Fareed Zakaria

The people who run around today, they call themselves the principalists because they believe they are adhering to the original ideals and ideas of the 1979 revolution, unlike the terrible pragmatists who have been trying to find a way to compromise with the West.

I think that you are seeing countries around the world find ways to make accommodations around America.

So it's not purely a kind of question of American decline.

It's that we are no longer leading.

So you take something like protectionism.

Yeah, we've become very protectionist.

And what you notice is very interesting.

Other countries regard the United States as, okay, you're the problem we have to deal with, and we'll cut some deal with you because you're too important for us not to.

But outside of that, countries are making more free trade deals with one another.

You know, the Indians with the Europeans, the Europeans with those Latin Americans, the Canadians with... So in other words, the one thing that the U.S.

had going for it was this agenda-setting power.

And that's gone.

The U.S.

is viewed as on its own weird track.

Everyone has to deal with it because it's too important.

And that is a sign of a certain kind of decline.

And the other one is...

this obsession to have enormous geopolitical control.

One of the haunting parallels for me is to think about the British Empire in its last 30, 40 years.

People forget, but after World War I, the British Empire expanded to its largest state ever, to its largest size ever.