The Current - Fareed Zakaria on the US’ moral decline

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

It's been seven weeks since the United States and Israel launched a coordinated bombing campaign against Iran. Fareed Zakaria tells Matt Galloway that the US's lack of coherent plan, moral bankruptcy and dubious legal standing in the Iran war have made it and the world more dangerous.

Okay, I'm just going to name a bunch of Canadian movies that are doing really well right now. You got Nirvana, the band, the show of the movie. You got undertone. You got Youngblood. All of them Canadian and all of them hits. After a year of all this elbows up talk and the focus on supporting Canadian-made products, our country's film industry is actually starting to see some of its own movies gain some traction. I'm Alameen Abdul-Mahmood, and this week we discuss the state of the Canadian film industry.

You can find and follow commotion with Elam-Abdl-Mahmood on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It has been seven weeks since the United States and Israel launched coordinated bombing campaigns against Iran, killing its supreme leader and targeting its nuclear facilities and infrastructure. Over the last two months, thousands of people have been killed, millions displaced across that region. A fragile ceasefire is now in place. It is set to end tomorrow.

Farid Zakaria has argued from the outset that this one, war lacks legal grounding and poses a significant existential threat to the United States. He's the host of CNN's Freed Zakaria GPS and the author of books including Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the present. Fried Zakaria, good morning. Hi, Matt. Pleasure to be on with you again. Good to have you back on our program. This seems like a simple question and yet it's not.

What is this war about? You're right. It is not a simple question because I think we have to. to begin by remembering that last June, the United States and Israel, in the middle of negotiations with Iran, started to bomb it and had a coordinated 12-day bombing campaign that was the longest, largest campaign against Iran ever, in which the United States used stealth bombers and 30,000-pound bombs. And at the end of that campaign, President Donald Trump said, Iran's nuclear program had been completely and totally obliterated.

Those are his words. The IDF chief of staff, the Israeli army heads, concurred with that judgment, as did Israel's atomic energy agency, which said the program is now essentially destroyed and can be kept destroyed as long as we don't provide it with access to nuclear materials, and Iran had no longer had access to nuclear materials. So, in other words, the argument that this was about, this is about Iran's nuclear weapons is extremely thin. There is simply no conceivable basis to launch the kind of campaign that this involved

to further degrade a program that had already been massively degraded. So I think it's plain to see that the real objective of this campaign was that Bibi Netanya was a regime change in Iran, B.B. Netanya, who's so. Donald Trump on the argument, not that Iran was so strong and posed an imminent threat, which is the claim, but rather the opposite, that Iran was so weak that a coordinated brief bombing campaign would make the regime collapse. Trump would be seen as the liberator of Iran, and this would be an easy, quick win in the Venezuela style. That, I think, was the real objective, and it has colossally failed. Do you think that Donald Trump wanted to go into this

War, to your point, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged that he wanted to go after Iran and the leadership there for decades. And there were reports in the New York Times, for example, that President Trump was essentially talked into the war by Netanyahu. Although the president has denied this, was the United States pulled into this war by Israel? I think without any doubt it was in the sense that Netanyahu presented Trump with a picture, a video presentation apparently, and the reporting on this is very, very important. solid as far as I can tell. And it appealed to Trump's, you know, narcissism, which is really the primary motivating force for Donald Trump, is that this is an easy win for me. I will look great.

And in a sense, I think if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he was moved by Iran's horrendous crackdown on protesters. Maybe they killed 30,000 people in one you know, two or three days span. This is a bad regime. It's a brutal regime. And maybe that motivated him to do it as well. But I think at the end of the day, I don't like the formulation of kind of Israel dragged the United States into the war because it conjures up some kind of conspiracy theory.

I think BB Netanyahu knows how to play Trump and played him very, very well, seduced him into doing this. But Trump is a grown man, a world leader. and he made the decision himself. And in that sense, I do agree with him. He has to take responsibility. No, you know, no blaming it on Israel made me do it. Yesterday, Donald Trump posted on social media,

I'm winning a war by a lot. Things are going very well. How do you understand that? The war is about to end. It's not going to end. The ceasefire ends tomorrow. He may extend it. He may not extend it.

Negotiations may or may not happen. How do you understand how the president communicates what's happening? in this war? It's a very good question because it really is almost bizarre and seems unconnected to reality. Until you remember that Donald Trump's principal concern at almost every action of his is what does this do to the American stock market. And he noticed that the stock market was coming to a very dark conclusion about this war, that it was proloat, you know, it was extending itself, it was unresolved, It was raising energy prices that might feed into inflation. And so he has taken to periodically writing these cheerful posts on truth social or saying things in press conferences or press set-asides where he says something like, we've agreed on all the basic points.

We're having a very strong discussion. You know, Trump likes to use words like strong and powerful. We have a very powerful agreement. all of which is just designed to talk up the market. And it's succeeding because, you know, market, I mean, at the end of the day, he's president of the United States. The market does seem to be affected enormously by his rhetoric. And so he plays it along. Now, you might say at some point, the rubber will hit the road or whatever metaphor you want to use.

And the market will realize that this is more extended. My own sense is, unless this does resolve, it's up very quickly. At some point, the real price of energy will become apparent. What I mean by that is right now you often hear that the price of energy is about $100 a barrel, the price of oil. That is the paper price. That is, in a sense, the futures trade of, that's what people are betting the price will be. The current actual price of oil in East Asia, when you buy a physical barrel of oil, is closer to $100,000. sometimes $145 a barrel.

So what the market is betting on is that that is a temporary spike in prices and things will resolve themselves, will we have a deal. But if we don't, at some point, the futures price will also start to look like the real price, which is 140. And then it becomes very hard to talk the stock market into believing that this is all going to get resolved happily in one day. He has also posted on social media about threatening all of Iranian civilization. A civilization will die tonight is one of his posts on social media as the deadline was drawing close.

He continues to threaten to blow up civilian infrastructure if a deal does not go his way. How do you understand that in terms of the reputation of the United States? I hope at some level that people understand that Trump, that this kind of bravado and braggia, and, you know, hyper-inflated rhetoric is part of Trump's mode of operation. He thinks it's a negotiating tactic. Exactly. And if you go back to the first term and read what he said about North Korea, it's actually it was bracing.

I had not done it and I did it recently. Very similar rhetoric, not quite as doomsdayish, but, you know, they would meet fire and fury like they have never known before and things like that. But I think, you know, there is a moral cost to this because it punctuates and emphasizes something that is at the center of all this, which is this is an intervention and invasion and attack that has absolutely no basis in international war. Iran was not attacking anyone. It did not pose an imminent threat. Its nuclear program had been contained. Iran is a problematic regime and one has to deal with those problematic aspects of it,

like its support for Hezbollah and things like that. But there was simply no case to be made for the kind of frontal attack that the United States and Israel have engaged in. And by saying the kind of things he was doing, he further erodes any moral authority the United States could have. He did not go to the UN. He has never made an argument. in broader grounds that encompass international law.

He did not try to assemble a coalition of nations. He is one ally, Israel. He did not go to Congress. This is all in mock contrast, by the way, with the Iraq war, which you may have believed was a bad idea strategically. But Bush got, went to the UN twice, got resolutions, sent inspectors in, went to Congress, tried to convince the American people,

put together a coalition of 45 nations, You know, this intervention in Iran is really, to my mind, I don't want to use the word unique loosely, but it's very, very unusual for the United States to do something that appears to be so lawless and where the president seems unconcerned that it seems lawless to the world. This week on two blocks from the White House, we're talking about the Trump factor and exploring how Trump's touch is backfiring in some places. loomed large over Canadian politics since his re-election. And this past weekend, the Trump factor was felt in the landmark Hungarian election. Join us every week as we break down U.S.

politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Just the last point on this, because at the same time, you have the president musing about putting a toll on the Strait of Hormuz to use the Strait of Hormuz. He uses tariffs, he uses tariffs as a way to extract revenue. He charged a billion dollars if he wanted a seat for his Gaza Board of Peace. What is, it feels as though there's, that foreign policy has become transactional in some ways. Is that how you read it? Well, it's clearly it's highly transactional with him. And instead of looking at the kind of, you know, the system-wide effects of the,

of the international order, the United States put together, Trump wants to square. Trump wants to squeeze every country. So take the case of Canada. The United States and Canada have built really what one would call a North American economy with Mexico, which has worked fantastically well. We've been able to retain a lot of manufacturing because of that, because, you know, between Canada's energy, the U.S. know how Mexico's lower labor costs, you can make cars in a way that's harder to make if you were just making them in any one of those countries. And Trump looks at that as vulnerability. He looks at interdependence as dependence.

And so he wants to squeeze Canada because he thinks we're the bigger market, we have leverage, and misses the kind of broader systemic benefit that all three countries get, and the United States in particular gets. So that's his method with everything. So it's always transactional. I would add to it one point, which is sometimes it's not even transactional for the United States, This board of peace is going to be chaired by its charter by Donald Trump for the rest of his life. And those funds that are going to be in the Board of Peace will be dispensed with as Donald Trump wishes.

This is not a benefit to the United States. This is a personal payoff to a slush fund that Donald Trump will control even when he leaves the presidency. It's scandals. And while all this is happening, you were just in China and you wrote that the U.S. is infuriating. much of the world by being reckless, erratic, and lawless, but China is playing the long game. What's China's long game in this moment? So what China is doing is it is not trying to step in and say to the world,

we're the responsible country, the United States is being irresponsible, lean on us, it's not going into the Gulf and telling the Gulf states, you should, you know, will protect you rather than the U.S. I think they are of very mixed view as to whether they want to replace the U.S. as the global hegemon. They see it as a kind of thankless task, and they don't have that kind of universalist vision that Britain and the United States have had over the last two centuries. No, China looks at this and says, how can we use this crisis to build our industrial power further and to spread our global economic influence largely broader more? So they look at this and see that the world

has now gotten very jittery about its dependence on fossil fuels. And of course, they are the absolutely dominant player in green technology. They make 80% of the solar panels that are sold around the planet. They make 70% of the batteries, 60% of the wind turbines. They have laid more high-speed rail in the last 20 years than the rest of the world put together. So they are going to countries and offering green tech with loans, with infrastructure buildouts, in the hope that, first of all, they get, you know, their firms, get business, but also that they kind of connect the world to a Chinese supply chain.

The payments for those will be made in yuan, not dollars. So it further erodes the dollar's role as a reserve of currency. So it's a much more clever, much longer term game of spreading and building economic influence and power around the world. And what I say in the column is at the end of the day, maybe, you know, in a few decades, maybe as the correlation of forces keep improving for them, they might well decide to try to replace the U.S. But they will only do it at a point where it has almost become a fatal company,

where the China is so strong that they can do it without firing a shot. And at that point, Washington will have squandered so much of its power and influence and goodwill that maybe it won't be able to do anything about it. Can I ask you where that leaves us here in Canada? You and I spoke here in Toronto in November, and this was before the Prime Minister Mark Carney made this much-heralded speech in Davos that called for middle powers to band together. And you'd said at that time that the U.S. and Canada, and I think most people agree, that the U.S. and Canada are joined at the hip. But Mark Carney has said that those days are over, that his government needs to make deals with countries like China and India and Australia. What is it that middle powers like Canada can do in this moment?

Can a country like Canada carve out its own path, or are we just going to be buffeted by? the wake of what happens in the United States? I think Canada can chart a path for itself. Look, China made a bet ever since Brian Mulroney's prime ministership, that it was going to hitch its wagon to the United States, that it was going to much more deeply integrate itself into the U.S. ecosystem. And before that, Chinese exports, I may have the number slightly wrong, but I believe I'm basically, right, about 35 to 40% of Canada's exports went to the U.S.

I think it's now like 70% of Canada's exports go to the U.S. And my sense is that what Mark Carney is trying to do is to over the next 10 years, reduce that from 70% to maybe 50%. That gives Canada more leverage. It gives it insurance. It diversifies away from the U.S. So that irresponsible actions by the U.S. will have a lesser impact.

You can't completely divorce yourself from the U.S. nor should you. Trump is, it's worth pointing out, very unpopular. The tariffs are very unpopular. 65% of Americans don't like them. So I think that there's a very good case to be made that there will be a course adjustment in the U.S. But I understand Mark Carney's point,

which is you've got to buy insurance. This could happen again. And so Canada will make the closest ties, we'll have closer ties with the UK, with the European Union, with India, even with China, and that will buy it a certain amount of diversification, buy it a certain amount of insurance. I think it's the only sensible strategy to do. I say this with great sadness, because I would much prefer Canada that was tightly integrated with the U.S., but we have shown ourselves to be an unreliable partner under Donald Trump, and I understand that that has consequences.

I just have a couple of minutes left. Just the last point on that. You said you were on Ezra Klein's podcast, and you said that a world without American power will be a worse world for the rest of the world. Can you just briefly make the case for that and why, in some ways, we all need the United States to be a good actor? If you look at what the world looked like before the United States was the dominant hegemon, you know, before 1945, before the system of both Bretton Woods and the geopolitical system that the U.S. has kind of underwritten and guaranteed. What did it look like? It was World War II, before that World War I, before that 400 years of the great powers of Europe, tearing themselves apart in bloody wars every few years. What happened after 45 is really quite remarkable.

You have had no wars between the great powers, the richest countries of the world, for now 85 years or whatever it is. You have had very few wars of conquest Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a rare exception, which is why we should resist it so strongly. It's extraordinary when you think about how often that happened before 1945. A place like Alsace-Lorraine changed hands three times in the 30 or 40 years before 1945. It was conquered by Germany, then conquered back by France, then conquered back by Germany.

That kind of thing doesn't happen. You know, the territorial conquest is very rare. there is a much greater emphasis on human rights in the world, albeit imperfectly, and there have been lots of terrible things that have happened. We created a whole system of foreign aid to help the poorest people in the world. Basically didn't exist before 1945. So all these things are a product of a liberal order that was created and underwritten by the U.S. Could some of it survive the U.S.'s decline and the U.S.'s abdication?

it probably could, and I hope it will, because there is a collection of countries like Canada, like the European Union, that believe in it. But, you know, we've never run that experiment before. Before the United States, you had another somewhat liberal hegemon, Britain, which, you know, under road free trade and freedom of navigation and things like that, and did push in some cases for human rights issues. I am certain that if China were the dominant hegemony, you would not have that because those are not China's preferences or values. So that's why I think the world will miss in a strange way American, you know, hegemony for lack of a better word. Freed, it's always good to speak with you about this.

These are complicated times, and I appreciate your perspective on where we're at right now and where we might be going. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure, man. Free Zakaria is the host of CNN's Freed Zakaria GPS and the author of book, including Age of Revolution's progress and backlash from 1600 through the present.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.