‘The Case for American Power’ By Shadi Hamid
- A Premium Radical Podcast via Resistance Radio by Radical Media.
On Monday 9th February 2026 Radical Media’s Maajid Nawaz spoke with American Egyptian author Shadi Hamid for the long form premium Radical podcast about his new book: The Case for American Power (2025). The first 30 minutes of this podcast are free for all subscribers, the remaining hour is for premium members of Radical Media only.
Shadi Hamid is an American Muslim author, political scientist, and Washington Post columnist known for his work on political Islam, democracy, and US foreign policy.
Once a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Hamid is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He is also a research professor of Islamic Studies at the Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is the first Muslim scholar in the institution’s 75-year history.
Hamid has contributed to publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, and is a co-founder of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast, found on Substack via Wisdom of Crowds. Shadi’s Twitter profile is found here.
Born in 1983 to an Egyptian family in Pennsylvania, Hamid holds a B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a Ph.D. in politics from Oxford University, where he studied Islamist political behaviour in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.
Hamid is the author of several books, including Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (2014), Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World (2016), and The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea (2022).
Shadi Hamid’s latest book, The Case for American Power (2025), forms the basis of this interview. It is available here for UK buyers and here for US buyers.
In this work, Shadi presents an urgent argument for the necessity of American leadership in a world of rising authoritarianism.
Our conversation with Shadi covered issues such as his view on ‘woke’ politics:
“Some people would even describe me as anti-woke, although I don’t love that phrase. But I thought there was a lot of excess in that time around this obsession with white supremacy. Everything is systemic racism, obsessions around gender identity and sexual identity and kind of imposing that on Americans and saying there’s only one way to think about these issues. And if you don’t agree, then you’re anti trans or you’re racist or God knows what else you are. And there was a lot of cancel culture around that time. And that really put me off. But I think that wokeness has essentially been defeated. So it’s no longer the defining issue in American politics. And what’s taken its place, at least on the left side of the spectrum is Gaza and the Palestinian plight and cause. And that’s where I’ve sort of returned to the progressive fold.”
On his childhood heroes, such as Noam Chomsky, being caught up in the Epstein scandal:
Shadi Hamid: “I mean, this is it is unfortunate, though. I was shocked to see that someone like Chomsky, who has always claimed to be a moral voice, the voice of America’s conscience, especially on foreign policy. I don’t know how to make sense of the fact that knowing what he knew about Epstein at that late date, he was still advising him on how to fight off the charges and the accusations. It leads to a very interesting question that’s been with us since time immemorial, which is why do otherwise good people support evil things?”
On President Trump and the benefits of hypocrisy:
“Yeah, I mean, no doubt there is something refreshing about Trump’s honesty. I actually call Trump, in the chapter On Hypocrisy, an anti-hypocrite. He doesn’t pretend to be better than he actually is. He’s not aspiring to a certain set of ideals. He is who he is. What you see is what you get. And that I think that is refreshing. I think there is something good about that. But I think there’s also something dangerous about it, because when there’s no aspiration, then there’s no idealism. And I think idealism is something we have to maintain as Americans. Because it’s that gap between ideals and reality. When we when we see that gap, then we can close it. What Trump says is, ‘Hey, there’s no gap because we’re just going to do whatever we feel like’. And there’s no greater goal. There’s no greater objective. Then it becomes harder to call him out, because he’s not actually trying to be anything other than what he actually is. So I think I think that in some ways hypocrisy can be good for a country. Look at it this other way that China, when we talk about China, we don’t call it hypocritical because China doesn’t aspire to be a democracy. It doesn’t aspire to promote democratic values.”
How his thesis applies to using American power abroad to influence Israel for the better:
Click to play:
Shadi Hamid: “Israel, that this is a non-negotiable, that if you want to continue receiving American aid at the current levels, that you have to allow humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to come in. And otherwise, if you don’t, there’s going to be consequences, then maybe they’ll actually listen to us. But we have to be willing to put that pressure.”
Maajid Nawaz: “So is it fair then to say that your view in the case for American power is that the soft power layer we’ve been talking about, a prime example of its use and its good use would be American soft power in the context of Gaza and Palestine and Israel translates as, hey, we need justice for Palestinians. In your view, that is a manifestation of American soft power.”
Shadi Hamid: “Exactly. Of pressuring Israel. That is an example of American power. I’m just skeptical that we’re actually going to do it. The Trump administration is still very pro-Israel. And if you look at a lot of the people in the Trump administration, they have very staunch views on Israel’s supremacy over Judea and Samaria, as they would call it.”
And on the benefits of hypocritical American idealism over uninspired American realism.
Click to play:
Shadi Hamid: “Hypocrisy is the cost of trying to be better than we actually are. It’s the difference between, say, a liar and a bullshitter. A liar actually in some ways is better than a bullshitter because the liar knows that he’s obscuring the truth. So you can call him out on his lies and say, you know that what you’re saying is wrong. The problem with the bullshitter is they have no way to know the difference between truth and and falsehood. So it’s harder to criticize them. That’s why it’s easy to criticize America, because people compare us to our ideals, and they see how we’re lacking. And in that gap between who we are and who we want to be, there’s a lot of work to be done. And I want people to recognize that hypocrisy gap, because only if we recognize it, can we actually improve our policies and become closer to the ideal.”
Shadi Hamid’s book is available here for UK buyers and here for US buyers
Premium members of Radical Media are able to listen to the long form podcast between Maajid Nawaz and Shadi Hamid at the top of this page.
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Our conversation with Shadi Hamid is Radical Media’s tenth premium members’ podcast.
