The Ezra Klein Show - The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

When President Trump didn’t annihilate “a whole civilization” on Tuesday, as he had threatened to do, much of the world exhaled. But the damage of his statements — a U.S. president, the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military, threatening to commit war crimes — continues to linger in the shadow of an uncertain cease-fire. Trump did not destroy Iran, but he may be destroying another civilization: ours. Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and the author of “Age of Revolutions” and other books. In this conversation, we discuss whether Trump’s threats on Truth Social worked as a negotiating tactic, the significance of crossing this kind of moral line and how the decline of American leadership is already reshaping the world. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria “The Predatory Hegemon” by Stephen M. Walt “Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.” by Fareed Zakaria Book Recommendations: A World Safe for Democracy by G. John Ikenberry The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr The Quiet American by Graham Greene Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Jack McCordick, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A few weeks back, we did a show on whether the Iran war would break Trumpism. But what we've seen over the past week is more specific. The Iran war is breaking Trump. At 8.03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to 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 me 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 backed down agreeing to a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Then on Wednesday, he wrote,

The United States will work closely with Iran, which we have determined has gone through what will be a very productive regime change. 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 U.S. 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 our moves 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 did they got 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 erasing Iranian civilization,

much as 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 centered is 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 pressuring 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 J.D. 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 his negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women, and children. An American president so that the straight. rate of Hormuz will be opened. It's just wrong. A list of the Trumpy or formerly Trumpy figures who just seem appalled here could go on. You had Marjorie Taylor Green 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. He 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 that what Trump said is 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 the midterm elections, and then he and his family and associates will face a raft of investigations. How much Gulf money has made its way into Trump family pockets? Who has bought all that crypto from them? What kind of deals got made with the Trump family before country saw their tariffs knocked down? Trump cares about nothing so much is 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 Fried Zakaria, the host of Freed Zakaria GPS on CNN, a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of, among other books, The Age of Revolutions. As always, my email, Ezra Clined Show at NYU Times.com. Fried Zakaria, 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, quote,

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 to sound too corny about it, because of course we made mistakes and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different. 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, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers that when it was their turn, had decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a kind of, you know, 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. I mean, you're talking about 93 million people. One thing that has always felt to me core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels to me on a deep level like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual lives of the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual lives of the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, individual human lives were 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 and a structure of values in which you did it. threatened mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing. And you see this in Doge and its 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 or 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 miss that 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. 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 like 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 McKinnelly, you know, McKinnelly said. he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place and there was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal. And it was, as you say, 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 hearkening 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 J.D. 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 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 to the Iranians, and frightened the whole world, and he put forth a maximalist, 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 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 completed. and totally obliterated. Those were 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 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 strait of hormones, and that that would have a cataclysmic follow-on effect. It now seems poised to not simply be able to be able to, 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 Strait of Hormos 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. 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 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 were the costs. And the benefit is, 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, 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 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 momentary gain in some poker-like negotiation isn't worth the price. Among the tells in all this to me was it Trump in announcing the ceasefire deal

said that he had gotten a 10-point plan from the Iranians, which he described as, quote, 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 Strait of Hormuz. It includes the world accepting an Iranian right to enrich uranium. It includes lifting all primary and secondary sanctions against Iran. It includes payment of reparations to Iran. I am not saying Trump or America or Israel will agree to all or to any of this. But if this is the reasonable basis for talks, that is an Iran that has ended up in a stronger position than it was, a position where it will have negotiated out control of the strait. 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 Strait 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 Strait of Hormuz. Trump said something, I think it was today, that was striking.

He mused about the U.S. and Iran jointly controlling the strait. And the way he described it clearly meant the U.S. taking a cut of those tolls as well. when you talk about the extractive nature of Trump's view of geopolitics and foreign policy, whether that is where it ends up, the idea that somebody said that to him 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 American 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 Barbary Pirates was about freedom of navigation. The U.S. has literally for its entire existence stood 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 into 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. No, what he wants to do is look at every situation and say, how can I squeeze this situation for a little bit of money? 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 for military aid, 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 warned China that the Strait of Malacca, through which more energy goes than the Strait of Hormor's, 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 an essay recently where he described what America is becoming or attempting to be as a predatory hegemon. Do you think that's the way to understand it? Yeah, that's a very good phrase because, you know, it is this predatory attitude towards everything, but we are still the hegemon, 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 first. freedom of the strong to do what they can and the weak to suffer what they must in Thucydides's phrase. The U.S. has never done that. And the U.S. as a hegemon has been very careful to try to have that longer term, more enlightened view, again, with lots of mistakes and lots of hypocrisy. But compared to other hegemon's, it really has played that role. And now it is trying to

extract for short-term benefit. And I emphasize this because it's actually, terrible for the United States in the long run. We have benefited enormously from being at the center of this world. But so we're getting these 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 Mossad. 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 Netanyahu's view, Iran is destroyed militarily. There's no question about it. I mean, remember, and 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. Ninety-eight percent of its enriched uranium had been taken out of the country. Israeli intelligence, American intelligence, and the International Atomic Energy Agency all said

that the Iranians were following the deal. And you had the reality that you had the most intrusive inspections regime that you had ever had in the history of nuclear tests. Was it possible? They could be cheating a little bit on the side. It's possible. Very, very few serious observers of it think that 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 B.B. Netanyahu's long reign as prime minister, and I wonder if in the long run, what people will notice is that his legacy was to split apart the alliance between the United States and Israel. He began by politicizing it in a poisonous way when Obama was president. He went and did an end-run.

around Obama went and addressed Congress. He openly fought with Obama and tried to turn the issue of Israel into a partisan issue and then has unleashed so much firepower. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. Israel is currently occupying 10% of Lebanon. It has displaced one 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 it. You look at it. at all of that. I mean, that on scale is a second knockba. Right. And just remember, you know, these, that's 600,000 human beings, that's women that children, who did nothing, who were in no way involved in Hezbollah's, 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 at, Beyond America, it's not just America. I think the Dutch just joined the South African case in the international court to look at what's happening even in Germany, which for obvious historical reasons has a very strong moral urge to always see things from Israel's point of view. In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see 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 least it was able to defend itself. It was able to deter in a kind of short-term narrow sense,

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

sense that America is a civilized nation. I think that it is actually core. to his politics and in a way his appeal that he routinely violates what we might have at another time called civilized behavior, the way he talks, the way he tweets or put things on truth social, the way he goes after his enemies. And, you know, you talk a lot about the rules-based international order that Trump is destroying.

And I always think that language sort of obscures that beneath the rules or values. and what Trump has gleefully done from the beginning of his time in politics is to try to violate those values in such a public way as to show them to be hollow, unenforceable, that these things we thought were boundaries or moral guardrails or nothing. 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 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 Roosevelt is probably the man

most responsible for dreaming up that post-war order. What you see is, you know, he goes at one point to Casablanca and he meets with the Moroccans. And he said he came to realize just how savagely the French had ruled over these people. 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 there had to be a way for countries to grow to wealth and grow to feel their power without conquering other countries. So I think you're exactly right, that it comes out of a very deep moral sense that there is a way to structure international life differently than it's been done for centuries. And the thing I worry most about is that what Trump is doing is irreparable. because even if you get another American president in, the world will have watched this display and said, oh, America can be just another imperial rapacious power,

and we need to start protecting ourselves, and we need to start buying insurance, and we need to start freelancing in the same way and protecting ourselves. And then, you know, you get into a downward spiral, right? Because if you think the other guy is going to defect, you were 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, who 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 say the same way. I've 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, 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. but as thoroughly a liberal denials as you could get, and it turns out much of the world is very happy to welcome America back in 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 has succeeded, by a more conventional figure or a 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 the allies at various points during the Cold War and now are desperate for an America that will simply commit to the alliance, the more the world imagines what a world without American leadership and without American power looks like, the more they want it. The problem is the world has changed. You know, during the Iraq War, China was not nearly as powerful as it is today. 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 a lines of whatever, 45 countries. Trump, with this Iran war, basically revels in the unilateralism of it. He revels in the fact that he does it all by himself. He doesn't want to bother with Congress, to bother with the UN, to bother with allies until 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 was willing to forego

the short-term extractive benefits. I hope that that America is still around. But as with everything this 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 people that we're telling here about America where we say it had this humanitarian vision and these ideals. And sometimes it didn't live up to them, but broadly did, that that's always been false. That Trump is America with the mask off. Trump has brought what we've done elsewhere home. And he has given up on ways we hid what we were actually doing, was his promise to destroy civilian infrastructure and bridges and power plants

to destroy civilization? Is that so different than what we did when we napalmed Vietnam? So there is this idea that Trumpism 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's. 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. 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 rapacious colonial empires. If you think about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, obviously much, much worse. And the United States used its power to rebuild Europe, to bring East Asia out of poverty. It created, as I said, foreign aid. Of course we made lots of mistakes. And what tends to happen is when you have an ideological conception of your foreign policy

and you think you have to save Vietnam from these evil communists, you end up destroying villages to save them. But that doesn't change this basic fact that I'm talking about, which is in the broad continuity of history, when you look at other great global powers, what did we use our influence for? What did we use our power for? Until World War II, every power that had won extracted tribute

from the powers that lost, including in World War I, people forget. So I see the argument about, you know, American hypocrisy because we do have done many, many bad things. But I think when you step back and think about it in a broader historical sense, the United States has a lot to be proud of. Let me try a thought on you that I've been wrestling with for bigger reasons, which is that I've been thinking a lot about why liberalism in its various manifestations feel so. exhausted and uninspiring. Here at this moment, when what so many people are afraid of and reacting to, is liberalism's achievements being wiped away, right?

How 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 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 philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions. An institution, institutions fail and they fall short and they bureaucratize. And the problem liberalism has, the problem of the idea is that you're voicing so eloquently have right now in acting as an

answer to Trump, is it what we are left offending are 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 either a losing of touch with or a loss of faith in the moral concepts that once animated the creation of those institutions.

There's a lot in there. So let me try 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, the kind of liberal enlightenment project, is it's won too much. over the last two, three hundred years, think of everything that liberalism has advocated from, you know, the emancipation of slaves to women's equality, to racial equality, to child working laws, to minimal work, you know, everything has happened. And if you look at the things that, you know, the classical conservatives argued for... Religious tolerations.

Right. Radical in its time. Right. You think about all the things that classical conservatives argued for, you know, for a powerful king, for powerful church, for the domination of a certain church-based morality over life, for women to be kept in their place, all those things have lost, right?

So at one level, the problem is, as you say, 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, surgent spoiler, which always has a little bit more drama to it. 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 cart 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 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 dictatorship. or a pope or a commissar tell you that. But that leaves people unsatisfied. I think there's a part of people that want to be told what is a great life, what is this cause greater than themselves? And, you know, the conservative answer is, well, it's God, family, traditional morality, and those are the things that matter a lot.

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 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 got the spoils. now I'm going to get the spoils. In a way, I think, think he thinks 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 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. That Trumpism doesn't work. Doesn't solve the problem if people think that what you were doing doesn't work either. You know, I was reading the same, that Drusum Dempsis, 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 Trump makes you miss him anyway. And she writes, watching the Trump administration rip up even the pretense of caring about liberal internationalism is a reminder that sometimes virtue signaling and hypocrisy are. 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 it's a political message that I think liberalism is kind of settled into. Our institutions suck, but you should defend them anyway. It sucks. I think it's, I can't remember who said, hypocrisy is the homage that vice plays a virtue, right? But I guess this is, the point I'm pushing up because I think you know so, the answer, but because I think it's something people need to, they need to be replying to this

challenge more on the level it's actually being posed. A movement that has adopted the institutional view can only ever really be a movement of the status quo and modest reform. And I think it's not about having the meaning of life, but it is about some mission about interest. And what Trump says is your interest is purely economic, extractive, power domination. It is, 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, 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 in, say, 1905, almost everything that it had on its party platform is now been adopted by every Western country.

So in some ways, what has happened is liberalism has succeeded, and these societies that have come out of it as a result, are wildly successful. People will often say that, you know, there was a great clash in the 20th century between communism and capitalism and capitalism one. But actually, in the political scientist, Sherry Berman, makes this point very well. What actually, one at the end was social democracy, was a mixture of the welfare state and capitalism everywhere, even including the United States. We have a vast welfare state. And so once you have created that, once the basic conditions of creating a middle-class democratic society in which there are protections for the poor, for the unemployed, you know, there is health care of some kind. Where do you go?

And part of what happened is, I think, the left in some areas went too far left and in an illiberal fashion. You know, the emphasis on quotas and DEI and all that kind of thing. in other areas they decided they wanted to go even further left. So the challenge is I see the problem with saying, okay, we've arrived at this stage, and a lot of people, I have to confess like me, thought, and maybe this is because I grew up in India, this is pretty amazing what you have been able to achieve.

And you look at the historical achievement of being able to have these stable, middle-class societies in which individual rights are protected where poor people are taken care of. This is amazing. Now, let's try to get it right. Let's try to get the Rube Goldberg of American 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 care. 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 done terribly over the last 30 or 40 years, it's just nonsense. The United States has done extraordinarily well over the last 100 years and in particular over the last 30 years with one big caveat where we have not been as good on distributional issues, which we could easily have done. Yeah, if Donald Trump and the people in this party would have led us, we would have.

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 thing to do. You know, here are the values. So there is a moderation. Romanticism in politics is something to be viewed to be viewed with a certain degree of skepticism.

I think I've been coming to a more opposite view, but I'm going to pick that thread up with you another time. You're going to go back to the 60s and start some new cult movement. I do not think that in the way politics and attention works today, you can have a political movement that is afraid of inspiration and afraid of passion. I was reading Adrian Woldridge's new book on liberalism, and he sort of has this paragraph early on. It's really his thesis paragraph where he talks about both liberalism's radicalism, it's sort of

radical imagination, but then also exactly as you just were. the importance of its moderate temperament that distrusts the passions and wants to keep a lid on things. 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 liberality, and institutions in your relationship to institutions. So you are balancing things if they come out of alignment, I think push liberalism into failure modes. But I do think as liberalism became the party of people for whom institutions have worked,

its temperament has become too institutional and too afraid of things that could upset the structures. 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, the way I would like to see the radicalism and the kind of reform is, you know, when I look at the issue of affirmative action, to me, I was always very uncomfortable with it. I always thought Lyndon Johnson's explanation of why you needed it to help formerly enslaved and black people who then lived under 100 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. 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 goes from being affirmative action to quotas,

and then it becomes diversity mandates. And I feel as though there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying, wait, have we completely lost track of what the core of liberalism, which was about, as Martin Luther King put it, judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skins. And those are the kind of things where I think, you know, liberalism gets so institutionalized and conventional wisdom forms and it becomes impossible to course correct.

What I worry about is, you know, kind of romanticism for romanticism's sake. The people who run around today, they call themselves the principalists because they believe they are adhering to the original ideals and ideas of the 1979 revolution, unlike the terrible pragmatists who have been trying to find a way to compromise with the West. There's another dimension of all this. It is not philosophical that I want to touch before we end, which is one way of understanding the predatory hegemon moment is that it is the gasp of a dying hegemon that only has a limited amount of time left

in which it can extract these kinds of rents. Now, I would like to believe that that is not true, but there are ways in which it obviously needs 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, he and his family are going to try to, like, pull out everything they can from it. And he's always been very obsessed with the rise of China, before that the rise of Japan.

And, you know, you could understand him as trying to monetize America's power while it still has it. And in doing hastening America's loss of it, you wrote a piece that said, like, the post-American world is coming into view. 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's that we are no longer leading. So you take something like protectionism. Yeah, we've become very protectionist.

And what you notice is very interesting. Other countries regard the United States as, okay, you're the problem we have to deal with and we'll cut some deal with you because you're too important for us not to. but outside of that, countries are making more free trade deals with one another. You know, the Indians with the Europeans, the Europeans with those Latin Americans, the Canadians with – so in other words, the one thing that the U.S. had going for it was this agenda-setting power. And that's gone. The U.S. is viewed as on its own weird track.

Everyone has to deal with it because it's too important. And that is a sign of a certain kind of decline. And the other one is this obsession to have enormous geopolitical control. You know, one of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 30, 40 years. People forget, but after World War I, the British Empire expanded to its largest state ever, to its largest size ever, only 20 or 30 years before it collapsed. And the reason was that the British elites got very engaged and,

enamored with the idea of controlling Iraq and controlling Afghanistan and controlling, you know, they would find these, there was this wonderful book called Africa and the Victorians by Robinson and Gallagher in which they talk about how, why the British annexed for Shoda, you understand, in the south of Sudan, well, because they thought you needed to control the Suez Canal, to control the route to India. Well, 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 Fashoda, which nobody anywhere in Britain

would have any idea where it was, and why were they doing that? Meanwhile, what they were neglecting was the reality that Germany was becoming much more productive. America was becoming much more productive. And I look at what we are doing today. I mean, you think about it, right? This is the third Middle Eastern War we have. fort in 25 years, I do worry that this imperial temptation to have so much of the focus and the resources of the country placed in these faraway parts of the world where it's not clear we're

actually gaining much, we're expending enormous energy, and we're expending a lot of our moral capital, our political capital, our actual financial capital. That part is very similar to what happened to Britain. And I don't know whether it's exhaustion or whether it's a kind of imperial arrogance or maybe a combination of the two. But that feels hauntingly reminiscent. I saw a Gallupol that was coming from their world survey. So polls, people all across the world, and approval of Chinese leadership had passed approval of American leadership. Neither was that high. It was 36% to 31%, but that the world now prefers Chinese leadership to ours struck me as, if we were trying to do is 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 a Chinese hegemon, because that is not China's conception of its world role. It's not going to be able to do it. It does not have the trust. We still, for good reasons, have an enormous amount of trust because we built it over 80 years. You know, look at, we have,

I don't know, 55 treaty allies in the world. China has won, North Korea. Maybe 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-colored glasses about these things, but I think America was very special in its world role, and I don't think China will be able to do that. I noticed the was in that. It certainly was, right now, we are definitely speaking in the past tense. The United States is currently not exercising its world role

with the same level of, strategic thought with the same moral vision and with the same humanitarian impulse that it has done, albeit imperfectly. I hope that that can come back. But my great worry, as I said, is some of these things are very hard to reconstitute. The world moves on, the world changes. People, your reputations take a lifetime to build and it's very easy to destroy. It's true for human beings and it's true for nations, maybe. And now is our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?

So one book I thought, since we do often talk about the rules-based international order, and it does sound so wonky that I would suggest a wonky book that explains it. The best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Eikenberry at Princeton, and I think the book is called A World Safe for Democracy. And encapsulates, what is this thing, the rules-based international order, the liberal international order that the U.S. created. The second is a book by Reinhold 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 there really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity, which sometimes we forget when listening to Pete Hetzett. And the final one, a similar vein, is Graham Green's book, The Quiet American. I think that one of the, one of sometimes novels do it better than than anything else. The novel said in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour, dyspectic, world-weary British journalist who sees this. 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 Zakaria, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra. This episode of Ezra Klancho is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Amund Soda. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes

Jack McCordic, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kellebeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Amun Zahota and Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Christina Similuski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times' opinion audio is Annie Roastro.