Ezra Klein and Annie Galvin, The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own, NYTimes, Apr. 10, 2026.

Here's the beginning of the interview:

Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.

Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure.

I want to start with Trump’s now infamous post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What did you think when you saw that?

I was horrified. But it goes beyond that.

It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while — which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.

Not to sound too corny about it, because, of course, we made mistakes, and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different.

After 1945, it said: We’re not going to be another imperial hegemon. We’re not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We’re actually going to try to build them, and we’re going to give them foreign aid.

That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away.

I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.

It just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been so distinctive in its world mission — a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an immigrant — that its leader could threaten to annihilate an entire people.

And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract: “civilization.” What we are talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people. You’re talking about 93 million people.

One thing that has always felt core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels, to me, on a deep level, like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual human lives were just understood as pawns in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests.

I’m not saying that there has not been disrespect or disregard for human life in the postwar era. That would be absurd.

But there was a commitment and a structure of values in which you didn’t threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing.

You see this in DOGE and its approach to U.S.A.I.D. — that there is something about how you treat or don’t treat, how you weigh or don’t weigh, the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machinations and that he just wipes away, as a kind of weakness or liberal piety.

If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.

We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.

You almost miss that because, even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that we were trying to help this country do better, we were trying to help these people do better.

What you are describing, quite accurately, is that Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th century — because sometimes people talk about how he loves McKinley, and he liked tariffs, and he’s like McKinley in that imperialism.

No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th-century European imperialist. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place. There was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal.

As you say, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life and dignity were never at the center of it. It was all a self-interested, short-term, extractive game. And Trump is hearkening back to that.

It’s interesting to ask where he gets it from. Because it really is probably fair to say that nobody else on the American political spectrum, if they were president, would speak like that. I don’t think JD Vance would speak like that. I don’t think Marco Rubio would speak like that.

There’s something that he brings to it — which is a callousness and a contempt for any expression of those values. For him, that’s all a sign of weakness, that’s the kind of [expletive] people say. But the reality is that’s the way he looks at the world.

It goes on from there.