Fareed Zakaria
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I don't think J.D.
Vance would speak like that.
I don't think Marco Rubio would speak like that.
So there's something that he brings to it
which is a kind of callousness and a contempt for any of those kind of the expression of those values.
For him, that's all a sign of weakness.
That's the kind of bullshit people say.
But the reality is the way he looks at the world.
So let's just evaluate it on the merits in the sense of the genius negotiating strategy.
What we have ended up with in a situation where we began the war with a country whose nuclear program had been completely and totally obliterated, those were Trump's words, but those were words, by the way, echoed by the head of the IDF in Israel.
Israel's atomic agency said Iran's nuclear program has been destroyed and can be kept destroyed indefinitely as long as they don't get access to nuclear materials, which we were actively denying them.
So that was the reality of Iran.
It had been pummeled.
Its nuclear program had been destroyed.
That was what we started with.
What we have ended up with is a war in which Iran has lost its military and its navy and things like that.
But to be honest, it was not using those to attack anybody.
What it has gained
is a far more usable weapon than nuclear weapons.
It has realized and shown the world that it can destroy the global economy, that it can block the Strait of Hormuz and that that would have a cataclysmic follow-on effect.