Fareed Zakaria

The only reason you can do that is because you're so powerful.

You're unconstrained.

You don't have to worry that they're going to go over to the communist side.

Like there's something here that feels very much like it's about the arrogance of power, the ability to act in unconstrained ways.

And I kind of wonder whether...

you know, the reason we, when we were powerful in the past, there was this check, there was this sense in which, you know, you had to put forward your best front.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

The cultural divide that has developed now is one in which I think for somebody like J.D.

Vance, Russia are actually the good guys, right?

As you said, they're white, they're Christian.

In fact, Putin often makes the point of Putin is culturally a neoconservative.

I mean, he's against all the licentiousness of Western liberalism.

So, by the way, is Xi Jinping.

And it's why they don't like Europe.

Exactly.

They worry that the kind of acids of Western liberalism will change their societies as well.

And so in many ways, the Russians and the Chinese are not just balancing against the West geopolitically, but they're balancing against them culturally.

because they don't want these forces of modernization and liberalism to infect their societies.

But the twist now compared to the Cold War is they have allies within the West who feel the same way.