Wednesday on CNN’s “At This Hour,” network host Fareed Zakaria said if the reports that President Donald Trump was planning to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change were true, Trump would be “renouncing the entire legacy of modern America in the world.”

Zakaria said, “There is always the sense that the United States is being taken advantage of or being ripped off. A lot of this speaks to the resentment that Trump’s base has with the idea that there is kind of professional globalist elites running the United States. But again, the core problem is, what they describe has been true for millennia. What’s different in the last 70 years is the United States brought the world together and said look, we’re still going to compete all the time.”

“The United States has the largest army in the world,” he continued. “Larger than the next 20 countries put together. The United States believes in national interests and advantage. But there are a lot of common problems. There are problems relating to global trade, relating to global climate change, global pandemics, diseases. What should we do about those together So no one country has to bear the burden? If you renounce that role, you are really renouncing the entire legacy of modern America in the world.

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