Recommended Books on International Order

Your SoCal Honda dealers are honored to help our community. When we learned about a local firefighter in need, we were proud to come to the rescue. Last year, it was my family standing in that smoke when the Eden Fire took our home and car. The helpful SoCal Honda dealer showed up with a brand new vehicle for me and my wife. We helped a firefighter with the new Honda, and we can help you too during the Honda Spring event. Get 0.99% APR on a 2026 Prologue at your SoCal Honda Dealers. Financiing details, financial credit for Ansport 3026. A few weeks back, we did a show on whether the Iran war would break Trumpism. What we've seen over the past week is more specific . The Iran war is breaking Trump . At 8:03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to 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 it up with another post on Tuesday that began A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again 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 4 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 worry. 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 a racing Iranian civilization, much less 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. Well, Carlson correctly centered 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 a crime against humanity. It is the act of a war criminal, it is the act of a monster . And I know there are those who say this is all just a negotiation. This was Trump pressing Iran to fold. There are two problems with that. The first is that Iran didn't fold, we did. Trump appears ready to accept a level of Iranian control of a Strait of Hormuz that would have been unimaginable two months ago. You have now 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 complet ely irresponsible and disgusting . This is wrong. It's wrong. He should not be doing it. I don't care that it's a negoti his negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women, and children. An American president so that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened? I 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 twenty fifth 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 twenty fifth Amendment to be used. You had Candace Owens calling Trump a quote genocidal lunatic . I am glad and relieved the Tuesday night brought a ceasefire rather than a war crime. The Iranian people have suffered plenty. They do not deserve to be buried in rubble To salvage Trump's pride. But I am not sure that what Trump said was wrong exactly. I am worried a civilization died that night, or at least is dying. But it's our civilization. The sense that America is a civilized nation, a nation that binds itself to the rules of law, to basic morality, that is led by people with even a shred of virtue. The sense that this grand experiment in self-govern ance 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 demagog ue 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 los ing, 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 un popular 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 pock ets. Who has bought all that crypto from them? What kind of deals got made with the Trump family before countries saw their tariffs knocked down ? Trump cares about nothing so much as winning, and he las hes 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 Freed Zicaria, the host of Freed Zaccaria 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 Klein Show at nytimes.com. Fritz Zicaria , 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's it goes beyond that. It 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 gonna ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We're actually gonna try and build them and we're gonna 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 the 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 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, so you're talking 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 18enth, nineteenth, early twentieth century when individual lives individual human lives were just understood as pawn s in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests . As you say, I'm not saying that there has 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 didn't threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing. That the, you know, and you see this in Doge and it's approached USAID, that there is something about how you treat or don't treat, how you weigh or don't weigh the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machin ations, 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 Iraq is. 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 nineteenth century, because sometimes people talk about oh he loves McKinley and he liked tariffs and he's like McKinley in in in that imperialism. No, Trump is more like a rapacious eighteenth 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 thing. 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 JD Vance would speak like that. I don't think Marco Rubio would speak like that. So there's something that he brings to it which is a kind of callousness and a contempt for any of those those kind of the expression of those values. For him, that's all a sign of weakness. That's the kind of bullshit people say. But the reality is the way he looks at the world. Here's what you will hear from Trump's defenders. That this is all today and it was on Tuesday liberal hysteria . That what we were watching was a brilliant negotiating tactic, that Trump frightened the Iranians, he frightened the whole world, he put forward a maximalist and terrifying and immoral position , and forced the Iranians to capitulate into a deal they would not otherwise have accepted. That night he did not destroy civilization, that night there was the announcement of a two week ceasefire . Are they right? Is that what happen ed? So let's just evaluate it on the on the merits in the sense of, you know, if w the genius negotiating strategy. Would 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 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 the the the the the what we started with. What we have ended up with is a war in which Iran has lost its military and its navy and things like that. But to be honest, it was not using those to attack anybody. What it has gained is a m far more usable weapon than nuclear weapons. It has realiz ed 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 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 as much 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 lear n because the Chinese had to h uh get the Iranians to agree to this. It has weakened the dollar because these payments that are being made through the Strait of Hormuz are now being made in crypto or in yuan, China's currency. It has strengthened Russia because Russia is now making something on the order of four to five billion dollars 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 are the costs. And the benefit as 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 every c in in the situ.ations 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 poker like negotiation isn't worth the price. You're soCal Honda dealers are honored to help our community. When we learned about a local firefighter in need, we were proud to come to the rescue. Last year, it was my family standing in that smoke when the Eden Fire took our home and car. The helpful SoCal Honda dealer showed up with a brand new vehicle for me and my wife. We helped a firefighter with the new Honda, and we can help you too during the Honda Spring event. Get 0.99% APR on a 2026 Prologue at your SoCal Honda Dealers. T dealer for my team details, finding you on credit approval offering sport 3026 . The problem with radio is we can't show you our new box packed with a KFC snacker, five nuggets, fries, and a drink for just seven dollars. So you'll just have to trust us when we say the crispy golden fried breading will make your mouth water. You'll have to trust us when we say this is a ridiculous amount of chicken for such a small price. And you'll have to really trust us when we insist that yes, it really is only seven dollars. Seven dollar box feast from KFC. Trust us, it's finger licking good. Prices and participation may be very tax tips and fees extra. Hi, I'm Solana Pine. I'm the director of video at the New York Times. For years, my team has made videos that bring you closer to big news moments. Videos by Times journalists that have the expertise to help you understand what's going on. Now we're bringing those videos to you in the Watch tab in the New York Times app. It's a dedicated video feed where you know you can trust what you're seeing. All the videos there are free for anyone to watch. You don't have to be a subscriber. Download the New York Times app to start watching. Among the tells in all this to me was that 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 a lift ing 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 negoti ation. 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 dru d demanding than they would have ever. Three months ago, they would have never said that they have the right to control the strait of hormones. So they have added on additional demands, if anything, th 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 US and Iran jointly control ling 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 America doing at another time than I think is even being given credit for. I 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 seventeen ninety-eight, something called a quasi-war with France was over freedom of navigation. The war with the Barbary 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 hegemon after nineteen forty-five, it has resolutely affirmed and defended that right. It has put in place huge protocols about it in the I think it was nineteen seventy-nine Car ter 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 you know, the 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 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 if 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 Hormose, 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 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 freedom of the strong to do what they can and the weak to suffer what they must, uh in Thucydides' phrase. The US has never done that. And the US has 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 hegemons, it really has played that role. And now it is trying to extract uh 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 this at the center of this world. But so we're getting the short -term ga ins 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 Massad. Seems that there were a lot of parts of his own administration raising doubts that he simply wiped away . Has this war been good for Israel? Do they get what they want out of it? Look, I think for a particular view of Israel, which has viewed Iran as this absolute existential threat , which is clearly Bibi Netanyahu's view. Iran is destroyed militarily. There's no question about it. I mean remember and Netanyahu in that opening video says I've been dreaming about this for forty 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 ten 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 expect inspections regime that you had ever had in the history of nuclear tests. So it 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 what that was going on. So there was a way to contain Iran without the extraordinary destruction. But I think that what Israel has done has come at a cost. I look at Bibi Netanyahu's long reign as prime minister, and I wonder 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 ten percent of Lebanon. It has displaced one million people in It said six hundred thousand of them may never be allowed to come back to their homes. Right, exactly. And and you put you look at all of that and then that on scale is a second knockback. Right. And just remember, you know, we these that six hundred thousand human So you you ask yourself, is the price that now a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel, that a majority of young people have a very unfavorable view of Israel. And if you look beyond America, it's not just America. I think the Dutch just joined the South African case in the international court to look at what's happening even in Germany, which for obvious historical reasons has a very strong, you know, moral urge to always see things from Israel's point of view. In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see and what they so you know is that really good for Israel in the long run? And for what? It was already the most powerful country in the Middle East. It was able to defend itself, it was able to deter in a kind of short term, narrow sense, yes, Bibi Net anyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of Israel's enemies. And some of it, like Hezbollah was a 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 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 y you know, you talk a lot about the rules-based international order that Trump is destroying . And I also think that language sort of obscures that beneath the rules are values . And what Trump has gleefully done from the beginning of his time in politics is to try to violate those values in such a public way as to show them to be hollow, unenforceable, that these things 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 it 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 I've been reading a lot about Franklin Roosevelt recently. Because if Roosevelt is probably the man most responsible for dreaming up that post war order. What you see is he goes at one point to Casablanca and he meets with the the 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, there's 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're going to defect first. And that's what I worry is going to start happening. The Canadians, you know, you look at what the Canadians did over the last 30 or 40 years. They basically made a single bet that their future was with a tight, close integration with the United States. Politically, economically, in every way. And they now look at the way in which the United States use that dependence to try to extract concessions from them. And they're now saying to themselves, well, we need to buy insurance , we need to have better relations with China and with India. And once you start going down that path, that becomes difficult to reverse, even if you know a a wonderful, more internationally minded, more value-based president comes into power. The Indians the the same way will have uh have been thinking to themselves, oh, we need to course correct and we need to take care of our own situation. And if everyone does that, at some point you're in a very different world than the world that we created after 1945. You know, I remember during the Bush era when people said that Bush had done irreparable damage to America's standing in the world, its 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 uh as thoroughly a liberal internationalist. I think too much, frankly, but as thoroughly a liberal internationalist as you can get. And it turns out much of the world is very happy to welcome America back into the same role . I can't tell if 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 this a structural change. Or in fact, you know, if Trump is succeeded by a more conventional figure or a more alliance-oriented figure, this all snaps back into something more like its previous place. Yeah, some of it will depend on whether is there an election that is a kind of complete repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in in twenty-eight and the world would would read that in a particular way. Look, there's a demand for American leadership. I mean, look at the Europeans who were very reluctant 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 w a world without American leadership and without American power looks like, the more they want it. The problem is the world has changed. You know, in 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 powers 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 he uh articulated it as part of a much larger issue of terrorism. He assembled an alliance 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 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 soured on the role that it has played as this country that had an enlighten ed self-interest, that looked long, that that was willing to forego the short-term extractive benefits. I hope that that America is still around. But as with everything that's happen ed 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 I 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 to some degree 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 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 th there is this idea that Trumpism actually isn't different. It's continu ity and it's explicit and aesthetically brutish. I totally disagree. I mean, I think that you can only compare a hegemon to other hegemons. In other words, yes, the United States looks like it has its hands much dirtier than Costa Rica, uh 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, um, 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. It created, as I said, foreign aid. Of course, we made lots of mistakes. And what tends to happen is when you have that ideological conception of your foreign policy and you think you have to you have to save Vietnam for from these evil uh communists, uh 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 One. People forget. So I see the argument about, you know, American hypocrisy because we do have done many, many bad things , but I think when you step back and think about it in a broader historical sense, the United States has a lot to be proud for of I'm Dane 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 the New York Times. You can subscribe at ny times.com slash subscribe 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 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 . Right. How has 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 movement, the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions. And institutions fail and they fall short and they bureaucrati ze. 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 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 U N that Trump challenges something deeper. And I think liberals fall back on a defense of institutions in a way that makes me feel like there's been a 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 and we both mean liberalism small L, you know, 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 min minimal work you know w everything has happened. And if you look at the things that, you know, the classical conservatives argued for eration. Right, radical in its time. Right. You think about all the things the classical conservatives argued for. You know, for the a powerful king, for powerful church, for the domination of the of of a 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, that liberalism not only has won, but then institutionalized itself, and those institutions inevitably become fat and corrupt and non-responsive. And I think this is a real problem. And what Trump can present is the kind of fiery insurgent spoiler, which always has a little bit more drama to it. You know, in the in the sixties that came from the radical left. Now it's coming from the right. But there is always that ability to kind of say that I'm gonna upset the Apple cart and that you know, there's a certain energy there that the people holding the the cart together aren't able to exercise. I think that's a real problem and you know, I mean somebody like a 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 the, that problem that you're discussing . 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 b because it came out of the religious wars was you get to decide what your best life is and we're not gonna have a dictator or a pope or a commissar tell you that. But that leaves people unsatisfied. I think there's a part of people that want to be told what is a great life, what is this cause greater than themselves? And you know, the conservative answer is, well, it's it's God, family, traditional morality , and those are the things that matter a lot. If you listen to Vance in Hungary, you know he says go out there and bring back the God of our fathers. Trump represents something different. Trump is appealing to the most naked selfishness in people. He's saying, What's in it for you? Why aren't we getting more out of this? You know, that's one of the reasons I think that he is so comfortable with the most the kind of open corruption that he represents. Because he 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 gonna get the spoils. In a way he's I think of 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 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, and that it's a problem here. But maybe to boil down what you actually said about Trump, I think Trump's core argument is 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 this thing that Drew some Demsis, 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 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. said but hypocrisy is the homage that vice play pays to virtue. But I guess this is the the point I I'm pushing not because I think you know so have 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 the having the meaning of life, but it is about some mission about interest. And what Trump says is your interest is purely economic, extractive, power domination. It's a very old vision of interest. Interest can also be values. They can also be moral. They can also be about identity. But this question of what is the answer to Donald Trump's way of describing what you should be interested in, what is in the national interest, what is in your interest, is I think a pretty deep one. Because I don't think to say, you know, you know, recommitting to alliances, I don't think that's enough for it. That's not a moral mission. That's a procedural tactic. Aaron Powell So I think you're getting at something very important. And I was trying to get at it when saying, you know, if you looked at the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was probably the most advanced Social Democratic party uh 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 them uh out of it as a result are wildly successful. People will often say that, you know, there was a great clash in the twentieth century bet,ween communism and capitalism, and capitalism won. But actually, and the political scientist social Sherry Berman makes this point very well. What actually won 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 the emphasis on quotas and DEI and all that kind of thing. In other areas it decided it wanted to go even further left. Right. So the challenge is I see the problem with saying, okay, you know, we've arrived at this stage. And a lot of people, I have to confess, like me, thought, and maybe this is because I grew up in in India, this is pretty amazing what you have been able to achieve. And you look at the historical achievement of being able to have 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 healthcare to work better so that you actually cover that last twenty-something million or however many it is. But that is unsatisfying as a you know, nobody writes uh poems about expanding Obamacare. 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 I'm suspicious of that much passion uh 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 thirty or forty years, it's just nonsense. The United States has done extraordinarily well over the last hundred years and in particular over the last thirty years with one big caveat where we have not been as good on distributional issues, but which we could easily have done. Donald Trump and the People in his party would have led us. 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 with the state and the church telling you this is the right little thing to do that you know, here are the values. So there is a a moderation. I I uh romanticism in politics is something to be taken to be viewed with a certain certain degree I think I've been coming to a a more opposite view, but uh I'm I'm gonna pick that thread up with you another time. You're gonna go back to the sixties and and uh and start some new k new new cult movement. I think that the I do not think that in the way politics and attention works today , you can have a political movement that is afraid of inspiration and afraid of passion. I was reading Adrian Woldridge's new book on liberalism, and he he sort of has this paragraph early on. It's really his thesis paragraph where he talks about both liber alism's radicalism, its 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 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. Aaron Powell No, I agree with that. And I and I think, you know, what the where I would like to see the radicalism and the kind of reform is, you know, when I look at the issue of affirmative action, to me, I was always very uncomfortable with it. I always thought Lyndon Johnson's explanation of why you needed it to help formerly enslaved and black people who had then lived under 100 years of Jim Crow made perfect sense. But then it starts getting expanded and it starts to be expanded to all kinds of people, you know, like people like me, which I thought made no sense. I mean, America has been particularly bad to African Americans. So it has been particularly good to other immigrants. That's why people from all over the world have tried desperately to come to America for hundreds of years, because the United States is unusually good at welcoming and accepting. So there shouldn't have been affirmative ac tion for people of color, whatever that means, or things like that. And then it becomes, it goes from being affirmative action to quotas, and then it becomes diversity mandates. And I feel as though there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying, why wait, 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 romanti cism 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 nineteen seventy-nine 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 rents Now I would like to believe that that is not true, but there are ways in which it often seems to be how Donald Trump acts personally . He's only got so much time left on this earth, only so much time left in this presidency. And he and his family are going to try to like pull out everything they can from it . And he's always been very obsessed with the rise of China before that the rise of Japan. And, you know, you could understand him as trying to monetize America's power 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 US had going for it was this agenda setting power. And that's gone. The US is viewed as off on its own weird track. Everyone has to deal with it because it's too important. And that is a sign of a certain kind of decline. And the other one is this obsession to have enormous geopolitical control. You know, one of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 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 Rob inson and Gallagher, in which they talk about how why the British annexed Fashod a 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 boing, 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, 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 fought in 25 years. I do worry that this imperial temptation to have the 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 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. Uh but that feels hauntingly reminiscent. I saw a Gallup poll 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 uh 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 altern ate 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 eighty years. Um you know, look at we have I don't know, fifty five treaty allies in the world. China has one North Korea. Um if you want to add uh 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 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 it's very easy to destroy. It's true for human beings and it's true for for nations, maybe. Aaron Powell And now is our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?