Fareed Zakaria

China has one, North Korea.

If you want to add Russia and Iran, find three, you know.

So the truth is, a world without American power will be a worse world for the rest of the world as well.

And I think many of them

feel a certain nostalgia for the old American power that they used to denounce.

I have somewhat rose-colored glasses about these things, but I think America was very special in its world role, and I don't think China will be able to do that.

I noticed the was in that.

It certainly was.

Right now, we are definitely speaking in the past tense.

The United States is currently not exercising its world role with the same level of strategic thought, with the same moral vision, and with the same humanitarian impulse that it has done, albeit imperfectly.

I hope that that can come back.

But my great worry, as I said, is some of these things

are very hard to reconstitute.

The world moves on, the world changes.

People, your reputations take a lifetime to build and it's very easy to destroy.

It's true for human beings and it's true for nations, maybe.

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

So one book I thought, since we do often talk about the rules-based international order, and it does sound so wonky, that I would suggest a wonky book that explains it.

The best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Eikenberry at Princeton, and I think the book is called A World Safe for Democracy, and encapsulates what is this thing, the rules-based international order, the liberal international order that the U.S.

created.