Fareed Zakaria

No, what he wants to do is look at every situation and say, how can I squeeze this situation for a little bit of money?

If I see a country and I see there's a slight divergence in tariffs, I don't think about, well,

The whole point was to create an open trading system.

No, I say, I can squeeze you.

If I see that you're dependent on me for military aid, I wonder, how can I squeeze you?

His whole idea is the short-term extractive, I get a win for now.

I've talked to a couple of foreign leaders about this, and they also picked up on this remark.

It would be stunning to the world if the United States, the country that has, for example, constantly warned China that the Strait of Malacca, through which more energy goes than the Strait of Hormuz, I think, has to remain open and free, that freedom of navigation is a right, not a privilege conferred by anybody.

If we were to now adopt the position, the Iranian position, that no, no, no, it's ours and we get to do what it is,

I mean, it's a complete revolution in the way we have approached the world.

Yeah, that's a very good phrase because, you know, it is this predatory attitude towards everything, but we are still the hegemon, right?

So it's weird.

You see countries like Russia acting in predatory ways, but you think of them as the sort of spoilers of the global system.

They're the ones that are trying to shake things up, disrupt things.

They don't like it.

the rules-based international system.

They want to destroy it or erode it in some way and allow for the freedom of the strong to do what they can and the weak to suffer what they must, in Thucydides' phrase.

The U.S.

has never done that.

And the U.S.