Preet Bharara: Fareed Zakaria, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Fareed Zakaria: Such a pleasure, Preet.

Preet Bharara: Long overdue. So, one thing that’s been in the news a lot and we should talk about is the mystery, although some people think it’s not much of a mystery, of what happened to the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who you know personally, correct?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. I actually know him quite well. About 16 or 17 years ago, I was invited to go to Saudi Arabia because I’d been writing some tough stuff in Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11. And the Saudi ambassador to the UK, Prince Turki bin Faisal—very, very powerful Saudi royal—said to me, “You should come and see Saudi Arabia. You don’t understand it. Spend a week.” So I decided, you know what? I’ll go. And I spent, I think, even longer than that. Jamal was my handler. He was working for the Saudi government. He was the guy interfacing with people like me. And what was striking to me about him at the time was he was really moderate. I mean, he was clearly the face of liberal reform in Saudi Arabia, so he was making the case for why they should be moving faster on women driving and things like that. But he was staunchly pro-monarchy. He was not in favor of a democracy. He kept saying, “We can’t arrest preachers because these are part of Saudi society.” So, his whole impulse was a very moderate, incremental reform. And, you know, he’s been pretty true to that ever since. He’s never been somebody who’s been a radical, “let’s get rid of the monarchy and then have democracy in Saudi Arabia” kind of guy.

So, to see him, first of all, to be branded an enemy of the state, essentially had to live in self-imposed exile in Washington, and then to see what has happened to him, it’s actually startling. It’s surprising. It’s very unsettling. Because the Saudis were not a police state of this kind. Saudi Arabia was generally a patronage state more than a police state. They bought off their opposition. This is more a Vladimir Putin, you know, kind of gory dismemberment of somebody, to make somebody die a painful death, maybe as a way to signal to other people. That’s—that’s Putin.

Preet Bharara: So why do you think he ended up that high on the enemy’s list for the Saudi regime? What is going on there, and what do you think happened?

Fareed Zakaria: There are two theories, and honestly, nobody knows. This is a black box absolute monarchy. I mean, it’s run like a medieval monarchy from the 16^th century or something, so who knows? But I think that there’s two plausible theories. The first is that Jamal was threatening precisely because he was actually very much part of the Saudi elite. This is a guy who comes from a very prominent non-royal family. That famous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a billionaire, he’s Jamal’s uncle. Jamal has relatives who are even in other indirect ways even related to the royal family. So, he’s a well-placed guy. He was working for people like Turki bin Faisal, very powerful royal. This suggests a very powerful schism within the elite. So, there’s—one theory is that Jamal was important because he was actually an establishment member and was part of an opposing faction of the establishment. The other is, look, this is an absolute monarchy. Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t like people writing things against him. He doesn’t like the idea that there is somebody out there. And in that classic way, that famous line of Henry II when he’s upset about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, and he says, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Mohammed bin Salman said something like that, and people went out and did this.

Preet Bharara: Well, that’s interesting, because then that suggests that MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, has some plausible deniability, because that’s the whole point of that famous phrase, right? That it can be viewed—

Fareed Zakaria: Exactly.

Preet Bharara: —as just a comment as opposed to a directive. So which do you think it was?

Fareed Zakaria: I think, you know, we’re all speculating. It seems unlikely that you would send two planeloads of people to Istanbul, including people who are skilled in the art of apparently dismemberment, if that is in fact true. These are all leaks from the Turkish government, so we don’t know if it’s true. But if that story is true, it’s very difficult to imagine that this happened without Mohammed bin Salman’s knowledge. If in fact, this was an abduction gone awry, which is plausible—I mean, it’s—we don’t know enough here, but—

Preet Bharara: But for abduction, you always want to make sure you have a bone saw as a backup plan.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] Yeah. That’s—that’s the part that makes it very, very—the part here that makes this very difficult to believe anything other than a pretty dark interpretation is there is no body, you know? I mean, if he died of a heart attack while being interrogated—I don’t even understand how you can go from interrogation to murder. There’s many, many shades between interrogation and murder. I mean, Preet, you’ve seen police interrogations your whole life. I imagine you don’t see a lot of them that go from, “We’re asking you a few question” to “Oops, the guy’s dead.”

Preet Bharara: Yeah. No, but I mean, look, there are stories of that happening when very harsh interrogation techniques have been applied outside the norm. But yes, I agree with you. But can we take a step back? By the way, I should mention that we’re recording this at about noon on Tuesday, and maybe the facts will emerge and change over the next few days before this drops. But assume that it was a premeditated murder. People showed up. In Turkey, there are allegations that they had material, including a bone a saw, and people who were skilled in these arts, if you want to call them arts. So, suppose it was the intentional will of the Saudi regime, MBS in particular, to have Jamal killed. Why go to that length, and why do it in a foreign country in your embassy?

Fareed Zakaria: So, I think, again, stipulating that we’re making all the assumptions you just made, if this was premeditated and planned, it suggests that MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, is actually a much darker figure than we realize, and there really is a quality of the Vladimir Putin-like desire for control. Because what that suggests, very much like Putin, is the reason you do these assassinations outside of the home country is you’re sending a signal to every dissident anywhere in the world that says, “You can run. You can’t hide. You may think you’re safe in the United States. You may think you’re safe in Turkey. You’re not. We can get to you anywhere.” That’s why the Russians have always assassinated people in London, in Surrey, wherever it is, because they’re a signal. That’s why they do the assassinations in a particularly gruesome fashion. That’s why you use poison, because you want it to be a slow, painful death.

So, if that’s the case, as I said, this is a big shift for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has not been a place like this. It’s very different in that way from even a place like Egypt, let alone Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There were never tens of thousands of political prisoners languishing in Saudi jails. Oh no. The Saudi model, as I said, was—it was patronage. It was bribery. You buy off your opposition. You put a few people in jail. But it does seem like we’re seeing a new and much tougher kind of Saudi monarchy.

Preet Bharara: So, now the question is, this happened. Let’s say it turns out that it was intentional. What is the United States supposed to do about it?

Fareed Zakaria: I think there’s no question what the Trump administration wants to do about it. Trump has invested so much in his relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Preet Bharara: Right. And not just Trump—his son-in-law, too.

Fareed Zakaria: His son-in-law too. And that tells you something, when the relationship is basically being handled within the family. This is—there is a kind of almost Mafia-like aspect to this element of the Trump administration, where when it’s being handled by Don Corleone and Sunny and Michael, you know this is important, right? So, what they have done is they have subcontracted American foreign policy in the Middle East to Saudi Arabia. If you think about it, the United States used to always try to be the great balancer in the Middle East. That was Henry Kissinger’s famous [?shuttle] [00:08:39] diplomacy, where you were kind of equally trusted by the Israelis, by the Arabs, by the Syrians, by the Egyptians, and the Iranians, by the way.

What we’ve done is we’ve basically signed on to a Saudi policy that says we support your very vehemently anti-Iran push, so we’re out of the Iran nuclear deal. We support your war in Yemen, even though it makes no sense and is going very, very badly. We support or we don’t criticize you when you kidnap the Prime Minister of Lebanon in an attempt to get a shakedown of that regime. Again, it fails. We support you when you try to throttle the small kingdom of Qatar, even though that isn’t working so well. We don’t have much of a Middle East policy under the Trump administration. What we have is a policy that says whatever Saudi Arabia says, we support. Now, in that circumstance, to suddenly find yourself with the guy you’ve put all your chips on, doesn’t seem like he’s the kind of international reformer that he was, that’s a huge problem. And I think the most significant thing that’s happened in the last couple of days is the break—and on the Republican side in the Senate. I mean, you have people like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham saying that they want to sanction Saudi Arabia. That is a very, very extreme, powerful statement that is setting us up for a head-on collision between Donald Trump and Republican senators.

Preet Bharara: Well, do you really think so, or is that just—is that just talk like we often see?

Fareed Zakaria: My gut is that Trump will win—in other words, that these senators will back down. But they certainly seem to be pretty outraged, and people like Lindsey Graham, I think they feel betrayed, because they felt like they were sold a bigger bill of good about MBS being the straight reformer. What I’m guessing will happen—now we’re speculating, and as you say, we’re recording before this will air. But my guess is the Saudis will present some face-saving excuse which says, this was an interrogation gone awry. There were some rogue elements. Those people are being disciplined, fired, maybe even jailed. MBS knew nothing about it.

Preet Bharara: Or given—or given the death penalty. Do you think there’s a chance that people who engaged in this so that Saudi Arabia emerges from it more unscathed is that those people will face ultimate punishment as well?

Fareed Zakaria: God, that’s a fascinating possibility, that this guy who probably did this under instructions would now be charged with murder. It’s certainly plausible that he’ll get some very severe penalty. And the crucial thing is that the Trump administration will officially say, “Look, this is the Saudi position. We have found no evidence to doubt it. And so, in effect, we accept it.” And then they’ll go to the senators and say, “You really want to sanction Saudi Arabia? Oil prices will skyrocket. Our arms contracts will collapse. Frankly, a lot of big businesses will support Donald Trump as opposed to the senators.” Everyone wants to make nice with Saudi Arabia. It is the central bank of oil in the world still, even though there are many other sources.

Preet Bharara: Is some of our reliance on Saudi Arabia overstated? So, I’m not an expert on arms, but this idea that the president has put forward that the Saudi Arabia government is buying $100 or $110 billion of military products—isn’t it true that Saudi Arabia has long used American military aircraft and weapons, and that they are not in the position to immediately shift to buying weapons elsewhere, that these things take some years to transition away from? And so, don’t we have some leverage in that regard?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. So, first of all, as with everything Donald Trump says that involves numbers, I mean, divide by four is usually a good rule of thumb. So, $110, it’s actually, I think, about $20, $20 billion of arms sales. Secondly, much of this was actually stuff that was started under the Obama administration. Thirdly, as you say, it’s not easy to switch. These systems are not interchangeable. You can’t buy one aircraft that’s—you know, one American aircraft, one French aircraft, and one Russian aircraft. It doesn’t kind of work that way. Where they do have some leverage is they are the central banker of oil. I mean, even though we are now energy independent and we produce a lot of oil, Saudi oil is the easiest oil to extract. And so, that makes it very easy for them to switch on and switch off production in a way that’s very hard to do with fracking or Russian oil, because these are very expensive projects, and once you put the money in, you can’t take it out. So, the Saudis have that capacity to go on and off, which makes them very powerful, because they can essentially control the price by just turning on the taps or turning off the taps. The issue, I think, is not so much all that, Preet. It’s just that if you’re looking for something that’s gonna end this recovery, sanctions on Saudi Arabia, oil spiking to $150, even in the short-term, that’ll do it.

Preet Bharara: Yeah. So, there are other considerations. And we’ve kind of tied our hands. I kind of want to go back to the Trump administration’s unfolding response. Is it sometimes the case, based on your experience, that obviously, your hands are tied a little bit, and you have an ally. And your ally does some thing terrible, and there’s a lot of pressure from political forces in your own country, even from your own party, like the Republican senators you mentioned, to do something about it, but you want to, in your public comments—Trump has been very careful to say, well, there’s been a strong denial. It was a very, very strong denial. He believes strong denials, apparently. But then privately, you say to your ally who has done something bad, you send them angry words, and you yell at them. So, for example, Secretary of State Pompeo apparently had a very short meeting. He was dispatched immediately by the President to go meet with MBS. What happens in that meeting? Does somebody say, “You know what, you’ve put us in a terrible spot. You did this terrible thing. Knock it off. We’re gonna knock your block off next time. Don’t do it again,” or do they hold hands and say, “Look, this will blow over. I’ll take care of our opposition in the States. What happens there?”

Fareed Zakaria: My gut is that it’s more the former in this case. My gut is that Pompeo probably went into this meetings and he said, “Look, you guys need to understand, this is a big deal. This guy was an American resident. He’s a Washington Post columnist. This has snowballed. We need a fully transparent account of what happened.” And I think that particularly, the Trump/Putin meeting’s unusual. Usually, there are no takers at these meetings. There are other people involved. It’s very rarely literally one-on-one. And so, Pompeo would be very unlikely to say something that could get back which suggested that he had in some way given a green light. So, both for reasons of propriety, which is it wouldn’t be the right thing to say, but also just politically, he would be making sure that he didn’t say something that would leave him vulnerable to being seen as having given a green light. So, I think that’s probably what they said, and that my guess is the Saudis are absolutely stonewalling, in the sense that they are absolutely denying any knowledge and involvement, because if they show any crack on that, from their point of view, I think it would be a disaster. So, they have to maintain the line. We knew nothing about this. We’re trying to figure out what happened. It’s a terrible tragedy. We’re as shocked as anybody else. The whole—I mean, there’s a bizarre element here, which is that Khalid bin Salman, Mohammed bin Salman’s brother, who was the ambassador to the U.S., many people have thought that when the Crown Prince becomes king, he, Khalid, will become the crown prince. They’re that close. He was a friend of Jamal Khashoggi. So, that’s—as I said, the whole thing is—there’s a truly bizarre element to this, where what the eff where they thinking?

Preet Bharara: [Laughs] Right. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah.

Preet Bharara: Can I ask you two things? One, in order to engage in foreign policy in an intelligent way, is it necessary for our politicians to sort of lie and mislead the public in order to calm the waters with allies, and tow a party line where behind the scenes, maybe there’s more frank discussion? Is that just the nature of how foreign policy has to work for us all to maintain our safety and our relationships in the world? Is that just a fact of life?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s not quite as nefarious as you make it sound. I’d say that’s probably true in all serious public policy, right? That there’s a certain amount of transparency that you want for a democracy, for accountability. But you can’t have total, complete transparency at every moment, particularly in the middle of a complicated and sensitive negotiation. So, for example, take the renegotiation of NAFTA. If each side had been divulging what concessions they were about to make, and then thus mobilizing the opposition to those concessions domestically, it would be a disaster. You wouldn’t be able to get anything done. But I don’t think that—the fundamental problem here is not that. The fundamental problem here in my view is the Trump administration has made a bet about Saudi Arabia that is, at the very least, wildly naive and exaggerated in its hopes for what Saudi Arabia can deliver as a force for progress and stability in the Middle East. And now that you have this symbol of something that suggests that they’re not the great reforming guys that they were being presented as, it calls into question that whole policy.

So, for example, this is leading people to take a second look at the Yemen War, the Saudi war in Yemen. Yemen is now the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. And that’s saying a lot. Worse than Southern Sudan. Worse than the Congo. And it’s entirely inflicted by one country, Saudi Arabia. And so, there’s a question of why are we supporting this? Why are we allowing American weapons arms training to be used in this process? It certainly doesn’t seem to serve American interests. This one murder has perhaps made us look a little bit more thoughtfully or a little bit more critically at that question.

Preet Bharara: I have a question about cause and effect. So, you mentioned this naive bet that the American government placed on MBS and on Saudi Arabia generally. And on the other hand, we have this evidence that maybe there was a premeditated murder of a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi. Did the first thing potentially cause the Saudis to think they could get away with the second thing, or were we just being naive in placing the bet, not realizing that Saudi Arabia was capable of doing this terrible thing?

Fareed Zakaria: I think it’s very plausible to suggest that the Trump administration’s unquestioned embrace of Saudi Arabia emboldened them. Because this is not a normal Saudi tactic. And the Trump administration has been so—so unqualified in its embrace that it may have allowed a new leader in Saudi Arabia who wants to be tougher than previous ones, who wants to assert his authority, Mohammed bin Salman, to say, “You know what? We can rough things up a little bit, and we don’t have to worry about the Americans. I have the American covered.” I’d make an even broader point about this, Preet. And I don’t know that in this particular case, this was going on. But there is no question that when Donald Trump calls the press “the enemy of the people”, it emboldens people who want to do bad things to a free press around the world. There is absolutely no question that even the Turkish president, Erdogan, who has many journalists in jail; the Philippines president, Dutarte, who does—that’s the smallest part of what he does. He unleashes death squads to take care of political opponents.

All these people know that the one country that used to call them out on these things, that used to raise the issue in bilaterals, bring it up at the UN, is not gonna say anything, because the President of the United States is going on about how the press is the enemy of the people. And of course, many of those people use the same language. So, Dutarte talks about fake news. He talks about how the press are the enemy of the people. Erdogan does the same thing. So, it’s not an accident that the last two years have been in some ways the worst years to be a journalist in many parts of the world. It’s because the force that used to be in some ways speaking up for these things, the United States government, is AWOL.

Preet Bharara: So, I want to use the example of Jamal Khashoggi, who we’ve been talking about for a while, to sort of take a step back and ask the question, how should our foreign policy be conducted? So, for example, some other country does something. There’s evidence that they interfered with our election. They’ve harmed an American citizen, or they’ve taken someone hostage, or they’ve taken an American resident—not a citizen, which is a distinction seemingly important to the President—but they’ve taken someone like him, and perhaps murder him in a foreign embassy. How is the public supposed to think about what our foreign policy should be, what our reaction should, and how they judge the actions of our government?

So, for example, let me give you a hypothetical. Would it have made a difference and should it make a difference if Jamal was not only an American resident, but also a citizen? And let me make it even more stark. And suppose there was an action taken against him in the Saudi embassy in the United States. Everything else is still the same, right? We still have this bet that you said we’ve placed on Saudi Arabia. We still have the issue of oil. We still have all these other things going on. Does that then take us to a level where the current reaction is woefully inadequate, and we should do something much more dramatic? How do you think about those principles?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah, it’s a really profound question, because it sort of gets at both substantive and the optics that govern political life. First, I think what’s really interesting here is the way that the American system, by which I mean Congress, the press, has reacted to Jamal, even though he was not an American citizen. The President, as you point out, tried to make this very churlish and narrow distinction. Well, he was an American resident, but he was not a citizen. But you know, I think that the fact that Congress has been so outraged, the press has been so outraged, other governments have been so outraged—look, the guy was a full participant in American life. He was living here. He was paying his taxes. He has three kids who are American. He’s being employed by one of the great national institutions in the United States, the Washington Post. In some very fundamental sense, he is an American. He is a participant in American political and civic life. For a foreign government to do this should be considered an outrage, whether or not technically he was. So, I’m very glad that Trump’s attempt to say, “We shouldn’t worry about him because he doesn’t have an American passport” hasn’t seemed to work. And even he has had to come around.

Preet Bharara: So, what if it happened here? What if it happened on American soil? I mean, we’ve had the same discussion with Putin. He does things in the UK. Could he do things here? Like, what happens if a country does something like that here?

Fareed Zakaria: So there, you’re raising this very profound question, which is, there’s—you have the interests of the state, the interests of the nation, and they are about stability in the Middle East, low oil prices, maintaining a good relationship with the Saudi monarchy. Then there are these things, not just human rights abuses that they do at home, but, as you say, stuff that involves American citizens or impacts on American citizens, and how do you make that balance? Here, I find myself, as always, something of a centrist, because for all those people who say, oh, we should just sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia, do this, then—well, ask yourself, if you do that, and oil prices go to $150, and you cause a recession, and people get laid off. And think about the cost you’re inflicting on Americans because of that.

So, part of what you’re trying to balance is what is the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, in terms of standing up for individual rights, liberty, and dignity? And how important is it also to maintain some level of stability in the world that allows for a functioning global economy, that allows the United States to function well, that allowed people to have jobs. And obviously, these things are gonna affect people on the margins. You’re not—no single action is gonna put millions of Americans out of work. But you have to balance those two. And to pretend that there isn’t a tradeoff here is a mistake.

Put it another way. If this had happened under Obama, Obama would also be torn. It’s not just Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump is doing it in a particularly crass way where he’s—first he’s saying the guy doesn’t count because he’s a resident. And then he’s saying, well, we’ve got these arms sales. But Obama would be thinking many of those same things and be trying to wrestle with this dilemma. It does get much, much harder, I think. You’re doing that classic lawyer thing, the law school thing, where you’re making it harder and harder for me. So, if it were in the U.S., in the Saudi—

Preet Bharara: [Laughs] I’m doing no such—I don’t know what you’re talking about, Zakaria.

Fareed Zakaria: If it were in the U.S., in the Saudi embassy, very hard not to react very strongly, I think. So—and why is that? Look, this is not rational. There is an emotional element here. Why is it that that boy’s photograph on the beaches of the Mediterranean, that Syrian boy, triggered a response? And not even—it triggered [?Anglo America] to take in one million refugees, when there have been plenty of other people washed up dead on the shores of the Mediterranean, somehow didn’t seem to trigger that. Sometimes these things are difficult to—something that happens that triggers a response. Some—but it usually is a critical mass, that there’s been a lot of stuff going on, and then one particularly dramatic event happens. And that’s when it gets triggered.

Preet Bharara: Yeah. There’s a tipping point, and sometimes the tipping point is a word or a speech or an event or a photograph, as you said. But I want to go back to something you said a moment ago then. You’ve been lauding senators, and in particular, Republican senators, for being strong in their statements.

Fareed Zakaria: Mm-hmm.

Preet Bharara: Are they being strong in their statements because they would do something different as president, or are they being strong in their statements because they can afford to be, because it’s not on their watch, because they’re merely senators and not the president?

Fareed Zakaria: A very brilliant point. That’s absolutely right. I mean, the Senate plays that role. Senators play that role. But by the way, I think it’s a good thing in the American system that you have a little of that, that the president can be tasked with kind of looking after the longer-term, more real politic interests of the country. The senators can give voice to moral outrage. I’ve never seen that as a bad thing or as hypocrisy. I do think it sends a signal to the rest of the world that America’s a—it cares about these issues. And while the president may not be able to shut off relations with another country because of that, there is a reaction in the country, and there is a condemnation in the country, and I think that’s very healthy.

Preet Bharara: That presumably allows someone like Secretary of State Pompeo to go into that meeting and say, “Look what the senators are saying. And they’re gonna push sanctions. And the next time, it’s not gonna be so easy.”

Fareed Zakaria: Exactly. And I think that—I think every administration uses that very effectively. But they need for those senators to sound like they mean it, that it’s not just an act. And I think it isn’t an act with people like Lindsey Graham. I think that he is genuinely outraged.

Preet Bharara: Let me ask you a broader question about foreign policy, which we should talk about more on the show. Is there such a thing a Trump doctrine? And if so, what is it?

Fareed Zakaria: To the broadest extent, the Trump doctrine before he came into office was easily identifiable. It was a kind of isolationist Jacksonianism. We use Jackson, Andrew Jackson, as a way of describing a certain kind of isolationism, which is to say, don’t bother me. I don’t want to be too involved in the world. But if I’m gonna get involved, we’re gonna come and beat the shit out of you and then leave.

Preet Bharara: [Laughs] Right.

Fareed Zakaria: Don’t expect us to do any nation-building. Don’t expect us to have any alliances. It’s stay at home, occasionally bomb the hell out of people, go back. And that’s his mentality. And he was very clear. He hated NATO because it’s a permanent, continuing alliance with all the thorny issues of burden-sharing and budgets and things like that. He thinks that trade is basically bad because people take advantage of us. So, he has a very strong isolationist streak in him. What’s interesting is, in office, some of that has shown through, as you’ve seen with the NATO stuff. But the truth of the matter is, if I were an establishment Republican trying to convince other Republicans, establishment Republicans, that Donald Trump has been okay, I’d say, “You know, he says all this stuff. He lets off all this hot air [?about America] [00:29:01], but what has he actually done? He hasn’t gotten out of NATO. He hasn’t gotten out of Afghanistan. He hasn’t gotten out of Syria. In fact, in all those places, he’s actually doubled down. The relationship with Japan is fine. I mean, he’d been threatening to pull our troops out of Japan, South Korea, Germany.

Preet Bharara: Is that all happening? Just in fairness, is that happening because he is—he is smartly saying one thing publicly and blowing off steam, and then being rational and moderate, and or is he being protected by the adults, like General Mattis and others? Which do you think it is?

Fareed Zakaria: I tend to think it’s probably the latter. It’s what you’re describing. But let’s be honest, Preet. This is—this is like a—this is a freak show. I mean, this is—this is a circus. Nobody’s ever seen an administration like this, where, as Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia, said, “If you look at the administration’s policy toward Russia, it’s actually very serious and very tough. They’ve armed the Ukrainians. They’ve put additional sanctions on the Russians. They’ve called them to account in various international bodies. The only problem is, the President periodically seems to suggest that he doesn’t agree with the administration’s policy at all. And so—

Preet Bharara: Right.

Fareed Zakaria: —we’re trying to figure out like, what does that mean, when the President says, “Well, I don’t think they even did it, and I don’t think they should be—should be held accountable for it. And by the way, Putin’s a great guy.” And meanwhile, the administration’s slapping additional sanctions on them. So, is it possible, for example, that we end up with the same situation with Saudi Arabia, where there’ll be some measures put in place, and Trump will be like, “Well, I like King Salman is the greatest guy in the world, and I totally believe him. It was a rogue operation.”

Preet Bharara: Right.

Fareed Zakaria: “People came in from the windows into the Saudi consulate and somehow managed to do this.”

Preet Bharara: It’s an interesting thing that suggests that the words of the president matter more than the words of anyone else, and that people put a lot of stock in it. And there’s some cognitive dissonance sometimes when a president says something, but his administration is doing something else. So, for example, if you flipped it—a lot of people think that this president is not tough on Russia because everything emanating from his pores and his mouth suggests a more romantic love of Vladimir Putin. But suppose it was the opposite. Suppose a president had very harsh words, but nobody did anything about it. What would the public’s reaction be? And in some ways, I think, and you would know better, that maybe the public would place the importance of the words and the calling out of an adversary in strong language as more important than these sanctions that they only read about from time to time, and they never actually see how they work in practice?

Fareed Zakaria: No, I think you’re absolutely right. And you know, that’s because the American system is very unusual, in that it really is a court. The president is the king, as you know. In many—most parliamentary systems, the cabinet is comprised of very powerful leading figures from whatever political party that the prime minister’s from. These are not people he can really fire. These are very—think of Gordon Brown when he was Tony Blair’s finance minister. The American system, the president is the king. Everybody serves at his pleasure. He can get rid of everybody he wants. I mean, there’s that famous cabinet meeting where Lincoln asked the cabinet what they thought about some policy, and everyone said, “Nay, nay, nay, nay, nay,” and then Lincoln says, “Well, I vote aye, and I guess, gentlemen, the ayes have it.”

Preet Bharara: I think what he said, in the same way that Donald Trump said to Lesley Stahl this Sunday, “I’m the president and you’re not.”

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] Exactly. Exactly.

Preet Bharara: So that goes back to Lincoln’s time.

Fareed Zakaria: But that’s true, you know? Think about it, Preet. The president has enough power that he can fire even you. And so—

Preet Bharara: Why you gotta—why you gotta mention that? Why you gotta mention that? We were having such a nice conversation. I was really enjoying this.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] I think you’re—I think you’re having an interesting life. This is surely more fun than putting bad guys in jail.

Preet Bharara: Yeah. Well, you know, I don’t have a TV show like some people.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs]

Preet Bharara: Preet Bharara GPS. I think that—I think that has a nice ring to it.

Fareed Zakaria: Hey, come up with your own acronym. [Laughter]

Preet Bharara: Global Positioning System, right? That’s what it stands for. No, it’s Global Public Square.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] Global Public Square.

Preet Bharara: I know. I know. I watch. Can I ask you about another figure who’s been in the news? Nikki Haley, who happens to be a fellow Indian American, for whatever that’s worth. Have you seen anyone else perform sort of as deftly in a prominent position in the Trump administration in terms of balancing their reputation, their relationship with the president, and future political viability than Nikki Haley?

Fareed Zakaria: No. I think you have it exactly right. And frankly, it’s one of the most impressive political balancing acts I’ve ever seen, period, because as you say, she comes in—by the way, doesn’t have any particular relationship with Trump. Has spoken out against him during the primaries. Also has no background in foreign affairs. Manages to overcome all that by working hard, you know, getting quite expert on some foreign policy issues, the ones that she had to present; somehow developing a good enough relationship with Trump, but at the same time, being able to represent herself independently. For example, she was one of the toughest voices on Russia early on, at a point where it wasn’t clear that Trump would allow that to happen. So, I give her credit for kind of pushing the envelope there. And then, very smartly, leaving at the top of her game.

Preet Bharara: Right. She did not overstay her welcome.

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. Yeah. It rarely happens in politics. What she knows is, she’s done a good job. The chances of having two more good years is—just because life is complicated, are not that great. So, why not leave at the top?

Preet Bharara: Is she special in some way, so that only she could have gotten away with that, being harsh in some language, pushing back in other places? I mean, in other words, are there things for other people in the Trump administration that they can learn from her, or is she unique?

Fareed Zakaria: You know, it’s a very good question. I don’t understand how she pulled it off, because Rex Tillerson was not able to. I think that either she had a conversation with Trump and said something like, “Look, I think it’s important that you allow me to say these things so you don’t have to say them,” or something like that. There was some kind of deal or, more likely, she’s very intuitively good politically, and figured out that this would be the place you could go. Because everything I know about Donald Trump suggests you can’t sit him down and have a conversation like that, because first of all, he’ll forget it two days later. It won’t make any difference. He’ll react the way he’s gonna react anyway. So, you have to in some way figure out how to approach this in a way that constrains him without him feeling constrained. And I think that’s why I said it was brilliant, because nobody else has been able to do it, even Mattis. Mattis has been able to maintain his independence, but he has not really been able to speak out in a highly critical way.

Preet Bharara: Right.

Fareed Zakaria: So, that—yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know her, so. Maybe you do. But as you know, there isn’t really a kind of Indian American club,

Preet Bharara: [Laughs] It’s the Illuminati. Come on.

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah, where we all meet and plot the eventual—that we’re gonna have vedas sung at the next inauguration.

Preet Bharara: This is an example of one of those things where we have to not be transparent publicly, and tell everyone that there’s no such thing.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] Exactly.

Preet Bharara: But obviously, you and I, we have the special handshake, Fareed, which we won’t share with other people.

Fareed Zakaria: Exactly. Exactly.

Preet Bharara: So, you’ve been complimentary of her, Nikki Haley’s, political deftness. What is your assessment of her time as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations?

Fareed Zakaria: Not particular impressive. I think that the key opportunity when you’re at the UN is to see if there are ways in which you can get the rest of the world to support American initiatives that is gonna solve global problems. Look, we’re in a world that is totally globalized in so many ways—for economically, of course. But you have diseases, and they get globalized immediately. You have climate change, which is a global phenomenon. And yet, our solutions are all national, because we still have a politics of nations, as we should. So, the trick is, how do you get—how do you get that level of cooperation? And it seems to me, that should be the measure of a U.S. ambassador to the UN, or of America’s engagement with these kind of bodies. And I don’t think she did very much on that front. I think she positioned herself well for her own purposes. She didn’t use it to try to do what it’s meant to do, which is to solve problems that are by nature transnational.

Preet Bharara: What’s the continuing relevance of the UN to America and the world?

Fareed Zakaria: Just that, that you have a world in which these problems are spilling over borders, and you need some forum in which you can meet, negotiate, talk to people, get a critical mass of people who become a majority, which then forces other people to go along. It’s not ideal, and look, I mean, if—the closer you get to the UN, the more you see the dysfunction. But it didn’t exist, you’d have to invent is, because you need someplace where people can get together. And the UN has a unique legitimacy, because it is—it does include everybody, you know? So, at some level, the G20, which is the sort of 20 largest countries in the world, sort of, may be a more efficient way. You just have 20 countries. They’re the big boys. If they agree to stuff, everybody else will probably have to agree to it. But that lacks legitimacy, because the small countries are not at the table.

So, the UN has this very powerful legitimacy, which is, everyone is represented. It makes it more unwieldy. It makes it more dysfunctional. But the UN has by and large massively served American interests. We’ve been able to mask American power, American preferences, American interests, as global interests, because we have much more say in the UN than any individ—any single country.

Preet Bharara: I want to switch gears a little bit, because we’re coming up to the end of our time, and ask you about how we should think about historical leaders, historical world leaders. You’re a highly educated person. You have three or four PhDs. How many PhDs do you have?

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] Just this one.

Preet Bharara: One.

Fareed Zakaria: After that, it becomes too many.

Preet Bharara: That’s one more than I have. So, you have infinity times the number of PhDs than I have. And recently, there was a—and there’s controversies all the time, but I want to ask you about one in particular. Scott Kelly, well-known astronaut whose twin brother is also an astronaut, and whose sister-in-law is Gabby Giffords, former Congresswoman, who quoted, approvingly, Winston Churchill. And then there was an avalanche of criticism about that because there was an unseemly side, some people say, to Winston Churchill, and he was not so modern in his views in all the ways we would like someone to be. And then he apologized for quoting Churchill. Is it appropriate to quote Winston Churchill in 2018?

Fareed Zakaria: Of course it is. The whole thing struck me as bizarre. I mean, he was quoting from Churchill’s—the first page of his memoirs of World War II. It was the most anodyne quote. Churchill says, and he quoted, “In victory, magnanimity. When you’re winning, be generous.” It strikes me as a perfectly reasonable thing to say. So then you get these people saying, “Oh, but Churchill was a racist, and he was an imperialist.” And then Scott says, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I should have looked this up. I stand corrected.” This is absurd. Look, every historical figure of any significance is complicated.

I’ll tell you, it’s funny you bring up Churchill. My father was a kind of figure from the Indian independence movement. When India was being ruled by the British, my father was one of these guys who was struggling to get the British to give India independence, and he became a politician and things like that. And he was always a big fan of Churchill’s. He had all the Churchill books, and he had a bust of Churchill and things like that. And he one day told me that when he was in England in 1945— that’s the election right after World War II, because he was a British—a subject—if you were an Indian who was in London at the time, you were allowed to vote. So I said, “Oh, you must have voted for Churchill because you have—you admire him so much.” He said, “Oh, no, no. Of course not. I voted for the Labor Party.” He said, “You’ve got to understand. I admire Churchill because he’s a great world historical figure and he’s a great leader. From an Indian point of view, he was terrible, because he was the most terrible imperialist, who wanted the British to rule India forever. And so, of course, for me, a vote against Churchill was a vote for Indian independence.”

It just shows, you know, people are complicated. Churchill made many mistakes in his life and did many bad things. And I think it’s basically fair to characterize him as a racist. But on one incredibly important thing, which was the rise of Nazi Germany, he was right, and everybody else was wrong. And the fact that he was right had a very important effect in saving Western democracy, which I think is—on the whole, was a good thing.

Preet Bharara: On the whole, yes, I would—I agree with your assessment, Dr. Zakaria.

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. A bad idea for the Germans to have won World War II, right? So, this—besides which, even if he had done some things worse, the quote was so anodyne. The only thing I’ll say about this, Preet, is there’s a tendency to overreact to things on Twitter. I mean, when you say there was an outrage, there was like, 20 guys on Twitter saying stuff.

Preet Bharara: Right. But he apologized.

Fareed Zakaria: And he shouldn’t have. He should have realized, these are 20 guys in their pajamas in basements tweeting out stuff. I mean—

Preet Bharara: Those are the same guys who interfered with the election, right? Weighing 400 pounds, eating Cheetos?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. This is not the wave of moral outrage. I mean, it’s like—yeah, but that’s my point, which it might actually be one person with 19 bots.

Preet Bharara: May I risk quoting from Churchill, my favorite quote from Churchill?

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] As you can see, I’m okay with that.

Preet Bharara: Well, you know. In 2018.

Fareed Zakaria: [?I think now]. [00:42:25] But if you get 10 tweets against it, just let it be.

Preet Bharara: But you can tell me if this is anodyne or not, and then you can define anodyne so I know what that means.

Fareed Zakaria: Mm-hmm.

Preet Bharara: So, Churchill has the best joke about prepositions that I’ve ever heard, right? Somebody once—this person who won the Nobel Prize—for what? For literature—apparently ended a sentence with a preposition. And do you recall what Churchill said in response?

Fareed Zakaria: That something’s up with which I will not put.

Preet Bharara: He said, “That is the kind of errant pedantry up with which I shall not put.” You can send your complaints to cafe.com.

Fareed Zakaria: I think it’s great. I only say this. I think whenever I have tried, because when you’re writing a column, and you have fact checkers, and you have people breathing down your neck, you’re always—I’m very careful to try and track down where these quotes come from. What I’ve discovered is many famous Churchill quotes were actually not said by Winston Churchill. What I mean by that is they were said by somebody not very important or impressive or well-known. And what I’ve discovered is there is a kind of inflation that takes place in the world of famous quotes, where you want your quote to have been said by Churchill, by Lincoln, by Jefferson. When it’s said by somebody else, somehow magically, the attribution of the quote keeps moving up. So, I think that I would just check. It may be—it might not turn out to be Lord Darby or somebody like that.

Preet Bharara: Well, I think a lot of quotes attributed to Churchill were actually said by Benny Hill. I don’t know if people know that.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs]

Preet Bharara: That’s definitely true. Fareed Zakaria, I look forward to your tenure as Secretary of State one day. Maybe you can have Nikki Haley.

Fareed Zakaria: [Laughs] Thank you. Thank you. So—

Preet Bharara: Maybe you can have Nikki Haley as your deputy and teach you about politics.

Fareed Zakaria: No. Let’s make Nikki Haley president. You become Attorney General. I’ll become Secretary of State. We need [?Adasi] to be Secretary of Defense. That’s the one areas where we don’t have—

Preet Bharara: Right. Well—

Fareed Zakaria: Like, people wouldn’t think of an Indian as a viable Secretary of Defense. I don’t know why.

Preet Bharara: Why are you telling people the goals we arrived at at our secret meetings? I don’t know why you’re—I don’t know why you’re doing that. [Laughter] Fareed Zakaria, thank you again. It was a pleasure.

Fareed Zakaria: Pleasure, Preet.

[End of Audio]