Fareed Zakaria

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. 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.

If you’re looking for a single-sentence summation of the change in America’s foreign policy under Donald Trump, you could do worse than what Trump said on Wednesday: “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” Trump seems to loathe America’s traditional European allies even as he warms relations with Russia. He’s threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico while softening his rhetoric on China. And he seems fixated on the idea of territorial expansion — whether it’s the Panama Canal, Greenland or even Gaza.   There is a “Trump doctrine” emerging here. It’s one that could be glimpsed dimly in Trump’s first term but is exploding to the fore in his second. What will it mean for the world? What will it mean for the United States? Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of the best-selling “Age of Revolutions.” He’s one of the clearest foreign policy thinkers around, and he doesn’t disappoint here. This episode contains strong language.

A lot about the world has changed since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The war itself has brought a number of surprises, from the tenacity of Ukraine’s resistance to the limits of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, competition between the United States and China has escalated into something resembling a new Cold War, India just surpassed China as the most populous country in the world and countries representing about two-thirds of the world’s population have chosen not to align themselves with the U.S. position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Those shifts raise a number of important questions: Where does the Russia-Ukraine war stand today? Are U.S.-China relations headed in the right direction? How will the rise of “nonaligned” countries like India alter the global balance of power? Is America’s longtime global dominance waning? Fareed Zakaria is host of the CNN show “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a columnist for The Washington Post, and one of the sharpest foreign policy thinkers of our time. We discuss what possible outcomes of the Russia-Ukraine conflict seem likeliest at this moment, why the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia haven’t been nearly as effective as expected, how the Republican Party’s stance on Ukraine could influence the outcome of the war, why tensions between the United States and China have intensified over the last year, the dangerous implications of the Chinese spy balloon debacle, whether the United States should ban TikTok, how America’s hypocrisy about foreign invasions looks to the rest of the world, why so many Global South countries don’t support the West’s sanctions regime on Russia, what India’s rise means for the future global balance of power, what President Biden’s foreign policy should look like moving forward and more.

“Russia’s utterly unprovoked, unjustifiable, immoral invasion of Ukraine would seem to mark the end of an era,” writes Fareed Zakaria, “one that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.” Many of us, myself included, grew up in that era. We came of age in a unipolar world, dominated by a single country whose military, economic, even cultural, hegemony remained largely uncontested. That world was by no means free of violence. But the great power conflict that had defined the lived experiences of previous generations seemed like an ancient relic. Recently, it’s the post-Cold War era of the last 30 years that has begun to feel outdated. China has become an economic and military powerhouse — its economy is now larger than the third, fourth, fifth and sixth biggest world economies combined. Russia has become geopolitically assertive, annexing Crimea in 2014, undermining U.S. elections , and now invading Ukraine. Over the past few weeks, questions that once came off as alarmist have become urgent: Are we witnessing the return of great power conflict? And if so, what does that mean for America — and the rest of the world? Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most brilliant analysts of this emerging era. His 2003 book “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” and his 2008 book “The Post American World” were well ahead of their times. And his more recent work on Russia’s aggression, China’s rise and the crucial distinctions between those nations is crucial for understanding this moment. We discuss the decline of the so-called “Pax-Americana,” why Zakaria believes Russia poses a much more existential threat to the liberal world order than China, what the West would be doing if it wanted to seriously punish Russia for its actions, whether Putin’s attempt to break the liberal world order has actually reinvigorated it, why Zakaria thinks it’s a mistake to think of the world as divided into “democratic” and “neo-authoritarian” blocs, how America’s expansionism and hypocrisy undermines its reputation abroad, whether Donald Trump was ultimately right about the need for greater European defense spending, what a diplomatic solution to the current Russia-Ukraine war could look like, how America’s thinking about the world needs to radically change in a global great power competition and more. Disclaimer: this episode contains explicit language.