"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
On GPS this Sunday: Former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden discusses the revelations of Edward Snowden, what the NSA is really doing with our phone calls, and the possible diplomatic and operational fallout.
Next, the New Yorker’s John Cassidy and Jeffrey Toobin debate the question many across the globe are discussing now – is Snowden the hero or the villain in this whole controversy?
Also, a look at the turmoil in Turkey and the general sense of unrest that still exists around the Middle East. Fareed sits down with columnist Mona Eltahawy and Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations.
And Fareed speaks with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author of a new book, To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace, about the lessons of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.
“You know, the experts of the day talked about mutual assured destruction, or MAD, as it was called by its acronym,” Sachs says. “And it was a bit mad, that the idea that there was a balance of terror that kept the peace. But Kennedy realized – and Khrushchev also realized – this wasn't a balance, it was an imbalance. It was a set of accidents waiting to destroy the world.”
And we’ll also take a look at why in the world China is thinking of building a canal…in Nicaragua…and why the U.S. may be woefully unprepared for it.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Fareed speaks with Joseph Nye, the former dean and now a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Noah Feldman, a professor of international law at the Harvard Law School, about U.S. ties with China.
Noah, you say that relations between China and the United States are almost destined to get cooler, perhaps worse.
Feldman: The fact is that the U.S. remains the sole global superpower. And it’s not in China's interests, in the long term, for that to be the case in the future. China wants, at least within Asia, for itself to be the regional superpower. At the same time, what separates this from heading for a Cold War direction is that we’re deeply cooperative with China. We still need them to buy our debt and they still need us to buy their goods. And that’s going to continue to be the case going forward. So we’re both cooperating and competing at once.
Joe, this is a kind of strange new world, in that, if you think about the Cold War, we had no trade relations with the Soviet Union. We actually sanctioned them. So can you imagine a situation with the world’s two great trading partners also ending up with an adversarial military relationship?
Nye: It could happen, but on the other hand, there are strong incentives to keep it under control. Because there’s such interdependence between the two countries, I think there’s a strong interest on both sides to keep this from getting out of control. We’re going to be able to manage this relationship if we don’t succumb to neuroses and paranoia, and if the Chinese don’t succumb to hubris.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
China has tremendous assets. It is the world’s second-largest economy and, because of its size, will one day become the largest.
But power is defined along many dimensions, and by most political, military, strategic and cultural measures, China is a great power but not a global power. Its military spending, for example, is not even a quarter of America's.
Perhaps most crucially, it lacks – for now – the intellectual ambition to set the global agenda.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
On GPS this Sunday: A meeting of the two most powerful men in the world – U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are holding a summit in California. But where is the Sino-U.S. relationship headed? Fareed speaks to one of the only Americans to have spent time with not only Xi, but every Chinese leader since the late 1970s – former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.
“Xi Jinping is a strong personality, very thoughtful. And he, I believe, knows that he has to define a new direction for China, no matter how successful their previous efforts have been,” Kissinger says.
Fareed also speaks with Joseph Nye, the former dean and now a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Noah Feldman, a professor of international law at Harvard Law School, for their take on U.S.-China ties.
Then, a preview of Iran's presidential election – who’s going to win and what will it mean for the world? And, protests in Turkey: is the Arab Spring spreading, or are the demonstrations just a blip?
What is the world’s happiest country? It’s the land down under, Australia, for the third year in a row. That’s according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's report on the best developed country to live in.
What makes it happy? Well, the nation’s economy is in good shape, employment is good, life expectancy is high, the air is relatively clean. So, should we all up and move to Australia or down and move to Australia? Maybe not. What we found interesting is that Australia only does best if you measure all the factors in the study equally.
But take a look at the video to see what happens if you prioritize different factors. For safety, Japan ranks highest. In terms of overall life satisfaction, Switzerland is first. If you want the best education, go to Finland. If you prioritize the environment, Sweden would be your choice. But if you are looking to maximize income, the U.S. far outranks the rest.
So, the question is, what makes you happy?
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Last week, Fareed argued in his TIME column that for the next generation of growth, the U.S. “must focus on training and retraining workers, break the immigration deadlock, build out our infrastructure and invest in science and technology.” But he also argued that the United States needed reform, changes that will “make our entitlement programs affordable as we age.”
Here he speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman about how this applies to Europe, and whether stimulus and why stimulus and reform shouldn’t be seen as mutually exclusive.
The point I want to ask you about is the kind of reforms that open up markets. You know, Japan has 800 percent tariffs on rice. Italy is 73rd in the world in ease of doing business. The reason I'm asking is because…you've quoted…almost approvingly, something Naomi Klein argues, which is that whenever you have these crises, the problem is that these countries then adopt market friendly policies. They're called neo-liberal policies. And these are terrible for the economies.
Now, I'm thinking, the whole history of the last 35 years, as you know, is the countries that adopted these policies, by and large, grew pretty well – from Eastern Europe to India. You know, look around the world and becoming more hospitable to trade and markets has generally been a good thing.
So I'm actually, you know, still very much pro-globalization. And certainly, you look at some places – India actually being a case where you really do seem to have gotten a lot of mileage out of liberalization.
But that's starting from a very extreme regime. So when we're talking about Western European countries…I mean Ireland. Think about Ireland. I always think Ireland was the poster child for reform. Everybody talked about what a great job they’d done, how the structural changes were so great.
And now that Ireland finds itself in a financial crisis, people say, well, what you need to do is structural reform. Uh, wait, didn't they already do that? What happens if you've already reformed everything? What next?
By Fareed Zakaria
American people and companies change past practices, take pain and prepare for the future. When you compare American companies since 2007 with, say, Japan's great corporations after that country's crisis and recession, it's clear that U.S. corporations are pretty ruthless in restoring
productivity (even at the cost of firing people) and they are nimbler, which means that they often come through a crisis stronger. And faster.
From automobiles to airlines to energy, companies are posting strong sales and profits.American banks have been under fire for many quarters. Critics feel they should have been punished or broken up or more tightly regulated. But if you compare them with their principal competitors, in Europe, they are far better capitalized, more secure with stronger balance sheets. As home prices recover, that will create a virtuous cycle between credit and housing that will enhance both stability and growth.
Fareed Zakaria GPS: 5th anniversary, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
1) Over the 5 years the show has been on air, Fareed has interviewed almost 600 people on GPS, hailing from around 60 countries on every continent (except for Antarctica!). Among the guests: 35 past, present or future heads of state and/or government…a king…a queen…and at least one man considered by his followers to be the living incarnation of a deity.
2) Each of the eight living secretaries of state have been interviewed by Fareed on GPS.
3) As befitting a global show, current GPS team members (a tiny team by TV standards) hail from Britain to Bombay, Israel to Lebanon, Spain to Germany, and Calcutta to Columbus, Ohio.
4) Fareed has recommended more than 200 books for the GPS book of the week. He has read every single one of the them. He only recommends books he has actually read, though he does admit to skipping a few pages here and there and doing a little speed-reading sometimes!
5) Eagle-eyed viewers will notice Fareed is rarely without his GPS mug on the table in front of him in the studio. What’s in it? It varies: often it’s just water, but depending upon Fareed’s mood and energy sometime it’s English Breakfast tea and sometimes green tea.
Fareed Zakaria GPS: 5th anniversary, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Over the past five years, Fareed has interviewed prime ministers and presidents from across the globe, as well as a king, a queen and a religious icon. But what were some of the most memorable or insightful exchanges? Here, Fareed shares his thoughts on five of the most telling discussions – and an offer it will be hard for Hillary Clinton to forget.
Anjem Choudary, July 2010
Have you ever met a jihadi? It's easier to find them in London than in New York. Indeed, earlier last decade, London was sometimes dubbed Londonistan, the origins of which were obvious. A brand of radical Islam seemed to flourish here, though their noisy, angry voices exaggerated their small numbers. I met activist radical Anjem Choudary when I was filming in London in July 2010. The tragic events in Woolwich a few weeks ago made me think of my encounter with Choudary back then.
Let me ask you something very simple.
Let me ask you that though, Sabra and Shatila? Who was behind Sabra and Shatila?
You know what, we're either going to end this program or you're going to answer my question.
Who were they funded by? No, but we're having a conversation.
We're not. We're having an interview where I'm interviewing you. You claim to be a man of religion. You claim to be a holy man. I want to return to this. Are you comfortable with the fact that what you're advocating is going to mean the death of innocent men, women and children?
No, what I'm advocating is for the British…
No, it is because it's already happened. So I just wanted to know, can you live with that?
Can I answer the question? OK. I'm advocating the removal of armed forces from Western countries, stopping the support for the parasite of Israel. In return there can be some kind of normalization between the relations.
How can there be normalization?
But as long as Muslim land is occupied and innocent men, women, and children are killed by the American British foreign policy, of course, there will be repercussions.
But there was no occupation of Afghanistan or Iraq when 9/11 was being planned and you were still advocating…
No, no. No, no. Before that they were killing innocent Muslims.
Where?
They were killing them in Israel, for example.
American forces?
Of course, they were.
You've got to get your history right.
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Barack Obama, July 2008
I interviewed President Obama when he was still the junior senator from Illinois, having just seen off a tough challenge from his future secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. I wanted to get a sense of his foreign policy compass – and where it might point if he became president. His response was an early indicator of the so-called pivot or rebalancing to Asia that was a feature of his first term in office.
Tell me, what is your first memory of a foreign policy event that shaped you, shaped your life?
A first memory. Well, you know, it wasn't so much an event. I mean, my first memory was my mother coming to me and saying, "I've remarried this man from Indonesia, and we're moving to Jakarta on the other side of the world."
And that's, I think, my first memory of understanding how big the world was. And then, flying there and landing. This was only maybe a year, or even less than a year, after an enormous coup, the military coup in which we learned later that over half a million people had probably died.
But it was for me, as a young boy, a magical place. And I think that probably is when it first enters into my consciousness that this is a big world. There are a lot of countries, a lot of cultures. It's a complicated place.
But you were an American in Indonesia. How did that make you feel?
Well, you know, it made me realize what an enormous privilege it is to be an American. I mean, it certainly was at that time even more so because the gap in the wealth of the West at the time compared to the East was much wider.
But it wasn't simply the fact that my mother was being paid in dollars by the U.S. embassy, and so, that gave us some additional comfort. It was also becoming aware that, for example, the generals in Indonesia or members of Suharto's family were living in lavish mansions, and the sense that government wasn't always working for the people, but was working for insiders. Not that that didn't happen in the United States, but at least the sense that there was a civil society and rules of law that had to be abided by.
My stepfather was essentially dragged out of the university he'd been studying in in Hawaii, and was conscripted and sent to New Guinea. And when he was first conscripted, he didn't know whether he was going to be jailed, killed. That sense of arbitrariness of government power. Those were the things that you felt you were protected from as an American, and made me, as I got older, appreciate America that much more.
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Pervez Musharraf, November 2011
I spoke with General Pervez Musharraf after he had stepped down as Pakistan’s president. One of the key issues looming over the future of Afghanistan as U.S. troops withdraw is Kabul’s trouble relationship with its neighbor. Musharraf’s response – and the evident lack of trust in Afghan President Hamid Karzai – underscored for me why ties will continue to be so difficult.
[Hamid Karzai] gave a speech the other day, or statement the other day, saying if America were to attack Pakistan, Afghanistan would be by Pakistan's side. What do you think? What do you make of that?
I think it's totally preposterous to imagine this kind of thing. And then I thank him that this is the first time he's made a pro-Pakistan statement.
So you really don't trust him?
I think – no, not at all.
What do you think is going to happen to him? Will he be able to hold on to power without – as the Americans draw down? Does he have support in Afghanistan?
I think it's going to be very difficult. Very difficult. Very, very difficult. He is not liked by the majority of Pashtuns because of what he is doing.
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Lloyd Blankfein, May 2010
I spoke with Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs, in the months following the height of the global financial crisis. I was struck by how personally he took my question of whether he fully understood the human cost of a crisis that, according to McKinsey, wiped out $28.8 trillion of global wealth in 2008 and the first half of 2009.
Let's talk about the human aspect of this crisis. So we've had this huge financial crisis and we talked about synthetic CDOs and CDOs and CDSs, but underlying it, what's happened is you've had millions of people lose their houses, go out of work. Do you feel like, sitting on top of Goldman Sachs, you understand that human cost?
I didn't always live on this perch. I grew up in public housing. My dad, for most of my life, worked for the post office, which was a terrific job to get because you couldn't lose your job. But before he got that job, he had lost his job, and I remember, one of my earliest memories is my own dad being unemployed and the insecurity I felt. I think about it all the time.
First of all, I look in the mirror, and the older I get the more I look like my dad every day. My dad passed away about 20 years ago, but I now look like he looked, as I remember him looking, and I think about my dad who worked at the post office but worked nights at the post office because you got a 10 percent night differential for doing it.
And I think about g when we got moved into, you know, the projects in Brooklyn and getting the apartment we got and trying to get upgraded to another apartment. Of course I think of all these elements. I think that's been a huge advantage to me in my life, to have that. I think it's been a huge advantage to me in my life to have come up through those kinds of stresses and strains.
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Wen Jiabao, September 2008
China may be led by a Communist Party, but its leaders are well-schooled in classic free market texts, at least judging from my conversation with then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao. How many Western leaders sound so comfortable reeling off details of their reading of Adam Smith?
You have the market economy where the market allocates resources. In socialism it's all central planning. How do you make both work?
(Voice of interpreter): The complete formulation of our economic policy is to give full play to the basic role of market forces in allocating resources under the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the government. We have one important piece of experience over the past 30 years, that is to ensure that both the visible hand and invisible hand are given pull play in regulating the market forces.
If you are familiar with the classical works of Adam Smith, you know that there are two famous works of his. One is The Wealth of Nations. The other is the book on morality and ethics.
And The Wealth of Nations deals more with the invisible hand, that is, there are the market forces. And the other book deals with social equity and justice. And in the other book he wrote, he stressed the importance of playing the regulatory role of the government to fairly distribute the wealth among the people.
If in a country most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, then this country can hardly witness harmony and stability. The same approach also applies to the current U.S. economy. To address the current economic and financial problems in this country, we need to apply not only the visible hand, but also the invisible hand.
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Hillary Clinton, August 2009
When I had Hillary Clinton on the show for the first time, she was only a little more than six months into a tenure as secretary of state that would see her clock up 956,733 miles on the job as she visited 112 countries. In Nairobi, Kenya I was asked to interview her at a town hall in front of thousands of Kenyan notables – and asked her whether she intended to take a local councilman up on an interesting offer.
This is a news report I saw while preparing for this town hall. And it involves a woman, a young woman, a very attractive young woman. A Kenyan city councilman says he offered Bill Clinton 40 goats and 20 cows for his daughter's hand in marriage five years ago...He is still awaiting an answer. And I thought on this occasion, Mrs. Clinton, if you think about...
If you think, in the current global economic climate, where asset values have gone down, your stock portfolio is probably down, your husband has had to do a little bit of government work [a reference to Bill Clinton's relief work for Haiti], take time off from the private sector. It's not a bad offer.
Well...My daughter is her own person. She's very independent. So, I will convey this very kind offer.
Alas, I've been here for a few days, and nobody has offered me any goats or cows.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
On GPS this Sunday: A GPS panel on Syria, Russia, the White House and the Republican Party. Weighing in will be Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Remnick, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, former Mitt Romney foreign policy advisor Dan Senor and American Enterprise Institute scholar Danielle Pletka.
“I think that many Democrats, as well, are deeply troubled that the president's [Syria] strategy has been a moral failure and practically has, you know, we've certainly seen the violence spread into Lebanon, creating real risks to Jordan, as well, and to Iraq,” Kristof says.
“Now, it's not clear that any other strategy would be any better. He may well say that. But I think there's a lot of real discomfort that the administration has been essentially paralyzed and that this isn't working very well.”
Then, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on some of the bright spots in the U.S. economy. And later, inside the Hermit Kingdom: VICE TV gives us a rare, exclusive look inside North Korea with the Harlem Globetrotters and Dennis Rodman.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Fareed Zakaria GPS marks its 5th birthday with this Sunday’s show, and since the show's launch Fareed has interviewed dozens of past, present or future leaders. Here, GPS presents five highlights from those encounters.
‘We cannot have value-free markets’
Then-British Prime Minister Brown, February 1, 2009
It may be trite to say this, but there is no one country that can solve this crisis on its own. And it's a far bigger financial crisis, because of how it's developed over the last few months. The word "credit" is derived from a Latin word "credo," which actually means belief or trust. And this is a crisis not just of credit, it's a crisis of trust in our financial institutions.
So, we are taking quite extraordinary measures – so, too, are other countries considering them – to ensure that the resumption of lending can take place.
Why is it not happening, Prime Minister Brown?
Well, it's not happening, because there is a crisis of trust and confidence in the banking system. It's as simple as that.
But these banks feel they have mountains of so-called toxic assets. What do you do about that? How do you get those off the books?
Well, that's what we're looking at the moment. The capitalization was the first stage of the process. What you've now got to do is look at how you can isolate the bad assets. But at the same time, while doing so, you've got to find other vehicles by which you can get lending to begin.
It is a crisis of confidence in the financial system. And it also comes back to issues about values, what values you respect. And I think at this time, it's important to say that we reward work, we reward enterprise, we reward effort, and we reward responsible risk-taking. But we cannot reward or condone irresponsible risk-taking and excessive risk-taking, which has been what has happened in the past.
And so, the values that underlie our markets are important as well. We want free markets, but they cannot be value-free markets.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Fareed speaks with Kenneth Cukier, data editor of The Economist, and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, a professor at Oxford’s Internet Institute, about the applications of “big data.”
So, what’s the big story here? I mean, we’ve always had data. Why is big data a quantum leap?
Cukier: Well, first we have vastly more data than we ever had before. That’s new. But secondly, we have more data on things that we never had rendered into a data format before. It was always informational, but not data. So you can take where you are, a location, as one example. Words in books that are now digitized and also datafied, is another. When you think about social media platforms like Facebook, it “datafies” our friendships. LinkedIn datafies our professional contacts. And we can do new things with that.
You have an example about the flu that’s fascinating, how Google and big data allowed people to figure out where flus were breaking.
Mayer-Schonberger: Yes, indeed. Think back at the H1N1 flu crisis that we had. And the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta wanted to find out where the flu was. And they asked doctors to report every flu case. But, by the time they had collected all the information and tabulated it, two weeks went by. And that’s an eternity if you have a pandemic at hand. And Google, at that time, thought that they could do better just by looking at what people searched for online.
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