Israeli minister: Iran doesn't need one centrifuge
Fareed speaks with Naftali Bennett, the economic minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, about Iran's nuclear program. Watch the full interview on GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
Iran - you have said that you thought a bad deal would lead to war, but a good deal could lead to peace. So the question is, do you regard the deal that is under discussion as a good deal or a bad deal?
From what we can tell, the area where they seem to be at right now is that Iran would go from about 19,000 centrifuges to somewhere in the range of between 5,000 and 7,000 or 8,000 centrifuges. Is that a sufficient reduction which would lengthen the lead time before Iran could potentially do something which can make them produce weapons grade uranium?
That's a very bad deal. Iran doesn't need one centrifuge. Canada has nuclear energy. Spain has nuclear energy. Switzerland has nuclear energy and they don't enrich uranium. You don't need to enrich uranium in order to use nuclear energy. You enrich uranium in order to produce a bomb. That's why the U.N. Security Council came out with six consecutive resolutions that they should have not one centrifuge.
And suddenly we're caving in to their whims, especially when Iran is on the floor. They're under a significant economic pressure. It's working. So when something works, you don't let it up. Quite the contrary. That's the point in negotiation where you insist, and, in fact, reinforce the sanctions. And we just want one simple thing – no enrichment within Iran. You can have all the nuclear energy you want for any peaceful uses, but no enrichment so you can't acquire a nuclear weapon. FULL POST
Will Senate Committee report incite greater anti-Americanism?
Fareed speaks with Moazzam Begg, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, about the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture. Watch the full interview on GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
Do you believe that the release of this report will incite a certain, a greater degree of anti-Americanism among radicalized youth in the Middle East, for example?
I don’t think so, no. In fact, I think what it will do is that it would suggest that at least America’s attempting to be open, at least it’s trying to make some confessions in public. I know that there’s no sense that there’s going to be any prosecutions, but at least America’s come clean and is setting a record, a standard, for other countries to follow. We know there are at least 54 countries involved. What did Britain do? What did Pakistan do? What did Syria do? What did Egypt do? All of these countries, they also now have a template to follow.
And let’s remember that people were already being dressed in orange suits and executed in Iraq in 2005 and in 2014. And this was well before any of these details came about.
The fact is that the occupation of Iraq, of Afghanistan, the torture program, was well known all around the world. Everybody was talking about it. So I don’t think there will be any particular reaction to this specifically because of this release.
On GPS Sunday: Discussing the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report
Watch "Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
On GPS this Sunday: Fareed starts with a panel discussion on the revelations from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. Did Congress know about everything the CIA was doing? He speaks with Jane Harman, a then-member of the House Intelligence Committee and now president of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
Fareed will also hear a perspective on whether the techniques outlined in the report were justifiable from John Yoo, a former official at the Department of Justice and author of the widely discussed "torture memos."
Also giving his take, former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher discusses whether the Senate committee’s report will damage U.S. standing around the world, especially in the Arab world.
Then, Moazzam Begg wants an apology. He was held in U.S. prisons and says he was abused and witnessed torture. What's his response to the report? Fareed asks him.
Plus, the man who might be Israel's next prime minister? Fareed speaks with Naftali Bennett, the economic minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet and the leader of the powerful "Jewish Home" party. He explains why he is adamantly opposed to a two-state solution.
Ex-DoJ official: Senate report examples 'very troubling' if true
Fareed speaks with former Justice Department official John Yoo about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA interrogation methods. Watch the full interview on GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
Forced rectal feeding, agency officials threatening to rape the mothers of prisoners, people with broken limbs being forced to stand for hours and hours, deprived of sleep for up to one week. Doesn’t that strike you as torture?
Well, those are very troubling examples. They would not have been approved by the Justice Department – they weren't approved by the Justice Department at the time. But I have to question whether they’re true because I can’t take at face value the committee’s report because there were no Republicans involved.
You know, investigations in the intelligence committee are traditionally bipartisan and the worst thing, from a lawyer’s perspective, from my perspective, is the committee didn’t interview any witnesses. And so, you have these reports, but they never gave a chance to the very participants, the people being accused, to explain themselves. And so I would want to know more about what happened in any of these cases and to see what really happened. FULL POST
The view from inside North Korea
Fareed speaks with Suki Kim, who spent months in North Korea as a teacher at a private university in Pyongyang, and is the author of Without You, There Is No Us, about her time there. Watch the full interview on GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
The sense one gets from the outside looking at North Korea is, honestly, it's the weirdest country in the world. It is the most strange social experiment. And the puzzle is, how does it survive? How is that people just docilely accept this incredibly authoritarian regime that's not just authoritarian, but totalitarian, really kind of tries to shape how you think, feel, breathe? What's your answer to that?
Well, I think it's a combination of many things. It's sort of this perfect storm. You have, first of all, this cult, serious personality cult. It's religious, really. Absolute belief in the great leader, this generation – three generations of these men who, these hugely narcissistic men basically wiped everything out of their culture except themselves.
So every North Korean wears the badge of the great leader. Their only holidays are the great leader holidays. Books, every article, every television, every song, I mean you name it, there's not a single thing. Every building has a great leader slogan. So I think when you have that kind of a personality cult, that's an incredibly powerful thing to be doing it for three generations.
You also have a very brutal military dictatorship that's been in place for a long time, and also to wipe out every communication method. There's no Internet. The phone calls are tapped or, you know, it's a small country. You can't travel within the country without a permission.
On GPS Sunday: Top panel on Russia, Iran + Syria, plus insights from inside North Korea
Watch "Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
On GPS this Sunday: Fareed convenes a panel of leading analysts to discuss issues ranging from Russia's recession to the extension of nuclear talks with Iran to strikes in Syria and Iraq. Offering their take are Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a new article on a disordered world, Robin Wright, a distinguished scholar at the Wilson Center, Chrystia Freeland, now a member of Canada's parliament and formerly a top editor at Thomson Reuters, and David Rothkopf, author of the book National Insecurity: American Leadership in An Age of Fear.
“Putin can continue to do the kinds of things he's doing in Ukraine or other places. That won't bring about greater sanctions,” Haass says. “And let's be honest, the real sanction against Russia is nothing that the United States and the Europeans has done. The real sanction is oil at $60 odd a barrel.”
Also on the show, inside North Korea – the fascinating story of subterfuge and spying inside the borders of one of the world's most secretive and closed-off nations.
Plus, an experiment in how to fix American education. The laboratory was the nation's largest school system. The investigator, a man with a stellar resume but a rank outsider. Joel Klein explains what he learned as chancellor of New York City schools.
Are we really living in innovative times?
Fareed speaks with Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook, and author of Zero to One, about whether we are overestimating the level of innovation. Watch the full interview on a GPS special on innovation in America, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
You've been writing for a while that you actually think we may not be living in as innovative times as everybody thinks we are.
Well, it's a two track story on innovation in the last three or four decades, where we've had enormous innovation in the world of computers, Internet, mobile Internet, the world of bits. We've had much less innovation in the world of atoms and energy and food technology, biotech, medicine, space travel, supersonic airplanes...
Right. Or even just airplanes. I mean if you think about it, it takes about the same amount of time to fly from Point A to Point B on the globe as it did five decades ago.
Yes, or probably even slower with the low tech airport security systems we have in place today. And so technology, the idea of technology, has been narrowed. And in many cases today, the word technology means simply information technology. And I do think it would be good for our world if we broadened this again and saw accelerating technological progress across all these frontiers.
'Creativity is a team sport'
Fareed speaks with Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, about why team work is essential to innovation. Watch the full interview on a GPS special on innovation in America, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
The most important thing part of your book, given your biography of Steve Jobs, is that this isn't really about a single hero or even a couple of heroes.
Right. You know, when I was doing Steve Jobs, I thought he was a great romantic visionary, that lone inventor who, in the garage, does things. And when I asked him, near the end of his life, what product are you most proud of inventing, I thought he'd say the iPod or the iPhone, and he said, no, creating a product is hard, but creating a team, a company, is even harder. The best thing I ever invented was Apple, the team. And we went through it all. He starts with Wozniak as his partner and gets that Macintosh team under the pirate flag banner, all the way through to having Tim Cook, Johnny Ive, the best team in Silicon Valley. So I realized from him that creativity is a team sport, that it's a collaborative effort.
And how do you create a great team of innovators?
You know, the good thing is there's no single here's the five rules. So I think you have to look at it like creating a good baseball team or something – who's our utility player, who's our shortstop, who's our designated hitter, who's our pitcher? But the main thing is two positions. You need a visionary, because without a visionary, everything you do is barren. And you need somebody who can every day execute, because vision without execution is just hallucination. So that's the core of a good team. And then you have to say, OK, and we need a designer, we need an engineer, we need the right people to make it work.
Kalanick: You can bend reality, but you can't break it
Fareed speaks with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick about the link between failure and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Watch the full interview on a GPS special on innovation in the United States, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
People always say in Silicon Valley... the great thing about the place is you can fail. So what's the upside of down?
It's so easy to talk about failure when you're not failing. It's so much easier. So a lot of the folks who talk about failure and how it's so easy to do in Silicon Valley, those are people who have succeeded.
But when they hadn't succeeded yet, they were scared out of their minds of failing. And yes, I've certainly failed a couple of times. And it's scary. But I think if the folks who do succeed are the folks not who accept failure, but the folks who do not.
And so though Silicon Valley is a place where you can fail and get back up on your feet, I find that the folks that are most successful in Silicon Valley are the ones who do not accept failure, ever. And they just keep going until it works. But they don't keep going on something that's not going to work. They adjust and they move and try to find where reality and their vision meet. I like to say you can bend reality, but you can't break it.
Rottenberg: You don't need a hoodie to be an entrepreneur
Fareed speaks with Linda Rottenberg, co-founder of Endeavor and author of Crazy is a Compliment, about what makes a good entrepreneur. Watch the full interview on a GPS special on innovation in America, this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
For you, an entrepreneur is somebody who is not always a tech genius, somebody who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. Explain.
Yes, I've been saying to people, you don't need a hoodie to be an entrepreneur. So first of all, in this country, it turns out the two fastest growing groups starting businesses are women and baby boomers over 55.
And I've worked with 1,000 entrepreneurs around the world – every industry, every generation, every race and gender – and what I believe is that entrepreneurs are people who view the world differently. They allow themselves to be contrarian. They zig when everyone else zags. And then they do something about it.
I've come to believe that entrepreneur is a fancy way of saying you're a doer. And it's not necessarily in tech and it's not necessarily people who have radical innovations. For me, entrepreneurship is about a series of minovations, mini-innovations and executing well.
What's behind Chinese nationalism?
Watch "Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Fareed speaks with Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and David M. Lampton, the director of China studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, about nationalism in China.
There’s no question there's been a rise in sort of nationalist rhetoric. And as I point out, all these attempts to really subvert the old international order, alternatives to The Asian Development Bank, to the IMF, to the World Bank, to the various security frameworks. Do you think this is Xi or is this a long-term Chinese strategy?
Lampton: What we're seeing is China, not just Xi. We're seeing a China that sees itself in great historic terms. And this isn't so much a new status for China, it's a sort of restoration of national greatness.
And I think we're going to face a China that, on one hand, is cooperative, increasingly cooperative on some economic and global issues, like climate change. But on the other hand, I just was speaking with military people in China last week and they are clearly going to continue to push China's sovereignty, and he's not going to give on that set of issues.
So he's walking a fine line by trying to seem a good global citizen on the one hand, but assuage this nationalistic drive on the other. FULL POST
Facing up to the China challenge
Watch "Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
By Fareed Zakaria
As Moscow continues to send its forces into Ukraine, it seems clear that Putin's Russia presents America and the West with a frontal challenge. But in the longer run, it is not Russia's overt military assault but China's patient and steady non-military moves that might prove the greater challenge.
Russia is a great power in decline. Its economy amounts to just 3.4 percent of global GDP. China's is nearly 16 percent and rising, now almost four times the size of Japan's and five times that of Germany's, according to the World Bank.
Presidents Obama and Xi deserve the accolades they are receiving for their historic agreement on climate change, and it seems to suggest that America and China are moving towards a new, productive relationship.
Except that, even while signing these accords, Xi Jinping's government has been taking steps that suggest it is developing a very different approach to its foreign policy – one that seeks to replace the American-built post-1945 international system with its own.
Watch the video for the full Take or read the WaPo column
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