transparent, accountable governments. joining me now to discuss, fareed zakaria. he is the host of cnn s fareed zakaria gps. fareed, thank you so much. i was just sitting here thinking, you know, to do this summit today. he is dealing with the economy. he is dealing with covid. um, he had the funeral, whatever. i was like who would ever want to be president of the united states? my gosh, what a job? the bandwidth you need to be dealing with all these issues and, you know, it s people often forget. they think like, okay, it s now foreign policy week. it s it that s not how it works. there is a great biography of president kennedy which points out that, in every day, you are dealing with all these issues, simultaneously. yeah. so, like you are in a meeting about inflation and somebody comes in and says, putin just moved another 50,000 troops into, you know, to the border of ukraine. and then, somebody else comes in and tells you something about the ohio runoff election. and t
there has been bipartisan agreement that one of the great successes of american foreign policy was the victory in the cold war and the consolidation of that victory was to free all those captive nations that had been colonized by the soviet union. p poland, the czech republic, slovakia, the baltic states. and, you know, anchor them in freedom and democracy in in the west. what tucker carlson seems to be saying is we are just worried about western europe. we are worried about belgium and france. if putin wants all of eastern europe, well, you know, that that s okay. a very odd concession and a very odd turning of one s back on one of the really the most extraordinary achievements of western strategy for the last 30 or 40 years. i mean, and and even let s look at ukraine. this is ukraine is a country where these people desperately want a future that is anchor
u.s. embracing autocrats and in an unprecedented way. the fox propaganda network even defendlinging putin this week. listen. it s crazy. so at this point, nato exists primarily to torment vladimir putin who whatever his many faults, has no intention of invading western europe. vladimir putin does not want belgium. he just wants to keep his western borders secure. i mean, this would have been unimaginable ten or i mean even five years ago. how troubling is this sympathy on the american right with authoritarians like putin and hungary s viktor orban? it s stunning and startling. so let s remember, unpack what what what was just said. um, putin is not planning to invade western europe. in other words, what tucker carlson seems to be saying is that it s okay if he has designs on eastern europe. now, for the last 25 years,