Fareed Zakaria

I kind of have to have an insurance policy.

I kind of have to have, you know, a way out, some kind of diversification.

And that's the tragedy.

We had been so reliable, but the world never thought, that our allies never thought they needed an insurance policy.

They needed to hedge against our becoming crazy rogue imperialists.

And now they do.

We are leaving them leaderless.

We are leaving them disunited and leaderless precisely because their strength came from being part of a whole, right?

They individually, none of them doubt, many of them are pretty strong, you know, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh largest economies in the world.

Right.

But what gave them the power was that we were all together, we were united.

So we'll end up in a kind of multipolar world, which is like the 19th century world, very unstable, very volatile, prone to war miscalculation, except this time we have nuclear weapons.

So not a happy scenario, also not a world in which freedom has as much capacity to expand.

And to my mind, what is strange about all of it is we took something where we were at the center, where we were the rule setter, where we were the agenda setter, and we've turned it into something where we've got this little box of the Western Hemisphere, which is, by the way, the least important of the three main regions in terms of even our own trading.

Our main trading partners are in Europe and Asia.

But I tend to think, John, that

Maybe it's just, again, I'm an optimistic immigrant.

This is not going to last.

This is not going to last.

You know, Americans don't like this, I don't think.