Fareed Zakaria

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?

Look, there's no question that that's true.

When I was writing about it, when I coined the phrase illiberal democracy in 96, 97, I was looking at places like Pakistan, the Philippines, Slovakia, Turkey, Erdogan, you could begin to see it happening.

And I always thought that this is not going to affect the developed world as much.

I did actually in my book have a chapter or two about America, but I thought it was sort of like a tendency, a danger that we were becoming too enamored of the idea of these charismatic leaders.

But what I didn't expect is that the institutional framework

of Western democracies would be as fragile as it is.

And in this case, actually, the United States is in worse shape than other places.

No, no, no, no.