America’s Dangerous Pessimism

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Most Americans think the country is in decline. So do their leaders. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have embraced foreign policies premised on the notion that the global order no longer serves American interests.

But Fareed Zakaria argues in a new essay for Foreign Affairs that these pessimistic assumptions are wrong. They’re leading the country to embrace strategies that will harm much of the world—and the United States most of all.

Fareed, thanks so much for joining me and for the powerful essay you wrote for our new issue. The title of that piece is “The Self-Doubting Superpower: America Shouldn’t Give Up on the World It Made.”

FAREED ZAKARIA

My pleasure. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Dan.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, let’s start with the essay. The piece opens by noting how pervasive and deep the pessimism about America’s position in the world is among a really huge swath of Americans across parties in this country. There’s a litany of pretty bracing statistics illustrating that that opened the piece. What do these pessimistic analyses—or maybe pessimistic vibes is a more precise way of putting it—get wrong, in your view?

FAREED ZAKARIA

Well, it’s really fascinating, right? When you ask people whether the United States is going to be more powerful, more influential in the next 10, 15, 20 years, you get very solid majorities of Americans saying, “No. America’s going to be less influential. It’s going to be less powerful.” And then you have the usual right track and wrong track number, which has now not crossed 50 percent, who say that America is on the right track for 20 years.

So there is this fairly long-standing, almost rooted pessimism that has developed, astonishingly, at a moment when, if you look at it in broader historical terms, at a point where the United States, after they won the Cold War, became the most powerful country in the world, dominated the international system. And so part of the puzzle here is, why is that happening? Why are Americans feeling so gloomy? But what I tried to do in this essay is talk about, what are the consequences of having this kind of pessimism? What does it mean for a foreign policy that is rooted in this kind of pessimism?

And with Trump, it’s obvious the whole campaign is entirely about pessimism. In fact, he put out a campaign video, and it was titled “A Nation in Decline.” Biden is different. On the surface, he talks about American exceptionalism and where our best years lie ahead, but it all sounds thin because the whole strategy, particularly the economic strategy, which is the heart of Biden's policies, is premised on the idea that we can’t compete in the world the way we used to. We need barriers. We need subsidies. We need tariffs. We need industrial policy. We need to block the Chinese, because in an open competition, they would do too well. So it feels like on both sides there is this presumption of pessimism.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And you often get from analysts and scholars who focus on hard military power assessments about the overwhelming American military advantage. I mean, I think what’s striking about your analysis in the essay is that you look at a much broader range of indicators that all point to the United States being in a pretty good position globally—even with a lot of changes in the nature of geopolitics, the rise of a slew of other powers. If you look at technological development, at demographics, at military spending or economic position, all of those look about as good as they ever have—and, in some cases, better than they did in the post–Cold War years, when we were at the height of our unipolar moment.

FAREED ZAKARIA

Yeah. That’s to me the most astonishing thing, which is, as I was looking at it more carefully, I realized that the pessimism is coinciding with a remarkable uptick in American power. So the basic measure that people often use is the percentage share of global GDP; how large are you as an economy, in the global economy? And what’s stunning to me is the United States in 1980, this is the moment of Reaganism and such, or 1990, which is the moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was in both cases 25 percent of global GDP. Well, guess what it is today: 25 percent of global GDP. The United States has maintained its weight in the world economy.

And just to give people a sense of the contrast, when we talk about the decline of the British Empire, Britain, by the end of World War II, was 4 percent of the world economy, and trying to run an empire that ruled almost a quarter of the population of the world. The United States is four to five times that size and is not trying to run a global empire of nearly that kind. So we’re in a very strong, healthy position.

If you look at technology, we’ve never been as strong as we are now. I used this statistic: in 1989, the top 10 companies in the world, six were Japanese. Only four were American. Today, nine are American. When you think about biotech and nanotech and, obviously, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, we lead in all those fields. Military, as you say, people know all about it. In fact, in military terms, the Chinese are catching up. That’s one area where we are clearly going to enter some kind of a bipolar world. But all the fundamental drivers of power, we’re doing astonishingly well.

Partly, that in a sense adds to the mystery of it, but it also redoubles my sense that we really need to have a policy that accurately reflects where we are. When in the early 1960s the United States was actually doing superbly, it convinced itself that it was actually in decline against the Soviet Union. So you have all kinds of missteps and fumbles, and I think that that sense of being behind the Soviet Union was at the heart of the Vietnam debacle because it was the sense of: “The Soviet Union is doing better than us. We cannot let them win in Vietnam.”

And if we had realized that, actually, the United States is doing fine, then one peripheral country 9,000 miles away going communist is not going to change that dynamic. And I think, similarly, with China today, we have this exaggerated fear of what China will do, which is rooted in the sense that we’re actually doing very badly.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You reference a Sam Huntington essay in the piece from the late ‘90s, but I was struck in reading your essay by the echoes and also some of the differences with an earlier Sam Huntington essay that he wrote in 1988, just before the end of the Cold War, which was about American declinism and the constructive force it often was in American society and strategy; that it was this fear of losing our edge that caused us to continue improving and innovating and refining our approaches and not resting on our laurels.

You see a different reaction to declinism in this moment. Rather than causing us to run faster, as you say at the end of the introduction of the piece, it’s causing us to “run scared.” Why do you think that is? What is the change in declinism from that Cold War version that was often healthy and constructive to what we have now?

FAREED ZAKARIA

Yeah. It’s a great question. Sam Huntington wrote that essay when I was a graduate student of his, so I saw a draft of that essay before it went to Foreign Affairs. He points out, as you say, that when the United States has worried about being in decline, it has got its house in order in various ways. It’s often fixed things.

And in this case, I feel like the difference is that during the Cold War, we were very attentive to building an international order that stood in opposition and in contrast to the communist world. So we never wanted to undermine or monkey with that order. On the contrary, we kept trying to build out a world of free trade and international rules and human rights, things like the Helsinki Accords, because it was all seen as the most powerful weapon we had to counter the Soviet bloc with its closed trade and lack of human rights and lack of norms and order.

This time, because we are so rattled by the rise of China and perhaps some other things, we are actually undermining that international order. To me, this is the central worry that I have in the piece, that we do things that we think will give us short-term advantage—violations of free trade, violations of the WTO [World Trade Organization], violations of other kinds of norms—because we feel like in the short run, this will give us the edge over China. In the short run, this will get us to put Iran on the back foot.

So, for example, the Trump withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and then the imposition of secondary sanctions completely wrecks a whole elaborate system of containment and sanctions on Iran that had been agreed to by the [UN] Security Council, that had been ratified in international law. And now the United States is, in a sense, the lawbreaker, and we do it because we think it gives us a momentary and temporary advantage.

But if you remember that famous quote from Vietnam, where some sergeant says—almost not reflecting or not realizing how ironic the statement was—he said, “We realized that, in order to save the village, we had to destroy it.” We are trying to save the international order by destroying it; by, in various ways, cheating or violating it in part on the theory that, at the end of the day, that will keep us strong, that will help us rebuild it.

But that’s the other part of this piece which I think is important, which is, we’re in a new world. Other countries have risen to power, influence, confidence; and they watch that hypocrisy, and they watch those double standards, and they are very sensitive to them. And while you could do this kind of thing in an age of greater American unilateralism—when, say, Turkey was a nothing economy and India was a nothing economy and Brazil was a nothing economy—today, it’s much harder. Because that’s the other story of the last 30 or 40 years: these countries see the hypocrisy, they call it out, and it affects the way in which they’re willing to participate in that same open international order.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I want to come back to the question of how the United States interacts with this set of countries, and new and rising powers. But to linger on the Biden diagnosis for a second—I mean, as you say, the roots of Trump’s pessimism are, I think, quite clear, because he’s so explicit about it. It’s a little bit more mysterious when you look at the Biden team and you have members of that team, probably Tony Blinken is the clearest example, who talk often of the rules-based order and the legacy of that order in the post–World War II years and the Cold War. President Biden often talks about that era with a degree of nostalgia and clearly has a kind of attachment to the foreign policy frameworks of that period.

But as you say, a “strategy that is premised on mistaken assumptions will lead the country and the world astray”—I’m taking that from the piece. What are the assumptions that the Biden administration is making that you think are leading it astray? What are the mistakes in that view of recent history?

FAREED ZAKARIA

I think the fundamental mistake is to view the United States’ economic position in the last 30 years as having gotten much worse, and that it got worse because of a blind adherence to a neoliberal policies, globalization, and such. You see this most clearly, of course, in Jake Sullivan’s speech at Brookings on international economic policy, itself remarkable that the national security advisor would be giving a speech on international economic policy. In a previous administration, I actually don’t think that that would even have been allowed. The Secretary of the Treasury would’ve made a speech like that.

And what it reflects, I think, is this core concern, because Jake Sullivan, who is an incredibly intelligent person and an extraordinarily disciplined mind, is trying to figure out how to develop a foreign policy that reflects the anxiety that Americans have. And I think that it’s important to put it that way because Jake Sullivan is very intelligent, and he’s also—and I think he would not view this as a criticism—but he’s very politically savvy. He’s aware that there is a certain strain of a certain part of America that feels exactly as he’s describing, that the classic blue-collar steelworker who may have perhaps used to vote Democratic and now votes for Trump—is doing so because he feels that the world of globalization—and globalism, as Trump puts it—has robbed him of his job, his dignity, his status.

So I think in some ways the policy is an effort to respond to that. That’s what, presumably, Biden meant when he talked about a foreign policy for the middle class. And again, these are all, I think, largely innovations and inventions that come out of the very fertile mind of Jake Sullivan. And that foreign policy for the middle class is the idea that America has been industrially hollowed out by globalization, that it has lost its footing, it’s allowed China to move too far, too fast, using unfair trade practices and such. And I think while there is some truth to all of that, of course, it’s substantially exaggerated.

The reality is the United States has been losing manufacturing jobs for 70 years at roughly the same pace. There’s a bit of a blip in the ‘90s when China joins the World Trade Organization, it descends a little bit faster—but largely that is because the United States has been transitioning into a services economy. Eighty percent of the U.S. economy is now services; eight out of ten jobs are services. I may have the statistics slightly off, but it’s roughly in that range.

And by the way, when you look at countries like Germany and France, Germany has massive industrial policies to help its manufacturing class, apprenticeship policies and such. Maybe you wouldn’t call them industrial policies, but policies that try very hard to maintain manufacturing. France coddles its workers with all kinds of labor laws and provisions. They both have had a decline in manufacturing at roughly the same pace and scale of the United States. The idea that we are uniquely losing these manufacturing jobs is simply not borne out by the data.

Secondly, it’s not really largely because of China. It’s happening because of a much larger global supply chain in which China plays a large role because it’s a huge country—but it’s not really as if if China had not been there, we would not have lost these jobs. Those jobs would’ve been lost to a combination of Bangladesh and India and Sri Lanka and Thailand and such, all of which tells you that this is partly the evolution of advanced economies. And perhaps most importantly, if you think about the data I gave you about the strength of the U.S. economy, you ask yourself, “Would we really want to trade places with any of these other rich countries? Who got it right after all?”

You look at Germany, where people do point to the manufacturing economy, which is true and it’s extraordinary—but Germany has nothing in the whole world of information economy, right? In the digital economy, Germany is a nonplayer, despite being the third-largest economy in the world. The only digital company of any note that Germany has is SAP, which is 30 years old, second-tier. Meanwhile, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, you could go on and on. We dominate that world. We are going to dominate the world of biotech.

So would you really rather be an economy whose greatest strengths lie in cars, chemicals, and machine tools, which are really basically second industrial revolution products that come out of the 1920s? Or would you rather be France, which is basically—the French economy is now luxury goods; would you really be better off making handbags and scarves? So it feels like we’re missing the real strengths of the American economy, and that the Biden policy, as a result, is in danger of two things: one, closing down this world of open economics, open rules, norms that we have embraced since 1945; and secondly, reacting much more strongly to the China threat than it deserves.

An Asian statesman put it to me this way, he said: “Look, China is a 1.4 billion-person society. It’s got lots of advanced stuff going on in it. By really violating core trade rules, you can probably set them back by a few years.” And most people in the government will tell you, that’s all they’re hoping to do. You set them back by three, four years on some of these things. But think about the geopolitical price you pay for doing that. You really have the danger of heading down into a Cold War 2.0. You have the danger of forcing countries to choose between China and the United States and all kinds of issues when China is, for most countries in the world, their largest trading partner. Is the tradeoff worth it?

And that’s one of the questions I think the Biden administration hasn’t asked itself: Is this tradeoff worth it? You’re seeing, already, the news that the Chinese are able to make a lot of the chips that we are trying to ban. It’s some harder work and it takes more energy and it’s more expensive. So again, it raises this question: for keeping them three to four years back, are you gaining enough economically to justify the cost of souring geopolitical relations and heading into what could end up being nuclear arms races, AI races, space races, biotech races, lack of global cooperation on climate change, lack of global cooperation on reforming trade rules, and all that?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s another essay in the same issue as yours by Gordon Hanson, who, as you know, is one of the economists famous for tracing the scale and extent of the China shock, the effect on American workers and factories of China’s entry into the global economy. And Hanson makes the same point you do, that the obsession with manufacturing is misguided. But it’s striking that the political consensus, the turn against trade across both parties, is so solid and so uniform despite what you hear from even an economist like Gordon Hanson about what the right diagnosis is. What is your explanation for the turn in the U.S. political system and among U.S. voters against this trading system, if it’s not that the causal chain that they paint is the correct one? What did we do wrong over the last 30 years, if not that?

FAREED ZAKARIA

There’s a very long history of this. As I said, change always has dislocations, and it dislocates certain people—even though, in aggregate terms, you move ahead. I mean, from the book I’ve been writing, I’ve been struck by the fact that the Venetians in the fifteenth century, who were the greatest and earliest beneficiaries of trade in those days, trade basically to the eastern world, to the Byzantine Empire, toward the end of their great reign of glory; turn against trade because they start to think that there are too many people getting in on the action, they’re losing out, and they start to put in tariff barriers. The Dutch, after being the great avatars of free trade, start to turn against it.

The most vivid example, of course, is Britain. People think of Britain as having been a great free trading country. It was, in its great era of supremacy and glory. But by the late nineteenth century, they started to worry in precisely the same terms, that Germany is catching up, the United States is catching up, and they turned toward what they call imperial tariffs. This was most eloquently articulated by Joseph Chamberlain; Neville Chamberlain’s brother, as I recall. He was the great avatar of this whole idea of imperial preferences, which is essentially the British version of friend-shoring. It was saying, you know, “We’ll have free trade within the empire, but not with the Germans, not with the Americans.”

So we’ve seen this happen, and it always ends badly for the country that moves in that direction. But why does it happen? Look, what happens is you are always fighting the last war. So why did William Jennings Bryan get nominated three times to be the Democratic candidate for president, even though he kept losing? He wasn’t really a Democrat; he was really a populist. This was the period of flourishing of populism in America. The last great flourishing was around the 1890s, 1910s. And why was it? It was because agriculture, which was 50 percent of the American workforce in those days—America was moving from an agricultural nation to an industrial nation. And even in 1900, 50 percent of America was employed in agriculture, but it was declining. Just to give you a sense of what was once half the American workforce is now between one and two percent of the American workforce when you measure it, depending on how you measure it.

So, similarly, I think manufacturing holds this, you know, “We’re fighting the last war.” And we have this nostalgic image, just as people in the ‘20s had this nostalgic image of an America of farms, this Jeffersonian vision, which is exactly what Jennings Bryan played on. Similarly, we now have this idea of the America that used to build stuff and that’s solid and real, and those people are real Americans. When Sarah Palin used to talk about real Americans, that’s the image that she would conjure up, and it’s just not the reality of the American economy anymore.

The reality of the American economy is service workers. That’s where all the growth in the economy is. Even when manufacturing output goes up in America, which it has in recent years, manufacturing employment doesn’t go up that much. So all these chip factories that we’re bribing—Intel, for example, and TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] to build; I mean, they mostly employ software engineers, very small number of blue-collar workers who actually do stuff with their hands.

But nostalgia plays a very large role in politics because you know the world you’ve lost. You don’t know the world you’re going into, and there isn't a lobby for that. There’s always a lobby for the past, not for the future.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note that the rise of China is probably the biggest change on the global stage that has caused this self -doubt and panic among Americans and among many of our allies. What do you think we’re getting wrong in our diagnosis of China’s rise and global role?

FAREED ZAKARIA

It is the most significant change in the global landscape, I would argue, probably since the rise of Germany in the late nineteenth century, because Japan was not really as big. But what happens with Germany is you get a power that is so large that no combination of European countries can counter it, can balance it, and that what the European balance of power of the nineteenth century rested on was the idea that no one power since Napoleon’s France had the ability to break out, that there’d always be a balance that could form. Well, Germany became so powerful that the only way to balance it, it turned out, was to have the United States, a non-European power, enter the balance.

I think the rise of China has a similarly kind of seismic effect on the global system because you have a country that is already the second-largest economy in the world—quite possibly in purchasing power terms already the largest, and perhaps in purchasing power terms will stay the largest—but is also a technology power, is also going to be a military power.

And the big shift and the important difference is the other powers that rose in the twentieth century, except the Soviet Union, which was countered and contained, were Germany and Japan, which were two powers that grew within the American security system. And both had histories which made it very hard for them to be active politically and militarily on the world stage, right? So even though Germany and Japan, by 1990, were the second- and third-richest countries in the world—they had tiny armies, they were not politically trying to flex their muscles. Because of the memories of World War II, they were part of the American security system.

None of that applies to China, and that’s why China’s rise is that important. So I say this all to say, look, I’m not one of those people who thinks China is going to collapse and wither into nothingness; no. It is going to be the second great power in the international system, probably for our lifetimes. But it has many, many limitations.

First, it has the limitations you’ve heard about. It’s always hard to make that final transition from a middle-income economy to an advanced industrial economy. And I don’t know that China will make it. It’ll still be plenty powerful because there’s four times as many people as the United States. But it may get stuck in the $16,000 per capita range. It may find that the demographic shift that is taking place makes it too hard to really move forward; that certainly was Japan’s experience. It may find that some of the problems that it has found, once it asserted state control over the economy, become very hard to unwind.

But I think the most important thing that we don’t think enough about with China is the United States is unique geopolitically because it has grown to power in an area that has allowed it to be fundamentally non-threatening to other countries. It is surrounded by two vast oceans and two weak neighbors. It was born as a colony and therefore has within it a kind of anti-colonialism built in. And so despite the fact that it has risen from that position—13 colonies of the British Empire—to become the most powerful country in the history of the world, it has acquired very little territory. I mean, there was a smattering during that period of late imperialism—the Philippines, Cuba, and all that—but that was a very tiny part of it.

Fundamentally, it’s been an anti-colonial power, and that means it has not triggered the kind of normal balancing behavior that international relations specialists would argue—you know, there’s always a puzzle about, if countries balance against rising powers, why have so few people balanced against the greatest rising power in the history of the world? And there is something unusual about the American case.

China does not have any of those characteristics. China is rising in a crowded continent: Asia. It has 16 neighbors; it has 16 border disputes. These countries are all different in terms of their politics, their political makeup. Some are democracies, some are monarchies. So there are all kinds of reasons to assume that there’s going to be tension—and there is. As China rises, what you see is it makes Japan anxious, it makes India furious, it makes Australia nervous; and that reality is a kind of self-limiting factor on Chinese power.

It means, by the way, there is all the more reason for it to be handled very, very carefully and shrewdly with the right mixture of deterrence and diplomacy, because the fact that there are these natural limitations on China's growth or rise of influence doesn’t mean you won’t have tussles and tensions. In fact, precisely because of that you will have tussles and tensions. And you have to try to make sure that those tussles and tensions don’t translate into what they did in 1914 in Europe and in 1939 in Europe, and instead can be checked and contained. And that’s where this mixture of deterrence and diplomacy comes into being.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you assess the Biden administration’s response to China as it’s adjusted over the last year or so? How close is it to getting that mix right? Or in what ways is it getting that mix right and in what ways is it getting that mix wrong?

FAREED ZAKARIA

So I think it started out very badly. I think the Anchorage meeting where the national security advisor and the secretary of state invite the Chinese to America for a serious senior strategic dialogue and then essentially engage in a public relations exercise of reading the Chinese the riot act in front of reporters in public—which obviously means you can be sure the Chinese are never going to do anything about something like that—it was designed simply as an act of public humiliation. And the Chinese then turned around and, in a very spirited way, respond. And that response of Yang Jiechi, the Chinese counterpart, goes viral in China, and there were hundreds of thousands of t-shirts in China with one of his statements emblazoned on it. So that set things off in a very bad place.

Then you had some policies that the United States put in place, many of which I agree with—that’s the chip ban and things like that—which were necessary to prevent China and the Chinese military from acquiring too many of these technologies too quickly. But then you have the fact that Biden never reversed the Trump tariffs on China, even though he criticized them continuously and consistently during the campaign, correctly pointing out that Americans were paying the price for this and that it was doing nothing to stop China's ability to trade.

So there were a lot of Trump policies that were left over. There was the additional stuff like Anchorage. Now, why was all this being done? In my view, the Biden team was very concerned that they were going to be viewed as soft on China, that this was going to give an opening to the Republicans. And this was all largely, I think, performative for domestic politics. But you pay a price for it in foreign policy.

And the Chinese became very hardline, very reluctant to engage on any issue from military to military, just even confidence-building and communications. No conversations on things like nuclear weapons—where the Chinese are planning to quadruple or quintuple the size of their arsenal, but they will do it now with no consultation or even discussion with the United States—global warming, climate change, nothing.

So I think at some point the Biden team decided that they had, firstly, put in place enough of the policies that they had to put in place, and there wasn’t going to be a massive ratcheting up of that. Secondly, I think they felt they were inoculated on the political side, that Biden was clearly going to be seen as tough on China, and they began to make a course correction. Simultaneously, I think Xi realized that some of his "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy and aggressive stances, particularly towards countries like Australia, had backfired. And so he also realized he needed a better relationship.

So both countries have misplayed their hands. And Xi, for a much longer period, has been engaged in this kind of unnecessarily aggressive stance. They both are trying to find some kind of modus vivendi—and the Biden team, I think, has very intelligently and shrewdly tried to find this working relationship.

The question will be: It will always take two to tango, and will the Chinese be willing to play ball on this? I hope so. Biden is right when he says we’re going to be competitive. This is going to be a competitive relationship. The point, however, is to find a way of limiting the areas where that competition takes place so that we don’t end up in a nuclear arms race of the kind that we did during the Cold War, with all the attending dangers of accidental launches and things like the Cuban missile crisis, to see whether there are places where there is a possibility for a win-win on things like trade, on things like climate, on things like AI, so that you have some common rules.

And that all seems within the realm of the possible. I mean, after all, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to cooperate on, for example, pandemics. We helped inoculate the world against smallpox and things like that. So I think that there should be places where we have that ability. This is an unusual situation we’re in, where the United States and China are deeply intertwined in economic terms.

The United States and the Soviet Union, the peak year of trade was $2 billion that year—I think it was in 1987. The United States and China trade $2 billion a day. And while there will be some decoupling, it’s not going to go down that much. So we have to find a way to be in a kind of frenemy-like world with the Chinese, to use a Facebook term, where we are going to have to engage, we’re going to have to counter and deter. And can those things happen simultaneously? That’s the challenge. I’m glad that both sides are trying to find a more serious way to be able to meet that challenge.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Taiwan remains the most dangerous flashpoint in that relationship, I think, and with apologies for being so self-referential, there’s another essay in the issue by Bonnie Glaser and Jessica Chen Weiss and Tom Christensen that points to mistakes in Washington and Taipei, as well as in Beijing, that have upset the relatively stable status quo around Taiwan. And I should note that Tom Christensen served in the George W. Bush administration, Jessica Chen Weiss in the Biden administration, so this is a critique from members of both parties. What is your level of concern about Taiwan and to what extent do you see U.S. policy as having gone off course on that especially delicate part of the relationship?

FAREED ZAKARIA

Yeah. That’s a very good piece in the magazine because it shows you, if you were to look at it as a kind of technocrat and say the goal is to maintain the status quo because that helps everybody—and by the way, even when you poll people in Taiwan, the majority of them say they want the status quo. They don’t want independence and they don’t want unification with China. But I think at the heart of the question of Taiwan is something that goes beyond technocratic issue.

In the old days, the Chinese strategy towards Taiwan, Deng Xiaoping’s strategy, was premised on the idea that in the very long run, time was on China’s side, that at the end of the day, 1.4 billion people on one side of the Taiwan Strait were building the largest economy in the world, and that the twenty-odd million people on the other side of the Taiwan Strait were inevitably going to be drawn to a magnet by this enormous attractive appeal of the Chinese economy and that China would relax and open up and have a kind of “live and let live” policy toward Taiwan.

Remember, the “one country, two systems” idea was proposed by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 for Taiwan. It was meant to be a way of luring Taiwan to think, look, don’t worry. And in his original formulation, not only did he say you can have your own political system, he said you can have your own army, you can have your own judges, you can have your own—it was very much designed as a kind of “you will be able to be Taiwan in everything but name, and we’ll just have a kind of confederation.” The Taiwanese turned it down, which is why he then offered it to Hong Kong, again as a demonstration it was meant to be.

What’s changed is, I think, the Chinese no longer think time is on their side. And that was why, for example, I think that they reneged on those fundamental promises to Hong Kong—because they believed that places like Hong Kong and Taiwan were slipping out of their grasp, that Hong Kong was slipping out of its grasp by staying so independent.

And Taiwan, most importantly, what they’re noticing is, every year, Taiwan becomes a little bit more independent, coherent, proud of its democracy, developing a sense of Taiwanese nationalism that is fundamentally rooted in its democratic character, and that’s all true. And so what that tells, I think, Xi Jinping, is that 20 years from now, Taiwan will be more independent-minded, not less. And if you look at the polling, while it is as I described it, younger people in Taiwan are more pro-independence-minded than older people. So they have gone from a feeling of confidence—and this is, again, another one of those cases where depending on whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, you get nervous or not—China is now pessimistic about where this is headed. And so, could Xi Jinping decide that he has a window here of time before Taiwan becomes truly independent-minded, before it is able to develop a strategy, a so-called porcupine strategy where it becomes too difficult to invade and conquer? So that does worry me. As somebody who generally thinks that there is still a path for peaceful relations between the United States and China, this does worry me a great deal.

I think there should be almost like a constant dialogue between the United States and China—a constant, ongoing strategic dialogue—over Taiwan, because the danger of a really significant global conflict over Taiwan is very real. It would be the end of globalization as we know it. It would be a real bifurcated world economy, but this time not with a marginal player like the Soviet Union, but rather with the second-largest economy in the world. As I say, by some measure, it’s the largest economy in the world. And Taiwan really could blow the whole thing apart.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to get your quick thoughts before we close on the two active major conflicts today, the first of those being the war in Gaza. You note the growing costs of American hypocrisy or isolation on issues. Do you have concerns about that isolation? Are there ways you would adjust the Biden administration’s approach, or is this the best it can do given contending pressures?

FAREED ZAKARIA

Look, the Biden administration has made a strategic decision that the best way to influence the course of action is to come out strongly in favor of Israel, to support it, to give it the political diplomatic cover it needs to also give it the military assistance it needs, and then build up and use that political capital to both restrain it in some areas and then to push it toward a political solution. So far, Netanyahu has pocketed the support of the United States but done very little to address the caveats and cautions.

But the real hypocrisy and the real isolation the United States faces is this, which is, we rightly say that borders should not be changed by force, that the Russian occupation of Ukraine is illegitimate, but we don’t really act that way about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which is now in its fifty-sixth year. Technically, the U.S. government’s position is, “This is illegal and cannot be ratified and legitimated,” but in practice we don’t behave like that. We have not pushed the Israeli government on this.

So I think the heart of the issue is that not the support for this particular military action—which, as I say, given the nature of the Hamas attack and given this calculation of trying to hug Israel close to have some influence on it, I understand—but the question is, “Is the United States going to push on that issue?” That is, first of all, the most glaring hypocrisy. I mean, if the United States can press on that and take this political capital it’s gaining to change that dynamic, I think that it will find itself less isolated. So far, it has been reluctant to do so.

As Aaron David Miller, one of the three Americans who has probably spent the most time on this subject, along with Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, negotiating with the Palestinians and the Israelis, he says, “Our problem, the reason we’ve never been able to produce this peace, is we’ve always been Israel’s lawyer. We’ve never taken a position that forced the Israelis to make concessions.” And maybe coming out of this war, one of the things that can change is the United States can really try to do something like that, by the way, which would be better for Israel than people realize.

And there are people in Israel who understand this. But imagine an Israel that did not have this albatross of the occupied territories on its neck. This is, then, an advanced technological, economic powerhouse that is achieving European levels of per capita GDP; that is able to trade, transact, interact with the entire world, and has rid itself of this thing that is so deeply corrosive to its democratic character. I think that the biggest winner in that situation would be Israel. But it’s hard for it to get there, and the United States could help it get there.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Meanwhile, Ukraine, if we’d been having this conversation five or six months ago, it would’ve been seen as a success of the administration and a cause for some optimism. That’s not the case today. You and I were both in Kyiv a couple months ago at a moment when the Ukrainian counteroffensive was tough going and incurring huge losses on the Ukrainian side. Do you worry about the end of U.S. support for Ukraine, given what’s been happening in Congress with the Republican majority in the House and the Republicans in the Senate, their opposition or their skepticism about Ukraine aid? And do you see a need for a shift in strategy on the Ukrainian part or on the Biden administration’s part, given that change in support?

FAREED ZAKARIA

Yeah, I worry about all of that, and I think I first worry about the military situation on the ground. I think that, first of all, to call it a stalemate is a mistake. There’s a lot of fighting going on. But essentially, what we have is a situation where neither side is gaining much ground on a permanent basis—in that sense, very much like World War I, where you wouldn’t really call it a stalemate when you have those massive attempted breakouts, didn’t go anywhere, Verdun, Passchendaele, all that, thousands of people dying. It’s closer to that than some kind of a frozen conflict. So the question is, if the Ukrainians are not able to gain the initiative and break through, there’s a real danger the Russians will. And so I think what we are thinking about is, it’s stable now; can we tilt it in Ukraine’s favor?

No; the question is, is it going to tilt in Russia’s favor? And in that situation, what is going to happen is possibly the overrunning of more of Ukraine, certainly the destruction of more Ukrainian cities, certainly making Ukraine even less viable as a economic entity—which means as a nation, it means it already can’t really export out of Odessa, which is its main lifeline to the world. If it becomes more and more difficult for it to move goods, it becomes even more of a kind of rump state that really can’t exist except in Russia’s shadow. So I worry a lot that things are not going well on the ground now.

There are two things, two elements there. Ukrainian strategy, it seems to me, has been a little bit too ambitious. They’re trying to reclaim everything. They’re trying to get back Crimea. All of that seems, Crimea seems to be militarily close to impossible. You can harass Russia over there. But they should focus on what they really want, which is making sure that Odessa is economically viable, and therefore getting back those territories that, in a sense, cast a shadow on Odessa. And if you make a breakthrough in those limited areas, you have, at least, the makings of a South Korea-like Ukraine that can exist and thrive economically, even if it has not gotten back all its territories.

The second piece is it doesn’t have enough of the armor and the weapons and the ammunition that it needs. So if the West does not ramp up that support, we know the outcome. The outcome will be that this massive, multinational, huge empire, Russia, which has turned its economy entirely into a war economy, is going to win.

The Middle East is fundamentally a kind of humanitarian tragedy with a few geopolitical consequences. Ukraine is a fundamentally geopolitical tragedy, where it would mean the breakdown of the global order. If you have a spoiler state on the scale of Russia, a rogue state on the scale of Russia wrecking the international system, to me, that would be the beginning of the unraveling of liberal international order. So the stakes are much, much higher in Ukraine than they are in Israel.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me close with a question closer to home. There’s a striking line in your essay, quoting you here: “The most worrying challenge to the rules-based international order does not come from China, Russia or Iran. It comes from the United States.” We’re having this discussion a couple of weeks away from New Year’s Day 2024, when we’ll all be obsessing over the prospect of a return of Donald Trump to the White House—or at least a fractious election, which we will once again call into question the basic functioning of American democracy.

Does the return of Trump wipe away all of the assurance and confidence about America’s prospects that run through this essay? I mean, there’s this big exception to a lot of the analysis that all of this could come apart if you have a leader like Donald Trump back. Is that pessimism warranted? Would that wipe away a lot of these advantages, or do you see it as more nuanced than that?

FAREED ZAKARIA

So what I worry about Trump is actually something deeper than, and God knows it’s deep enough to worry about democracy as a result of his election, but that is going to take its own course. He will either win or he will claim he won, and each one presents a constitutional crisis of its own.

But what I worry about is, let’s say he wins and he wins cleanly. What Trump represents at an ideological level, to the extent one can talk about ideology, is the return of Republican isolationism. And I think we forget now that this was a very deep strain in American history, and this is what wrecked the post–World War I international order: the reluctance of the United States, despite the fact that it was the most powerful country in the international system, from playing the part that it needed to play to uphold that international system.

And that isolationism returned after World War II. Robert Taft, the leading Republican of the time, was vehemently opposed to NATO. In fact, there’s this very famous moment where he wants to run for the Republican nomination. He hears Eisenhower is running and he knows that if Eisenhower runs—Eisenhower is the most popular man in America, the victor of World War II—Taft didn’t stand a chance. And so he essentially sends a message to Eisenhower saying, “I would hope you would stay out of this.” And he goes to visit Eisenhower, who is then commander of NATO in Brussels, so supreme allied commander. And we have this from both sides, so we know it’s true. Eisenhower tells him, “I will issue a one-line Sherman-esque declaration that I will not run for the nomination, I will not accept it, if you issue a one-line statement saying you unequivocally and unreservedly support NATO. That is why I’m running.” And Taft says, “I cannot give you that assurance.” And that is why Eisenhower runs for the presidency in 1952: to bring the United States in a bipartisan fashion into the world.

Trump represents the unraveling of Eisenhower’s journey, of Eisenhower’s mission. And if the United States returns to a situation where it is deeply divided on that fundamental issue, are we engaged in the world? Are we engaged in Europe? Are we engaged with our allies in Asia? Are we going to be sitting and nitpicking over every expenditure and claiming that they are free-riding with us? That takes us into a much more dangerous world because the world order we have built since 1945, which is the best we’ve ever—you know, the most peaceful, most stable, most prosperous world order, really, in human history, it has rested on American power and on American intentions and American policy. And we’re still plenty strong enough to continue to do that, and that’s the point of the essay. But it’s not just American capability, it’s American intention, it’s, you know, American willingness to play that role benefits us enormously. Because we are the richest country in the world, we benefit from peace and stability and predictability and order and trade.

So this is not the case of Trump as the crazy man. This is the case of Trump and his ideology, which, what worries me is it’s the one thing he’s always believed. In 1985, when he was a real estate developer, he took out an ad in the New York Times. And in those days, ads in the New York Times cost a lot of money, and Donald Trump is super cheap, so we know he must have felt this very deeply. And the ad is basically about, we need to have Japan and countries like Japan stop ripping us off on international trade, and we need NATO to stop ripping us off on security. So even then, Donald Trump was sounding this alarm. He didn’t seem to notice that he was fundamentally wrong then, that we did just fine vis-à-vis Japan, and that our commitment to NATO actually won us the Cold War. But those views are unchanged since 1985, and those views could wreck the international system.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Fareed, thank you for such a wide-ranging conversation and for, really, the important essay that you have in our new issue. The title is “The Self-Doubting Superpower.”

FAREED ZAKARIA

Great to be with you, Dan.