I found the Fareed Zakaria interview with Charlie Rose very helpful:
Zakaria is hardly a man of the left. He supported the war, but now believes it was a horrible mistake. He’s pro free trade. At some point when we have sane leadership, we can get into a deeper discussion of trade policy. It’s a critical subject, and it’s not an either/or kind of thing. It’s just that this administration has created so many other issues that outweigh trade policy in importance, that it seems hardly worth talking about. We have to worry first about unshredding the constitution, then we can worry about America’s role in the world.
But Zakaria supports what I have believed from the beginning: that this obsession with Islamo-fascism is an absurd distraction and a huge waste of time, lives, and resources. It’s a police problem, not a military one. And while we’re obsessed with our Moby Dick, the world moves on.
Our current mentality and the policies that follow from it is making us a joke and increasingly an irrelevancy. Zakaria’s point is that the world wants us to lead, but if we can’t, to get out of the way. The world will find a way to do its thing without us.
***
UPDATE: Zakaria’s book is being discussed this week at TPM Cafe Book Club. I think that the one weakness that should emerge in Zakaria’s analysis is his tone-deafness to wealth and power distribution upward. Haven’t read the book yet, but some things he has said suggest this is a problem for him.
Leave a Reply