Fareed Zakaria on the Moral Cost of Trump’s War

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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. Open 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 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 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 using about partying with Iran to charge tolls

to ships passing through the straight of Hormuz and giving them relief from sanctions and tariffs. This is not the art of the deal. This is behavior that you 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 precedent, not even a month and a half into the conflict, which we are not winning, by the way, because the streets where Muz 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 where they could not 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.

He even can see of a racing Iranian civilization, but let's just 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, worried about your family back home.

What Carlson correctly sent her to 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 it 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 an negotiation. This was Trump rushing around 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 straight of hormones, that would have been unimaginable two months ago. You have now JD van 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 in a moral way, and a dangerous way, even to negotiate,

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

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 tactic.”

Is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women and children, an American president, so that the straight of hormones will be opened. It's just wrong. A list of the Trumpy or formally Trumpy figures who just seem appalled here could go on. You had Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 20th Amendment and Trump's removal from office.

She said what Trump is 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 quote "genicidal 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'm not sure that what Trump said was wrong, exactly. I am worried the 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 found is feared. We've entrusted tremendous power to a self-dealing narcissist and demagogue,

who is 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 has bought all that crypto from them? Kind of deals got made with the Trump family before country's other tariffs, knock down. Trump cares about nothing so much as winning, and he lashes out when he feels himself at risk of losing. The next year is Will for him, carry the potential of parable 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 Fried Zikarya, the host of Fried Zikarya GPS on CNN, a calmness for the Washington Post and the author of Among Other Books, The Age of Evolutions.

As always my email as recline show at endbytimes.com.

Fried Zikarya, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure. So I want to 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. I mean, not just 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. You know, 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.

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. 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 on 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. We're just understood as pawns 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 post-war era, that would be absurd. But there was a commitment in 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 approach to USAID, 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, 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 that trick, because even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that, you know, we were trying to help this country do better.

“And what you're describing, I think, quite accurately, 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 rapaceous 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 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 events 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.

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 merits in the sense of, you know, the genius negotiating strategy.”

What we have ended up with in a situation where we began the war with a 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 idea 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. It's nuclear program had been destroyed.

And 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. What it has gained is a far more usable weapon than nuclear weapons.

“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.

We're 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 $45 billion extra per month because of the price of oil, which will probably stay elevated for a while.

And 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 of America's allies as if they had somehow joined in. 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 new clip program that was largely defunct is real was already far more powerful than Iran and can 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 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. If it were, I don't think that the ends justify the means in the situations like this and certainly not when the things you say deeply erode your credibility, your moral reputation, you know the core of your values, I think those things are real and throwing them away for a momentary gain in some focal like negotiation isn't worth the price.

I'm Dame Brugler, I cover the NFL draft for the athletic. Our draft guide picked up the name "The Beast" because of the crazy amount of information that's included. I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports. I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in-depth unique journalism you get from the athletic and in New York Times.

Among the "tells" in all this to me was it Trump and announcing the cease-fire deal said that he'd gotten a 10-point plan from the Iranians, which he described as "workable basis" on which to negotiate. He also said that we're dealing now with a change regime that was much more reasonable. The Iranians have released a plan. It includes Iran continuing to control the state oformous. 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 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 have three months ago.

They would have never said that they have the right to control the state oformous.

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 state oformous. Trump said something, I think it was today, that was striking. He mused about the US and Iran jointly controlling the state. And the way 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 to him or 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 American doing at another time than I think is even being given credit for.”

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's 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 stood for the freedom of navigation, and since it became the global hedge amon. After 1945, it has resolutely affirmed and defended that right.

“It has put in place huge protocols about it, and I think it is 1979, cardboard and a whole program for it.”

That's to this whole idea that the United States has always taken the view that it was trying to create the 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 hedge amon 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?" If I see a country and I see there's a slight divergence in tariffs. I don't think about the whole point was to create an open trading system. No, I say, "I can squeeze you."

How can I squeeze you? His whole idea is the short-term extractive I get a win for now.

The country that has, for example, constantly worn China, the the Strait of Malaka, for which more energy goes than the Strait of Hormos 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, I mean, it's 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 be as a predatory hedge amon. Do you think that's what I understand? Yeah, that's a very good phrase because, you know, it is this predatory attitude towards everything, but we are still the hedge amon.

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 the strong to do what they can and the weak to suffer what they must in the cities is phrase.

The US has never done that and the US has had a hedge amon 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 hedge amons, it really has played that role. And now it is trying to extract a foreshort 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 the center of this world, but so we're getting the short term gains at enormous long term lost 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, my Hebrew man in Jonathan Swan, it's pretty clear that Trump was talked into it after meeting with Netanyahu and the Masad seems that there are a lot of parts of his own administration raising doubts that he simply wiped away. Has this warping 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 BBC News and Yahoo'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 failure on a cripple 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 atomic energy agency all said that the Iranians were following the deal, and you had the reality that you had the most intrusive inspections regime that you had ever had in the history of nuclear types. It was impossible. 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 reign as Prime Minister, and I wonder if in the long run what people will will notice is that his legacy was to split apart the alliance between the United States and Israel. He began by politicizing it in a poisonous way, when Obama was president. He went and did an end run around Obama, went and addressed Congress. He openly fought with Obama and tried to turn the issue of Israel into a partisan issue.

And then has unleashed so much firepower. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. Israel is currently occupying 10% of Lebanon. It has displaced 1 million people.

And this said 600,000 of them may never be allowed to come back to their homes. Right, exactly. And you put, you look at all of that and that on scale is a second knockout. Right, and just remember, you know, these are 600,000 human beings that's women that children who did nothing, who were no way involved in his ballas, you know, rocket campaign against 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.

“See things from Israel's point of view. In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see and what they see. 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.

In a narrow sense, yes, BB Netanyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of Israel's enemies. And some of it, like Hesbalah, 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, when we were with Ben Gurian said Israel, you know, when we found it should be a light until nations, I think for most people in the world today, that is not the way they look at Israel. And that is a huge loss. And that is a huge moral loss, because Israel had a moral claim when it was founded.

I want to go back to where we began, which was Trump's threat to wipe out a civilization.

“And in what I thought that was an entirely empty issue, 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 true 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 also think that language should have obscured that beneath the rules or values.

And what Trump is 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 or boundaries or moral guard rails or nothing.

“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 it 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 pawns in some larger struggle. I've been reading a lot about Franklin Roosevelt recently because it rose well probably the man most responsible for dreaming up that post war order.

What you see is you know, he goes at one point to Casa Blanca 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 difference out of values and much of that post war there 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 repatious 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 now look at the way in which the United States use that dependence to try to extract concessions from them.

“And then now saying to themselves well we need to buy insurance we need to have better relations with China and within the end and once you start going down that path.”

That becomes difficult to reverse even if you know a wonderful more internationally minded more value based president comes into power the Indians the same way we have I've been thinking to themselves or 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 it's global leadership to international institutions.

“Then came Obama and it turned out the damage wasn't irreparable go to the first Trump term and you know again you hear the same things and then comes Joe Biden as thoroughly a liberal internationalist I think too much frankly.”

and it turns out much of the world is very happy to welcome America back in the same role. I can 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. The 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 it's previous place.

If it will depend on whether is there an election that is a kind of complete repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in 2018 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.”

And more the world imagines what world without American leadership and without American power looks like the more they wanted 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 in 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 in America that is deep and lasting.

Then it's very different America it's an America that really has not just tired but sourd on the role that it has played as the country that had an enlightened self interest that looked long that that was willing to forgo the short term extractive benefits. I hope that that America is still around but as with everything that's happened with Trump there are points at which I've watched Donald Trump success and thought to myself. I can't believe that Americans want this I just you know and I still have difficulty with that.

There's also always been this leftist critique that the story you're telling some of you 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.

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 hedge amont to other hedge amonts 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 four hundred years. The United States has 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.

Those were all repatious 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 Asia East Asia out of poverty.

“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.

We use our influence for what did we use our power for until World War II every power that had had one extracted tribute from the powers that lost including in World War I 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. I'm Dan Brugler I cover the NFL draft for the athletic.

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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 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 is that not created a revival of its strength or a recognition of its moral ambition?”

I think one of the reasons is this that liberalism begins with profoundly ambitious moral ideas about the dignity of the individual. And what it means to be free. Over time, and particularly in the post-war period, it encodes those ideas and ideals into institutions, laws, rules. We keep calling it the rules based international order. And then it becomes the movement, the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions, and institutions fail, and they fall short, and they bureaucratize.

And the problem liberalism has, the problem the ideas that you're voicing so eloquently have right now, in acting as an answer to Trump, is it what we are left offending, or 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 stirring call for more participation in the UN, that Trump challenges something deeper, and it integrals fall back on a defensive 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 then we both mean liberalism small ale, you know, the kind of liberal enlightenment project, is it's one too much.”

So 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 racially quality, to child working laws, to minimal work, everything has happened. And if you look at the things that, you know, the classical conservatives argued religious tolerations. It's radical in its time, right? You think about all the things the classical conservatives argued for, you know, for a powerful king, for powerful church, for the domination 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, and in the 60s that came from the radical left.”

Now it's coming from the right, but there is always that ability to kind of say, I'm going to upset the Apple 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, somebody like a Mamdani has a way of infusing it with a greater sense of fashion, 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.

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 Pope or a commissar, tell you that. I believe people on satisfied, 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 vans and hungry, you know, he says, go out there and bring back the God of our fathers, Trump represents something different.

He's 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 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 looked very fancy and meritocratic, but they, they got the spoils. Now, I'm going to get the spoils. In a way, he's, I think, thinking 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 mid-terms, but Phil Soffkin, 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 dumpsys, who is the editor-in-founder of the publication, the argument wrote, and she was writing about the UN and liberal institutions, and in the ways they've both failed often to live up to them or all 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.

But I think it's, I can't remember who said, hypocrisy is the homage to that vice-play. But I guess this is the point I'm pushing up, 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.”

Just 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, 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 at it when saying, if you looked at the social democratic party of Germany, which was probably the most advanced social democratic party in Europe and say 1905, almost everything that it had on its party platform is now adopted by every Western country.

“So in some ways what has happened is liberalism has succeeded, and the societies that have come out of it as a result are wildly successful.”

People were often say that, you know, there was a great clash in the 20th century between communism and capitalism and capitalism one, but actually in the political scientist social, a shared boom and 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 once you've 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 went to far left and in an illiberal fashion, you know, the emphasis on quotas and D, you know, that kind of thing.”

So in some areas that decided they wanted to go even further left, right, so the challenge is, I see the problem with saying, okay, we, you know, we've arrived at this stage and a lot of people, I have to confess like me thought, and maybe this is because I grew up in India, this is pretty amazing what you have been able to achieve and you look at the historical achievement of being able to have the stable middle class societies and which individual rights are protected where poor people are taking care of.

And this is amazing, now let's try to get it right, let's try to get the the rub 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 Obama, 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. Things to write poems and hymns and in fight battles for you're often going in dangerous places, now that's deliberately, 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 anteriorly 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, you know, the Donald Trump and the people in this party would have let us 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 and because that often leads you in bad places. Look, liberalism was born out of this distrust of all that passion that religion and hierarchy came from with the state and the church telling you, this is the right to think to do that, you know, here are the values.

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 start some new new called 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 Wultridge's new book on liberalism and he sort of has his paragraph early on. It's really his thesis paragraph where he talks about both liberalism's radicalism.

It's sort of radical imagination, but then also exactly as you just were. The importance of its moderate temperament that distrusts the passions and wants to keep a lid on things 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 abalancing 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 you are balancing things that they come out of alignment. Push liberalism into failure modes, but I do think as liberals and became the party of people from institutions have worked. It's 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.

“I agree with that. And I think the where I would like to see the radicalism and the kind of reform is, you know, and 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 mid perfect sense. But then it starts getting expanded and starts to expand into 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 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 and 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 know, kind of romanticism for romanticism sake.

The people who run around today, they call themselves the principleists because they believe they are adhering to the original ideals and ideas of the 1979 revolution, unlike the terrible pragmatists who have been trying to find a way to compromise with the West. There's another dimension of all this that is not philosophical that I want to touch before we end, which is one way of understanding the predatory hegemon moment is that it is the gasp of a dying hegemon that only has a limited amount of time left in which it can extract these kinds of runs.

Now I would like to believe that that is not true, but there are ways in which it obviously would be how Donald Trump acts personally, he's only got so much time left on this earth, only so much time left in this presidency and he and his family are going to try to like pull out everything they can from it.

And he's always been very obsessed with the rise of China, before the rise of Japan, and you know, you could understand him as trying to monetize America's power wall still has it.

And in doing hastening America's loss of it, you wrote a piece that said that 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. Is that we are no longer leading, so you take something like protectionism, yeah, we've become very protectionist and what you notice is very interesting other countries, regard the United States as, okay, you're the problem we have to deal with and we'll cut some deal with you because you're too important for us not to.

And that's gone, the US is viewed as on its own weird track, everyone has to deal with it because it's too important and that is a sign of a certain kind of decline and the other one is this obsession to have enormous geopolitical control, you know, one of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 30, 40 years.

“People forget, but after World War I, the British Empire expanded to its largest state ever to its largest size ever, only 20 or 30 years before it collapsed.”

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 African the Victorians by Robinson and Gallagher and which they talk about how.

The British annexed for Shodah, you understand the south of Sudan, well, because they thought you needed to control the Swiss canal to control the route to India.

Well, if you needed to control the Swiss canal, you needed to control Egypt, but if you needed to control Egypt, you needed to control opposite Dan, but to control opposite Dan, you needed to control Los Sudan, so boy, there you were sending troops to for Shodah, which nobody anywhere in Britain would have any idea where it was and why were they doing that, meanwhile.

“But they were neglecting with the reality that Germany was becoming much more productive, America was becoming much more productive.”

And I look at what we're doing today, I mean you think about it, right? This is the third Middle Eastern War we have fought in 25 years.

I do worry that this imperial temptation to have so much of the focus and the resources of the country placed in these faraway parts of the world, which is not clear where actually gaining much, where expanding enormous energy. 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 Paul's people all across the world and approval of Chinese leadership had passed approval of American leadership.

Now that was that high, it was 36% to 31%, but that the world now prefers Chinese leadership to ours struck me as, if we're trying to 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. 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 to 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 we have, I don't know, 55 treaty allies in the world. China has won North Korea.

“You know, if you want to add Russia and Iran, find three, you know, so the truth is a world without American power will be a worse world for the rest of the world as well.”

And I think many of them feel a certain nostalgia for the old American power that they used to denounce. I have somewhat rose color glasses about these things, but I think America was very special in this world role and I don't think China will be able to do that. It certainly was, right now we are definitely speaking in the past tense. The United States is currently not exercising its world role with the same level of strategic thought with the same moral vision and with the same humanitarian impulse that it has done all being 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.

The best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Ikenberry 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 in international order, the liberal international order that the US created.”

The second is a book by Rhino Neber called the irony of American history and it's really all about the great danger when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that you know might is right. And the call for humility. It ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism in American foreign policy and the Christian they really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity which sometimes we forget when listening to beat headset.

“And the final one, a similar vein is Graham Greens book The Quiet American. I think that one of the sometimes novels do it better than anything else. The novel said in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour,”

specific world, very 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.

Fried Zikarya, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.

“This episode of the Asaklanche is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker.”

Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Galbe with the additional mixing by Alman Souta. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Jack McCordic, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Whirlen who, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Yon Kobel. Original music by Alman Souta and Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christianity Samuski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pinning audio is Annie Rose Strasser.