I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
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.
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 are leading the country to embrace strategies that will harm much of the world and the United States,
most of all.
Three 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 that made my pleasure.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you then.
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?
It's really fascinating 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 is going to be less influential, it's going to be less powerful.