Fareed Zakaria

not just tired, but soured on the role that it has played as this country that had an enlightened self-interest, that looked long, that was willing to forego the short-term extractive benefits.

I hope that that America is still around.

But as with everything that's happened with Trump, there are points at which I've watched Donald Trump's success and thought to myself, I can't believe that Americans want this.

And I still have difficulty with that.

I totally disagree.

I mean, I think that you can only compare a hegemon to other hegemons.

In other words, yes, the United States looks like it has its hands much dirtier than Costa Rica, which doesn't even have an army, right?

But let's think about the last three or four hundred years.

Is the United States been qualitatively different as the greatest global power compared with the Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, the Kaiser's Germany, Imperial France, Imperial Britain, Imperial Holland?

Yes, those were all rapacious colonial empires.

If you think about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, obviously much, much worse.

And the United States used its power to rebuild Europe, to bring East Asia out of poverty.

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.