Fareed Zakaria

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 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 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 that's happened with Trump, there are points at which I've watched Donald Trump's success and thought to myself, I can't believe that Americans want this.

And I still have difficulty with that.

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, 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.