Fareed Zakaria

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 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 93 million people.

If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq,