Fareed Zakaria

The second is...

a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called The Irony of American History.

And it's really all about the great danger when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that, you know, might is right and the call for humility.

It ends with a call for a kind of Christian realism.

in American foreign policy.

And the Christian there really refers to the humility at the heart of Christianity, which sometimes we forget when listening to Pete Hetzeth.

And the final one, a similar vein, is Graham Greene's book, The Quiet American.

I think that one of the, sometimes novels do it better than anything else.

It's a novel set in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour, dyspeptic, world-weary British journalist.

who sees this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be able to, you know, bring peace, justice, and virtue to Vietnam.

And you can imagine it doesn't quite work out that way.

Fareed Zakaria, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ezra.

Well, it was a huge pleasure, honestly.

But you asked me to do it when I was very young, and it was based on my first book, actually, which was all about illiberal democracy, you know, democracies where elected rulers start to abuse, elected leaders start to abuse the rule of law and, you know, individual rights.

In those days, I was talking about places like

Pakistan and the Philippines, not the United States of America.

And it was a huge pleasure.

And of course, it leaves me wondering, what happened, John?

What am I, chopped liver?