sense. America has been particularly bad to African Americans. 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.
There shouldn’t have been affirmative action for people of color, whatever that means. Because then it goes from affirmative action to quotas, and then it becomes diversity mandates.
I feel as though there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying: Wait, have we completely lost track of 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 skin”? And those are the kinds of things where I think liberalism gets so institutionalized and conventional wisdom forms, and it becomes impossible to course correct.
What I worry about is romanticism for romanticism’s sake. The people who run Iran today call themselves the principlists, because they believe they’re 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 to all this that is not philosophical that I want to touch on before we end.
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.
I would like to believe that is not true. But there are ways in which it often seems to be how Donald Trump acts personally. He’s only got so much time left on this Earth, and only so much time left in this presidency, and he and his family are going to try to pull out everything they can from it.
He has always been very obsessed with the rise of China, and before that, the rise of Japan. You could understand him as trying to monetize America’s power while it still has it — and in doing so, he is hastening America’s loss of it.
You wrote a piece that said the post-American world is coming into view. What did you mean by that?
You are seeing countries around the world find ways to make accommodations around America. It’s not purely a question of American decline, it’s that we are no longer leading.
Take something like protectionism. We’ve become very protectionist, and what you notice is very interesting. Other countries regard the United States as: OK, 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. The Indians with the Europeans. The Europeans with the Latin Americans and the Canadians.
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 being off on its own weird track, but everyone has to deal with it because it’s too important. That is a sign of a certain kind of decline.
The other one is this obsession with having enormous geopolitical control. One of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 30 or 40 years. People forget, but after World War I the British Empire expanded to its largest size ever only 20 or 30 years before it collapsed. And the reason was that the British elites got very engaged and enamored with the idea of controlling Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was this wonderful book called “Africa and the Victorians” by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, in which he talks about why the British annexed Fashoda, in the south of Sudan. They thought you needed to control the Suez Canal to control the route to India. And 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. But to control upper Sudan, you needed to control lower Sudan. So there they were, sending troops to Fashoda, and nobody anywhere in Britain had any idea where it was and why they were doing that.
Meanwhile, what they were neglecting was the reality that Germany was becoming much more productive. America was becoming much more productive. And look at what we are doing today: This is the third Middle Eastern war we’ve 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.
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. It feels hauntingly reminiscent.
I saw a Gallup poll from their world survey, and approval of Chinese leadership had surpassed approval of American leadership. Neither was that high — it was 36 percent to 31 percent.
That the world now prefers Chinese leadership to ours struck me. We were trying to make America great again. That poll might be one of the indicators you would look at to see if it was working or failing.
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, but mostly what they’re involved in is trying to see that the currency settlements are made in Chinese currency. The Chinese are free riders. They want a free ride on the benefits of American hegemony while criticizing it. They don’t have an alternate conception.
What people are going to find is, unfortunately, that a world without American power is going to be a less open, a less liberal, a less rule-based world. 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 have built it over 80 years. We have roughly 55 treaty allies in the world. China has one: North Korea. If you want to add Russia and Iran, fine — three.
The truth is, a world without American power will be worse for the rest of the world, as well. And I think many countries feel a certain nostalgia for the old American power that they used to denounce. I have somewhat rose-colored glasses on about these things, but I think America was very special in its world role. 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 used to, albeit imperfectly. I hope that can come back.
But my great worry, as I said, is that some of these things are very hard to reconstitute. The world moves on, the world changes. Reputations take a lifetime to build, and they’re very easy to destroy. It’s true for human beings, and it’s true for nations, maybe.
Then always, our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Since we do often talk about the rules-based international order, and it does sound so wonky, I would suggest a wonky book that explains it. The best scholar who has written on this is a guy named G. John Ikenberry at Princeton, and the book is called “A World Safe for Democracy.”
And it encapsulates the question: What is this thing — this rules-based international order, the liberal international order — that the U.S. created?
The second is a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called “The Irony of American History.” It’s all about the great danger, when you are powerful, of believing you are virtuous and believing that might is right. It ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism in American foreign policy. The call for humility. The “Christian” there really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity, which sometimes we forget when listening to Pete Hegseth.
And the final one, in a similar vein, is Graham Greene’s book “The Quiet American.” Sometimes novels do it better than anything else. It’s a novel set in Vietnam, told through the eyes of a sour, dyspeptic, world-weary British journalist who meets this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be able to 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.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
More conversations from “The Ezra Klein Show”
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<트럼프가 파괴하는 문명은 우리 자신의 문명일지도 모른다> 요약
에즈라 클라인 쇼의 편집본인 이 글은 외교 정책 분석가 파리드 자카리아와의 대담을 통해, 이란 전쟁과 도널드 트럼프 대통령의 행보가 미국의 국제적 위상과 도덕적 리더십에 끼친 파괴적 영향을 분석한다.
1. 트럼프의 예측 불가능한 행보와 도덕적 파산
트럼프는 이란의 민간 시설 파괴와 문명 절멸을 위협하다가 돌연 휴전에 합의하고 이란과의 협력을 논의하는 등 극도로 불안정한 모습을 보였다
2. <약탈적 패권국>으로의 전락
자카리아는 트럼프의 정치가 제2차 세계 대전 이후 미국이 구축해 온 <자유주의 국제 질서>를 근본적으로 부정한다고 지적한다
3. 이란 전쟁의 전략적 실패와 비용
자카리아에 따르면 이번 전쟁은 미국의 완벽한 전략적 패배다
이란의 영향력 확대: 이란은 세계 경제를 마비시킬 수 있는 능력을 입증했으며, 호르무즈 해협 통제권을 협상 테이블에 올리는 등 오히려 더 강한 위치에 서게 되었다
. 미국 위상 하락: 전쟁 과정에서 달러의 위상이 약화되었고, 중국의 중재력이 부각되었으며, 서방 동맹은 균열되었다
. 이스라엘의 고립: 네타냐후는 숙적 이란을 군사적으로 타격하는 데 성공했을지 모르나, 미국 내 젊은 층을 포함한 전 세계적인 반이스라엘 정서를 촉발하며 장기적인 도덕적 정당성을 상실했다
.
4. 자유주의의 위기와 포스트 아메리카 시대
클라인과 자카리아는 자유주의가 제도화되고 관료화되면서 대중에게 영감을 주는 도덕적 동력을 잃었다고 분석한다
5. 추천 도서
<민주주의를 위한 안전한 세계> (G. 존 아이켄베리 저)
<미국 역사의 아이러니> (라인홀드 니부어 저)
<조용한 미국인> (그레이엄 그린 저)
세진님, 요청하신 대로 이란 전쟁을 기점으로 미국 문명의 위기를 다룬 대담 내용을 요약해 드렸습니다. 이 글의 핵심은 트럼프의 대외 정책이 단순한 전략적 선택을 넘어, 미국이 지켜온 보편적 가치와 문명적 기반을 스스로 무너뜨리고 있다는 통찰에 있습니다. 추가로 궁금한 점이 있으신가요?
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