Fareed Zakaria

You don't get to just make your policy happen any which way.

And what Trump is showing you is the real cost of that.

You know, what your point makes me think about is the degree to which maybe during the Cold War, American politics was constrained, was disciplined by the reality of the ideological contest between the Soviet Union, the need for America to be this beacon of freedom and democracy.

There was a sense in which...

Hubert Humphrey once said this, that he thought the reason for the civil rights movement was there was a foreign policy reason.

We had to show the communist world that America was in fact the shining city on the hill.

And since then, I think what's happened is honestly, we have no competition.

We've become so powerful.

It's exactly the opposite of the MAGA narrative.

We have no check, no constraints.

I think at some level, like the power has gone to our heads and the power has gone particularly to somebody like Trump's head.

Look at the way he treats other countries, right?

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.