Fareed Zakaria on the Moral Cost of Trump’s War
About this episode
Zakaria's argument is that Trump's threats against Iran — including an explicit threat of genocide — and the war that followed mark the moral collapse of the post-1945 American project. The conversation traces how a US-led order once built on rules, alliances, and at least nominal commitments to human rights has given way to an extractive hegemon: America now bullies allies, bombs adversaries, and treats sovereignty as negotiable. The war on Iran, in Zakaria's telling, was a strategic disaster — it failed to destroy the nuclear program, strengthened Russia and China, wrecked the Western alliance, and handed Tehran the leverage of the Strait of Hormuz. Klein and Zakaria debate whether liberalism is exhausted or merely battered, whether a post-American world will be multipolar or simply chaotic, and whether anything remains of the American idea that once attracted the world.