Fareed Zakaria

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.

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.