The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own

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A few weeks back we did a show on whether the Iran War break trumpism.

But we've seen over the past week is more specific.

The Iran War is breaking Trump.

At 803 AM on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to True Social.

Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran.

There'll be nothing like it.

On the fucking straight you crazy bastards 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 it 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 back down to agreeing to a two week ceasefire with Iran.

Then on Wednesday he wrote, the United States War closely with Iran, which we have determined

has gone through what will be a very productive regime change.

Trump has oscillated in the course of days even hours 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 Trumpier voices or at least traditionally Trumpier voices on

the right.

Here's Tucker Carlson.

On every level it is vile on every level.

It begins with a promise to use the US military, our military to destroy civilian infrastructure

in another country, which is to say to commit a war crime, a moral crime against the people

of the country, whose welfare by the way was one of the reasons we supposedly 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 the conflict, which we are

not winning by the way, because the straits for Hormuz are not open.

There's one way to keep track.

That's the measurement, saying that we're going to use our military to kill the civilians

of this country who didn't choose the where they get nothing to do with it.

They're like civilians everywhere.

Look, 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 a racing Iranian civilization, watch us threaten it in public.

It is a horrific act on its own.

Just imagine being an Iranian parent that night, unsure if you could protect your child.

Imagine being an Iranian living here.

Worry about your family back home.

Well, 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 is the act of a war criminal.

It is the act of a monster.

And I know there are those who say this is all just a negotiation.

This was Trump pressing Iran to fold.

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 a strait of Hormuz that would

have been unimaginable two months ago.

You have now 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 even to negotiate because

what it does is it commits you to war crimes if your bid is rejected.

Megan Kelly said this well.

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.

A list of the Trumpi or formerly Trumpi figures who just seem appalled here could go on.

You had Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment and Trump's removal from

office.

She said what Trump was doing was, quote, 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 quote, genocidal lunatic.

I am glad and relieved.

The Tuesday night brought a ceasefire 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 what Trump said was wrong exactly.

I am worried a civilization died that night or at least is dying, but it's our civilization.

The sense that America is a civilized nation.

A nation that binds itself to the rules of law, to basic morality that is led by people

with even a shred of virtue.

The sense that this grand experiment in self-governance is falling into ruin.

It is very hard to see Donald Trump, listen to him, 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's becoming

more dangerous and erratic as he ages and as his presidency fails.

What we saw over the last week was how dangerous Trump becomes when he feels himself losing,

when he feels the control is slipping from his grasp.

Donald Trump is a 79 year old man in uncertain health in the final years of his presidency.

He is hideously unpopular even now.

He is very likely going to lose midterm elections and then he and his family and associates

will face a raft of investigations.

How much golf money has made its way to Trump family pockets?

Who's bought all that crypto from them?

What kind of deals got made with the Trump family before country-sother tariffs knocked

down?

Trump cares about nothing so much as winning and he lashes out when he feels himself at

risk of losing.

The next few years will for him carry the potential of terrible loss.

And so 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 Friedz Zakaria, the host of Friedz Zakaria GPS on CNN, a columnist

for the Washington Post and the author of among other books, The Age of Evolutions.

As always, my email is reclinedshowatnyotimes.com.

Friedz Zakaria, welcome back to the show.

Always a pleasure.

So on a start with Trump's now infamous post on Tuesday morning where 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 US 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 and build them and we're going to give them foreign aid.

That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different.

So itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers that when it was their turn

had decided to act repatiously to extract tribute, to enforce a kind of brutal vision of dominance.

All that was in a sense thrown away and I realized it was just one tweet,

but there was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.

And it just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been

so distinctive in its world mission and a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an

immigrant that the leader of that country could literally threaten to annihilate an entire people.

And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract, right? Civilization.

What we're talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people.

And you're talking 93 million people.

One thing that has always felt to me core about the moral challenge,

the 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 lives, individual human lives,

were just understood as ponds in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and

conquests. As you say, I'm not saying that there's 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 we're losing. And you see this in Doge and it's

approached USAID that there is something about how you treat or don't treat, how you weigh or don't

weigh the lives in futures of the people who are caught within your machinations that he just

wipes away as I think 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

sort of see this as part of America's great uplifting mission. And you almost missed the

hat 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. And what you're

describing I think quite accurately is Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th

century because sometimes people talk about oh, he loves McKinley and he likes tariffs and he's

like McKinley in that imperialism. No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th century European

imperialist who did not have any of McKinley. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because

he wanted to Christianize the place and think there was none of that sense of uplift or most of it

was just brutal. And it was as you said, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life

and dignity was never at the center of it. It was all a kind of self-interested short-term

extractive game. And Trump is harkening back to that. And 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. So there's something that he brings to it,

which is a kind of callousness and a contempt for any of those those kind of the expression

of those values for him. That's all a sign of weakness. That's the kind of bullshit people say.

But the reality is the way he looks at the world. Here's what you will hear from Trump's defenders

that this is all today and it was on Tuesday, 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 into a deal. They would not otherwise have accepted that night. He did not destroy

civilization that night. There was the announcement of a two week ceasefire. Are they right? Is that what

happened? So let's just evaluate it on the on the merits in the sense of you know if the genius

negotiating strategy. What we have ended up with in a situation where we began the war with the

country whose nuclear program had been completely and totally obliterated. Those are Trump's words

but those were words by the way echoed by the head of the IDF in Israel. Israel's atomic agency

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 the

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.

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 straight of hormones and

that that 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 $90 billion of revenue every year which is

by the way 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 straight of hormones 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 to $5 billion extra per month because of the price of oil which

will probably stay elevated for a while. It's 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 they had somehow joined in. This 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 as far as I can tell is 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.

But I also think what the President of the United States says matters and you can't just excuse

something on the argument, oh it's a clever negotiating strategy. First of all it was a stupid

lousy negotiating strategy that has ended up with the United States much weaker than it was.

But even if it were I don't think that the ends justify the means in every in the situation. It's

like that's not and certainly not when the things you say deeply erode your credibility,

your moral reputation, the core of your values. I think those things are real and throwing them away

for a momentary gain in some poker like negotiation isn't worth the price.

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As much as possible, the Iranians have released a plan. It includes Iran continuing to control

the state of Hormuz. It includes the world accepting and 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

than it was. A position where it will have negotiated out control of the state and as you say

that's a revenue source, it is demanding payment and relief. For Trump to describe that as

that plan is 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 made, would have been comfortable with seven of

those demands, by which I mean there are three that are more demanding than they would have

three months ago. They would have never said that they have the right to control the

state of Hormuz. So they have added on 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.

The straight of Hormuz. Trump said something, I think it was today, that was striking. He

mused about the US and Iran jointly controlling the straight and the way he described it

clearly meant the US taking a cut of those tolls as well. When you talk about the extractive nature

of Trump's view of geopolitics and informed policy, whether that is where it ends up,

the idea that somebody said that time where he came up with it and that that was compelling that

the end goal of all this is instead of America making sure that the tradeways 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.

And to give you a sense of how divergent it is, the United States' first military action in

1798, something called a quasi-war with France, was over freedom of navigation. The war with the

barbaric pirates was about freedom of navigation. The US has literally for its entire existence

stirred for the freedom of navigation and since it became the global hegemon, after 1945,

it has resolutely affirmed and defended that right. It has put in place huge protocols about it

and I think it was 1979, Carter put in a whole program for it. And 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. And 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.

Know what he wants to do is look at every situation and say, how can I squeeze this situation

for a little bit of money? You know, how can I, if I see a country and I see there's a slight

divergence in tariffs? I don't think about, 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,

I'm not going to be familiar with it. I wonder how can I squeeze you? 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 of the United States, the country

that has, for example, constantly worn China, the the straight of Malacca, for which more energy goes

than the straight of hormones, I think, 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, that no, no, no, it's ours and we get to do what it is. I mean, it's a complete

revolution in the way we have approached the world. The foreign policy scholar Stephen Walt had,

in essay recently, where he described what America is becoming or attempting to be as a predatory

Hezm on. Do you think that's what I'd understand it? Yeah, that's a very good phrase because

it is this predatory attitude towards everything, but we are still the Hezm on, right? So it's weird.

You see countries like Russia acting in predatory ways, but you think of them as the sort of 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 and allow

for the freedom of the strong to do what they can and the weak to suffer what they must in

enthusiastic phrase. The US has never done that and the US has Hezm on 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 to other Hezmons, it really has played that role. And now it is trying to extract

of for short term benefit. And I emphasize this because it's actually terrible for the United

States and the long run. We have benefited enormously from being at the center of this world,

but so we're getting the short term gains at 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,

been 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. And 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 Masad. 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?

Did 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-nassonyahu's view,

Iran is destroyed militarily. There's no question about it. I remember Netanyahu in that opening

video says, I've been dreaming about this for 40 years. He's 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 a kind of adversary off the field.

But I would argue that Iran had been contained in many significant ways, particularly after the

Obama nuclear deal. Remember, no enrichment, 98% of its enriched uranium had been taken out of the

country. Israeli intelligence, American intelligence, and the international energy agency all said

that the Iranians were following the deal. And you had the reality that you had the most intrusive

inspections regime that you had ever had in the history of nuclear. So it wasn't possible.

They could be cheating a little bit on the side. It's possible. Very, very few serious observers

of it think that that was going on. 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 BB Netanyahu's

long-rainist prime minister, and I wonder if in the long run what people will notice is that

his legacy was to split apart the alliance between the United States and Israel. He began by

politicizing it in a poisonous way when Obama was president. He went and did an end run around

Obama when to address 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% of Lebanon. It has displaced one million people.

And it said 600,000 of them may never be allowed to come back to their homes.

Right. Exactly. And you look at all of that. And that on scale is a second knock-buck.

Right. And just remember, you know, these are 600,000 human beings. That's women that

children who did nothing, who were in no way involved in his ballas, you know, rocket campaign against

Israel. So you ask yourself, is the price that now a majority of Americans have an unfavorable

view of Israel that a majority of young people have a very unfavorable view of Israel? And if you look

beyond America, it's not just America. I think the Dutch just joined the South African case

in the international court to look at what's happening even in Germany, which for obvious historical

reasons has a very strong, you know, moral urge to always see things from Israel's point of view.

In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see and what they, so,

you know, is that really good for Israel in the long run? And for what? It was already the most

powerful country in the Middle East. It was able to defend itself. It was able to deter in a kind

of short-term narrow sense, yes, BB Netanyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of

Israel's enemies. And some of it, like, his balla was a really nasty organization doing bad things

in terms of the way it was attacking Israel. But you put it all together. I mean, with Ben Gourian said

Israel, you know, when it was founded, it should be a light unto nations. I think for most people

in the world today, that is not the way they look at Israel. And that is a huge loss. And that is

a huge moral loss because Israel had a moral claim when it was founded. I want to go back to

where we began, which was Trump's threat to wipe out a civilization. And then I thought that

wasn't entirely empty. It just said it might have been 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 of the way he talks the way he tweets or put things on truth social the way he goes

after his enemies. And you know, you talk a lot about the rules based international order. The

Trump is destroying. And I think that language sort of obscures that beneath the rules are values.

And what Trump has gleefully done from the beginning of his time in politics is to try to

violate those values in such a public way as to show them to be hollow, unenforceable,

that these things without reboundaries or moral guardrails or nothing. And I think it forces some,

you know, reckoning with what those values really were. So when you talk about that order,

when you lament the way Trump has undermined it, underneath the rules, what do you feel is being

lost? I think at heart, the enlightenment project that the United States is the

the fullest expression of the only country really founded as almost a political experiment of

enlightenment ideas that at the core of any value system had to be the dignity and life of an

individual human being. Those were not horns in some larger struggle. I've been reading a lot about

Franklin Roosevelt recently because in Roosevelt, it's probably the man most responsible for dreaming

up that post war order. What you see is he goes at one point to Casablanca and he meets with the

the Moroccans and he said he came to realize just how savagely the French had ruled over these

people and he said we are not going to have fought this war to allow the French to go back and do

what they've been doing for these past centuries and we're not going to allow the British to go back

and do what they're doing that if we are going to get in this war and save the West as it were,

this is going to be a different set of values and much of that post war order comes out of that.

Why did he want free trade and openness because he thought that had to be a way for countries to

grow to wealth and grow to feel their power without conquering other countries. So I think you're

exactly right that it comes out of a very deep moral sense that there is a way to structure

international life differently than it's been done for centuries and the thing I worry most about

is that what Trump is doing is irreparable because even if you get another American president in,

the world will have watched this display and said oh America can be just another imperial

repatient power and we need to start protecting ourselves and we need to start buying insurance and

we need to start freelancing in the same way and protecting ourselves and then you know you get

into a downward spiral right because if you think the other guy is going to defect you are going to

defect first and that's what I worry is going to start happening. The Canadians, you know you look

at what the Canadians did over the last 30 or 40 years they basically made a single bet that their

future was with a tight close integration with the United States politically, economically in every

way and they now look at the way in which the United States use that dependence to try to extract

concessions from them and they're now saying to themselves well we need to buy insurance we need to

have better relations with China and with India and once you start going down that path that becomes

difficult to reverse even if you know a wonderful more internationally minded more value-based

President comes into power the Indians said the same way we'll 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.

You know I remember during the Bush era when people said that Bush had done irreparable damage

to America standing in the world that's global leadership to international institutions

thank you Obama and it turned out the damage wasn't irreparable go to the first trump term and

you know again you hear the same things and then comes Joe Biden as thoroughly a liberal internationalist

I think too much frankly but as thoroughly a liberal journalist as you could get and it turns out

much of the world is very happy to welcome America back to the same role.

I can't tell if the two trump terms the going back to it the sort of erraticness of American

leadership now has made this something different where the structures are changing around us as you

were saying in a way that makes us a structural change or in fact you know if Trump is succeeded by a

more conventional figure or more alliance oriented figure this all snaps back into something more

like its previous place. Yeah some of it will depend on whether is there an election that is a

kind of complete repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in 28 and the world would read that in a

particular way. Look there's a demand for American leadership I mean look at the Europeans who are

very reluctant to allies at various points during the Cold War and now a desperate for an America

that will simply commit to the alliance the more the world imagines what a world without American

leadership and without American power looks like the more they want it the problem is the world has

changed you know in during the Iraq war China was not nearly as powerful as it is today Russia was

neither had not been able to revive itself through all the oil revenues consolidate power as

Putin has the world is different today and America is different look bush for all his flaws always

tried to appeal to broader principles the Iraq war he went to the UN he tried to get UN resolutions

he went to Congress he articulated it as part of a much larger issue of terrorism he assembled

alliance of whatever 45 countries Trump with this Iran war basically rebels in the unilateralism

of it he rebels in the fact that he does it all by himself he doesn't want to bother with Congress

to bother with the UN to bother with allies until you know things are going badly and then he

starts screaming that he wants them but if Trump represents something in America that is deep

and lasting then it's very different America it's an America that really has not just tired but

soured on the role that it has played as this country that had an enlightened self interest that

looked long that that was willing to forego the short term extractive benefits I hope that

that America is still around but as with everything that's happened with Trump there are points

which I've watched Donald Trump success and thought to myself I can't believe that Americans want

this I just you know and I still have difficulty with that there's also always been this leftist

critique that the story you're telling some people that we're telling here about America where we

say it had this humanitarian vision and these ideals and sometimes didn't live up to them but

brother did that that's always been false that Trump is America with the mask off Trump has

brought what we've done elsewhere home and he has given up on ways we hid what we were actually

doing was his promise to destroy civilian infrastructure and bridges and power plants to destroy

civilization is that so different than what we did when we napalmed Vietnam so there is this idea

that Trump is actually isn't different it's continuity and it's explicit and aesthetically brutish

but honest what do you think of that I totally disagree I mean I think that you can only compare

a hegemon to other hegemon in other words yes the United States looks like it has its hands much

dirtier than Costa Rica which doesn't even have an army right but let's think about the last

three or 400 years is the United States been qualitatively different as the greatest global power

compared with the Soviet Union Hitler's Germany the Kaiser's Germany imperial France imperial Britain

imperial Holland yes those were all repatuous 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 as I said foreign aid of course we made lots of mistakes

and what tends to happen is when you have an ideological conception of your foreign policy and you

think you have to 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 Two every power that had one

extracted tribute from the powers that lost including in World War One people forget so I see the

argument about you know American hypocrisy because we do have done many many bad things but I think

when you step back and think about it in a broader historical sense the United States has a lot to be

proud for

let me try to thought on you that I've been wrestling with for bigger reasons which is that I've

been thinking a lot about why liberalism in its various manifestations feel so exhausted and

uninspiring here at this moment when what so many people are afraid of and reacting to

is liberalism's achievements being wiped away right how is that not created a

revival of its strength or a recognition of its moral ambition and I think one of the reasons is

this that liberalism begins with profoundly ambitious moral ideas about the dignity of the individual

and what it means to be free over time and particularly in the postwar period it encodes those

ideas and ideals into institutions laws rules we keep calling it the rules based international order

and then it becomes the movement the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions

and institutions fail and they fall short and they bureaucratize and the problem liberalism has

the problem the ideas that you're voicing so eloquently have right now in acting as an answer to

Trump is it what we are left defending our institutions that don't really work as opposed to values

that really do and 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 like a

stirring call for more participation in the UN that Trump challenges something deeper and I think

liberals fall back on a defensive institutions in a way that makes me feel like there's been a

either a losing of touch with or a loss of faith in the moral concepts at once animated the

creation of those institutions there's a lot in there so let me try and respond to several

elements of it because you put a lot into that one part of what liberalism's problem and we both

mean liberalism small L you know the kind of liberal enlightenment project is it's one too much

over the last two three hundred years think of everything that liberalism has advocated from you

know the emancipation of slaves to women's equality to racial equality to child working laws to

minimal work in the you know everything has happened and if you look at the things that you know

the classical conservatives argued religious tolerations right radical and it's time right you think

about all the things the classical conservatives argued for you know for the powerful king for

powerful church for the domination of the of certain church based morality over life for women

to be kept in their place or all those things have lost right so at one level the problem is as you

say the liberalism not only has one but then institutionalized itself and those institutions

inevitably become fat and corrupt and non-responsive and I think this is a real problem and what Trump

can present is the kind of fiery insurgent spoiler which always has a little bit more drama to it

you know in the in the 60s that came from the radical left now it's coming from the right but

there's always that ability to kind of say I'm going to upset the apple card and that you know

there's a certain energy there that the people holding the the card together aren't able to

exercise I think that's a real problem and you know I mean somebody like a Mamdani has a way of

infusing it with a greater sense of passion because maybe he goes directly to the values and even

though some cases I don't agree with his policies I think he's a master communicator and he has

solved in a way that problem that you're describing but I think there are also two other problems

liberalism has always been somewhat agnostic about the ultimate purpose of life you know the

whole idea because it came out of the religious wars was you get to decide what your best life is

and we're not going to have a dictator or a pope or a commissar tell you that but that leaves people

unsatisfied I think there's a part of people that want to be told what is a great life what is

this cause greater than themselves and you know the conservative answer is well it's it's God family

traditional morality and those are the things that matter a lot if you listen to Vance and Hungary

you know he says go out there and bring back the God of our fathers Trump represents something

different Trump is appealing to the most naked selfishness in people he's saying what's in it for

you why aren't we getting more out of this you know that's one of the reasons I think that

he is so comfortable with the most the kind of open corruption that he represents because in a

sense he's saying look those guys had a whole system and you know it looks very fancy and merit

or credit but they they got the spoils now I'm going to get the spoils in a way he's I think

single things of themselves representing his people but in any case they seem comfortable with him

getting them but there is this sense of an appeal to naked selfishness self interest short term

extraction and that's to me much more worrying because the problem with liberalism not having this

answer for the meaning of life that's an old problem and it's a hard one to solve because the

whole point of liberalism is that human beings get to decide that and it's not being forced on them

I am more skeptical than some that the absence of meaning at the center of liberalism is

the problem that the post liberal right wants to make it out to be in that that it's a problem here

but maybe to boil down what you actually said about Trump I think Trump's core argument

is that didn't work this does now the thing that he is doing is proving that this doesn't work

what he is attempting doesn't work his administration is not going well people do not like the tariffs

they don't like the war they don't like him that will probably be enough for Democrats to win the

midterms but philosophically in this moment of rupture it's not enough to build something new the

Trumpism doesn't work doesn't sell the problem of people think that what you were doing doesn't work

either you know I was reading the thing that drew some demsist who's the editor and founder of the

publication the argument wrote and she was writing about the UN and liberal institutions and the ways

they've both failed often to live up to their moral commitments but also the way that the Trump

makes you miss him anyway and she writes watching the Trump administration rip up even the

pretence 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 that realism is

true I would much prefer imperfectly trying to live up to real values than this and also

as a political message that I think liberalism is kind of settled into our institution suck but you

should defend him anyway it sucks I think it's I can't remember who said hypocrisy is the homage

that vice-played player but I guess this is the point I'm pushing not because I think you know

some of the answer but because I think it's something people need to they need to be replying to

this challenge more on the level it's actually being posed a movement that has adopted

the institutional view can only ever really be a movement of the status quo and modest reform

and I think it's not about like having the meaning of life but it is about some mission about

interest and what Trump says is your interest is purely economic extractive power domination it's

a very old vision of interest interest can also be values they can also be moral they can also

be about identity but this question of what is the answer to Donald Trump's way of describing what

you should be interested in what is in the national interest what is in your interest is I think

a pretty deep one because I don't think to say you know you know recommitting to alliances I don't

think that's enough for it that's not a moral mission that's a procedural tactic so I think you're

getting at something very important and I was trying to get I did one saying yeah if you looked at

the social democratic party of Germany which was probably the most advanced social democratic party

in Europe in say 1905 almost everything that it had on its party platform is now been adopted

every western country so in some ways what has happened is liberalism has succeeded and these

societies that have come out of them are out of it as a result are wildly successful people will

often say that you know there was a great clash in the 20th century between communism and capitalism

and capitalism won but actually in the political scientist social a share of bourbon makes this

point very well what actually wanted the end was social democracy was a mixture of the welfare state

and capitalism everywhere even including the United States we have a vast welfare state and so once

you have created that once the basic conditions of creating a middle class democratic society in which

there are protections for the poor for the unemployed you know there is health care of some kind

where do you go and part of what happened is I think the left in some areas when too far left in

in an illiberal fashion you know they are the emphasis on quotas and d i and all that kind of thing

in other areas it decided they wanted to go even further left right so the challenges I see the

problem with saying okay you know we've arrived at this stage and a lot of people I have to confess

like me thought and maybe this is because I grew up in in India this is pretty amazing what you have

been able to achieve and you look at the historical achievement of being able to have the stable

middle class societies in which individual rights are protected where poor people are taking care of

this is amazing now let's try to get it right let's try to get the the root goldberg of American

health care to work better so that you actually cover that last 20 something million or however many it

is but that is unsatisfying as a you know nobody writes poems about expanding Obamakia you know so

I see the problem but you know I think that that is the reality and when you start trying to find

things to write poems and hymns and fight battles for you're often going in dangerous places now

that's the liberal in me you know I'm suspicious of that much passion put into politics and look at

what the passion on the right looks like I'm sure that the fundamental critique that Trump comes at

this from which is that the United States has unterably over the last 30 or 40 years it's just

nonsense the United States has done extraordinarily well over the last 100 years and in particular over

the last 30 years with one big caveat where we have not been as good on distributional issues

but which we could easily have done yeah the Donald Trump and the people in this party would have let us

right what a exactly I'm wary of saying that the left needs to go somewhere where there's going to be a

lot of drama and energy and people are going to be singing songs again because that often leads you

in bad places to a liberalism was born out of this distrust of all that passion that religion

and hierarchy came from with with the state and the church telling you this is the right thing to do

that you know here are the values so there is a moderation I romanticism in politics is something

to be taken to be viewed with a certain certain degree of skepticism I think I've been coming to a

more opposite view but I'm going to pick that thread up with you another time you're going to go

back to the 60s and and and start some new new new cult movement I think that the I do not think

that in the way politics and attention works today you can have a political movement that is

afraid of inspiration and afraid of passion I was reading Adrian Woldridge's new book on liberalism

and he he sort of has this paragraph really on it's really his thesis paragraph where he talks about

both liberalism's radicalism it's sort of radical imagination but then also exactly as you just were

the importance of its moderate temperament that distrusts the passions and wants to keep a

lid on things and I just don't think those two things hold together that well now I can come up

with balances of things I do believe liberalism to be fundamentally a balancing act and I think of

it as a balancing act between moral imagination sort of plurality or what I often think of as a

liberality and institutions in your relationship to institutions see see you are balancing things

if they come out of alignment I think push liberals into failure modes but I do think as liberals

became the party of people from institutions have worked its temperament has become too institutional

and too afraid of things that could upset the structures and so then if people don't believe the

structures are working for them then it really has nothing to say to them because it just fundamentally

disagrees no I agree with that and I think you know what the where I would like to see the radicalism

and the kind of reform is you know when I look at the issue of affirmative action to me I was always

very uncomfortable with it I always thought Lyndon Johnson's explanation of why you needed it to help

formally enslaved and black people who would then lived under a hundred years of Jim Crow

made perfect sense but then it starts getting expanded and it starts being expanded to all kinds of

people you know like people like me which I thought made no sense I mean America has been particularly

bad to African Americans so it has been particularly good to other immigrants that's why people from all

over the world have tried desperately to come to America for hundreds of years because the United

States is unusually good at welcoming and accepting so there shouldn't have been affirmative action

for people of color whatever that means or things like that and then it becomes it goes from being

affirmative action to quotas and then it becomes diversity mandates and I feel as though

there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying why wait can we completely lost track of

what the core of liberalism which was about as Martin Luther King put it judging people by the

content of their character not the color of their skins and those are the kind of things where I

think you know liberalism gets so institutionalized and conventional wisdom forms and it becomes

impossible to course correct what I worry about is you kind of romanticism for romanticism's sake

the people who run around today they call themselves the principalists because they believe they are

adhering to the original ideals and ideas of the 1979 revolution unlike the terrible

pragmatists who have been trying to find a way to compromise with the West. There's another

dimension of all this it is not philosophical that I want to touch before we end which is

one way of understanding the predatory Hezman moment is that it is the gasp of a dying Hezman

that only has a limited amount of time left in which it can extract these kinds of rents.

Now I would like to believe that that is not true but there are ways in which it obviously

need 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 like pull out

everything they can from it and he's always been very obsessed with the rise of China before

that the rise of Japan and you know you could understand him as trying to monetize America's

power wallets still has it and in doing hastening America's loss of it you wrote a piece that said

like the post-American world is coming into view what did you mean by that?

I think that you are seeing countries around the world find ways to make accommodations around America

so it's not purely a kind of question of American decline it said we are no longer leading so you

take something like protectionism yeah we've become very protectionist and what you know

this is very interesting other countries regard the United States as okay you're the problem we

have to deal with and we'll cut some deal with you because you're too important for us not to

but outside of that countries are making more free trade deals with one another you know the

Indians with the Europeans the Europeans with those Latin Americans the Canadians with so in

other words the one thing that the US had going for it was this agenda setting power and that's

gone the US's view it as off on its own weird track everyone has to deal with it because it's

too important and that is a sign of a certain kind of decline and the other one is this obsession

to have enormous geopolitical control you know one of the haunting parallels for me is to think

about the British Empire in its last 3040 years people forget but after World War One the British

Empire expanded to its largest state ever 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 controlling Afghanistan and controlling you know they would find these there

was this wonderful book called Africa and the Victorians by Robinson and Gallagher and which they

talk about how why the British annexed for Shoda you understand the south of Sudan well because they

thought you needed to control the Suez Canal to control the route to India where if you needed to

control the Suez Canal you needed to control Egypt but if you needed to control Egypt you needed to

control upper Sudan but to control upper Sudan you needed to control lower Sudan so boy there you were

sending troops to for Shoda which nobody in anywhere in Britain would have any idea where it was and

why were they doing that meanwhile what they were neglecting was the reality that Germany was

becoming much more productive America was becoming much more productive and I look at what we are

doing today I mean you think about it right this is the third Middle Eastern war who we have fought

in 25 years I do worry that this imperial temptation to have so much of the focus and the resources

of the country placed in these faraway parts of the world where it's not clear where actually

gaining much we're expanding enormous energy and we're expanding 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 but that feels hauntingly reminiscent I saw Gallup Paul that was coming from

their world survey so polls people all across the world that end approval of Chinese leadership had

passed approval of American leadership now there was that high is 36% to 31% but that the world now

prefers Chinese leadership to ours struck me as if we were trying to just make America great again

I mean that might be one of the indicators you would look at to see if it was working or failing

and it's actually mostly a vote against us because nobody actually wants Chinese leadership I think

they don't know what it would mean the Chinese for the most part don't seem to want to offer it

look at what has happened with this recent crisis they got involved a little bit mostly what they're

involved in is trying to see that the currency settlements are made in Chinese currency the Chinese

are a free rider they want a free ride on you know the benefits of American hegemony while criticizing

it they don't have an alternate conception so what people are going to find is unfortunately a world

without American power is going to be a less open a less liberal a less rule based world but it's

not going to magically reconstitute itself around the Chinese hegemony because that is not China's

conception of its world role it's not going to be able to do it it does not have the trust we still

for good reasons have an enormous amount of trust because we built it over 80 years you know look at

I don't know 55 treaty allies in the world China has won North Korea if you want to add

Russia and Iran find three you know so the truth is a world without American power will be a

worst world for the rest of the world as well and I think many of them feel a certain nostalgia

for the old American power that they used to denounce I have somewhat rose colored glasses

about these things but I think America was very special in its world role and I don't think China

will be able to do that I noticed the was in that it certainly was right now we are definitely

speaking in the past tense the the United States is currently not exercising its world role

with the same level of strategic thought with the same moral vision and with the same humanitarian

impulse that it has done albeit imperfectly I hope that that can come back but my great worry as I

said is some of these things are very hard to reconstitute the world moves on the world changes

people your reputation stake a lifetime to build and it's very easy to destroy it's true for

human beings and it's true for for nations maybe and I was our final question what if your books

you recommend to the audience so one book I thought since we do often talk about the rules based

international order and it does sound so wonky that I would suggest a wonky book that explains it

the best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Eikenberry at Princeton and I think

the book is called a world safe for democracy and in capsule is what is this thing the rules

based international order the liberal international order that the US created the second is a book

by Ronald Nieber called the irony of American history and it's really all about the great danger

when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that you know might is right

and the the call for humility it ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism in America

conform policy and the Christian there really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity

which sometimes we forget when listening to Pete headsets and the final one on similar vein is

Graham Greens book the quiet American I think that one of the one of sometimes novels do it better

than than anything else is a novel said in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour despotic world weary

British journalist who sees this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be

able to you know bring peace justice and virtue to Vietnam and you can imagine it doesn't quite work

out that way freed Sikarya thank you very much thank you Ezra

this episode of the Soclan chose produced by Annie Galvin back checking by Michelle Harris with

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mixing by Amman Zohuta our executive producer is Claire Gordon the shows production team also includes

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director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Roy Strasser