Haggling With Trump’s America, the Russian Diesel Deal, Yemen’s Civil War

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Fareed Zakaria (1:28)

This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York. Today on the program, how to lose friends and diss people.

Chrystia Freeland, former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada explains how Canada has reacted to Donald Trump's crusade against America's neighbor.

SPEAKER_2 (1:54)

They're nasty people.

Fareed Zakaria (1:56)

Then, diesel. Why is Trump rewarding Russia with a 36 million barrel deal?

And Saudi Arabia, the powerful Middle Eastern nation is getting hit by the Houthi rebels next door.

How is this happening? Alas, Princeton's Bernard Haykel.

Finally, we will tell you about one Western country that has been able to do what everyone else says is impossible. Build amazing infrastructure.

But first, here's my take. In a very well-written speech last week, delivered against the magnificent backdrop of the Acropolis in Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged the West to rediscover what made it exceptional. He described the qualities that defined Western civilization as the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, and celebrated its ambition, nationalism, and relentless pursuit of excellence. He warned that the West had become ashamed of the very things that made it great.

Rubio is right that the West has sometimes lost confidence in its own traditions and ideals, and it shouldn't. But Rubio himself seems deeply confused about what made the West exceptional. Consider the qualities he celebrates– courage, strength, ambition, and pride. Genghis Khan had all of these in abundance. So did the Persian emperors, the Russian tsars, and the rulers of Imperial China. Every great civilization has celebrated its warriors, glorified its conquests, and believed in its own superiority. What truly distinguishes Western civilization is not its military power or national pride, but its intellectual and political traditions. From Greek philosophy and Roman law, through Christianity, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, the West developed a set of ideas that challenged the arbitrary exercise of power. Reason, scientific inquiry, individual liberty, democracy, the rule of law, and universal human rights became central to Western civilization and set it apart.

Other cultures have traditions of morality, justice, and human dignity. But in the West, these ideas evolved into revolutionary political propositions. That every human being possesses certain rights simply by virtue of being human, that governments exist to secure those rights, and that no ruler or tradition stands above scrutiny. The most radical feature of these ideas, in part inspired by Christianity, was that they were universal. They applied not just to Westerners, but in principle to everyone. Consider slavery. The West practiced slavery on a vast and brutal scale, as had virtually every major civilization in history. But the West also produced a powerful abolitionist movement, drawing on Christian beliefs, enlightenment ideals, and the struggles of enslaved people themselves. Western societies developed principles that could be used to condemn their own conduct. Similarly, for centuries, Western societies treated women and religious and racial minorities as second-class citizens, as did most other civilizations. But Western ideas about equality and individual rights helped generate movements for women's suffrage, religious tolerance, and civil rights. These movements did not reject the West's highest ideals. They demanded that the West live up to them. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the Declaration of Independence idea that all men are created equal precisely because its promise was universal, and even if American society had repeatedly betrayed it. This is also true of imperialism. Almost all great powers have sought to extend their dominion. The West was extraordinarily successful at it, and one can marvel at its enormous reach. But Western societies also ended up recognizing the rights of colonized people and questioning the morality of the conquest and the brutality of colonial rule. This capacity for self-criticism is not a weakness. It is one of the West's greatest strengths, that it can force itself to live up to its own ideals. It is also part of the relentless use of reason that has made the West lead the world in science and discovery.