Fareed Zakaria

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 save Vietnam from these evil communists, 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 I. 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 of.

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 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 minimal work.

You know, everything has happened.

And if you look at the things that, you know, the classical conservatives argued for.

Religious tolerations.

Radical in its time.

Right.

You think about all the things that classical conservatives argued for, you know, for a powerful king, for a powerful church, for the domination of a certain church-based morality over life, for women to be kept in their place.