The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Fareed Zakaria — Revolutions & Global Affairs

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Fareed Zakaria, the host of CNN’s flagship international affairs show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, joins Scott to discuss his latest book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.” We hear why the Industrial Revolution was the most transformative in our nation’s history, and get an update on geopolitics as a whole.  Follow Fareed on X, @FareedZakaria. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 294. I-294 is an interstate highway located in the northeastern part of illinois in 1994 the show friends premiered on nbc true story my wife tried to humiliate me by telling all of her friends that i had a tiny dick wasn't she surprised when they all disagreed go go go Go! Go! Welcome to the 294th episode of the Prop G Pod. The dog is traversing the Nile River. That's right, going down the Nile, stopping.

Totally freaked out about the Nile crocodile. I've been watching all these YouTube videos. Those bitches, they don't play around. I am fascinated. My TikTok algorithm is essentially Great Danes, economists, ridiculously hot people talking about social justice, and some unwitting animal heading up to a watering hole looking for just a light afternoon refreshment of water. And wham, the croc comes in. Oh my god, I can't get enough of that shit. And I know how it ends every time, but I keep watching it. Anyways, I'm going down the Nile. Cultural trip. Some of you should know about the dog. I hate anything cultural. Broadway, museums, I hate all that shit.

The most cultural thing I'll do is I'll watch like Aliens and IMAX. That for me is the equivalent of a museum visit. Anyways, but I've decided I want to do a trip where my kids see something historical. So we're going down the Nile on one of these flat river boats, which I'm actually kind of excited about. Anyways, here we are headed to the Nile next week. So in the meantime, please enjoy our conversation with Total Gangster and number one most viewed podcast. Last time we did this, his video got over a million, like 1.2 million views. Anyways, the inimitable Fareed Zakaria. We hear all about his new book, Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

Fareed, where does this podcast find you? I'm in New York at my house. Oh, nice. So let's bust right into it. Your new book, Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, walks the reader through pivotal revolutions that have shaped world history. The economic revolution, the French revolution, the industrial revolution, and four present-day revolutions, globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. Let's start with the past revolutions. Stack rank them in order of how they changed the trajectory of history. If you were going to write a book on one of them, which one would it be? It would be the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution changed the world. You can see this in a very simple graph. If you look at a

graph of per capita income, average income of human beings in the world over the last 2,000 years. It's basically a flat line for 1,750 of those years. And then sometime around the 18th century, it starts to go up. And then it's like a hockey stick graph. It just goes way up. We go, roughly speaking, from a couple hundred dollars per capita income per person to $5,000, $6,000, $7,000. And that dramatic rise is basically because of the Industrial Revolution. So if you ask yourself, what is the single thing that has changed the course of human history, the most discontinuous feature of human life, it is the Industrial Revolution,

where finally human beings were able to get themselves out of poverty, out of real grinding medieval poverty, and almost on a sustained basis keep raising their standards of living for 250 years. But hasn't technology, the technology revolution sort of hockey-sticked the hockey stick? And that is, what happened in the previous century has gone parabolic, I think, in the last 50 years. No, the microprocessor vaccines, internal combustion engines, hasn't even gotten more parabolic in the last four or five decades? So, you know, the data does not show economic growth going parabolic in that way. As you know, you've seen some optics of productivity and you've seen rises in, you know, in certainly the U.S., for example, has done very well over the last 30 years. But part of it is, I think, that that was starting from such a low base. You know, you're starting with people who are barely having one meal a day. So I think you haven't seen quite that in the data,

but I agree with you, and that's part of what I try to explain in the book, that the nature of the digital revolution, if we can just call it that for a moment, is that it has created a whole new economy and a whole new mental world for us. Marc Andreessen's famous blog post where he talks about software eating the world gets it exactly right.

The world used to be run, it was a world of atoms. And what happened is the digital revolution came and it created a world of bits and bytes that now control those atoms. So actually, the internal combustion engine is kind of irrelevant now. What a car is becoming is software on wheels, and it's the software that controls that. And now what's going to happen is you're going to have AI that controls the software, and those things become paramount. And the point I'm trying to make in the book is not so much about the economic effect. It's the sort of social and psychological consequences of these

changes, which you know and care a lot about. It is mind-blowing in every way to think about that. You know, human beings have never had the power to multiply their minds the way that AI is going to be able to allow them to do? What does that do to our conceptions of who we are as human beings? And what does history tell us about, there's a lot of catastrophizing around AI, and I can't, I'm trying to sort through how much of his techno-narcissism, where people like to think that the singular, the single point of failure that's going to, or success that's going to destroy or save humanity, or if we should really be worried about it. As you look through history and these revolutions, if we're going through an AI

revolution, what can we learn from the past revolutions? I share your skepticism that it's going to end human existence, it's going to extinguish the universe. That stuff has always struck me as, you know, kind of catastrophizing. And you can see how it has the potential. But, you know, human beings at the end of the day, I had to put it in simple terms, you can pull the plug, you can create a kill switch, you can create, for example, a simple break between the ability of AI and AI-operated machines to access energy. At the end of the day, they need energy to run. And so, you know, now you could say

those kill switches become increasingly expensive if you're running your whole society and your whole economy and your whole cities on AI, and then you suddenly say the only, you know, the break is going to be that you lose the access to energy. Well, maybe you then lose access to the AI that's running everything, you know, your planes, your traffic lights, everything like that. But there is a kill switch.

The effect I think that is most likely to happen is exactly what's happened with this digital revolution, but on steroids. Because I do think that that piece of this is new. Until now, we have always been able to use technology as a tool. You know, the Industrial Revolution was fundamentally an energy revolution. We were able to make machines

that could do the work of thousands of humans, thousands of horses. That's why we talk about horsepower. It was about replacing horses, and a steam engine by the end could replace thousands of horses. It was able to do the work. So the AI revolution, I think, allows you to replace minds. It allows you to replace thousands of minds because one computer, one AI program can do what thousands of minds used to do. That is mind-blowing, and that's the part

I'm fascinated by in terms of the potential of what it can do in terms of solving problems like disease and global warming. But it's also kind of scary. We are entering uncharted waters. So some revolutions cause tremendous productivity. Some revolutions end in world war. Now do politics. When you look at examining these different revolutions and looking at the state of American politics, let me go broader, the state of geopolitics in 2024, what lessons from history do you glean and what does it say about the situation we're in right now? argument of the book is every time you have these massive changes in technology and economics propelling some societies forward dramatically, you get two things happen. You get an identity and a political revolution. The identity revolution, because you start to think of yourself differently. You know, that starts with the Dutch. The Dutch become the richest country in Europe. But most importantly, they start to think of themselves differently. They're no longer

part of the Spanish empire. They're Dutch. They break away. They're no longer part of the Catholic world. They're Protestant. They break away. And those identity revolutions create a political revolution. That's point one. And point two is you always have a backlash. And what we are living through right now is the backlash to one of the most dramatic, perhaps the most dramatic, perhaps the most dramatic revolutions that we've had. As you said, these four revolutions taking place almost simultaneously. Economics with globalization, technology with information, identity and geopolitics all happening. So we are living through the backlash, the cultural backlash to

all of this. How we navigate that backlash is going to determine where we end up here. You know, are we going to get overwhelmed by it? Are we going to sort of accept the Trumps and Brexits and Victor Orbans of the world who say, stop the train, I want to get off? The real backlash, in a sense, comes from Russia and China and Iran, to a certain extent, where they're all saying, we don't want any of this world. We believe that this Western modernity, Western liberal democracy is ruining the world. The Western liberal order is corrupt, and they're fighting back. And if, for example, Russia wins in Ukraine, what will that do to that

liberal international order that's rested on the premise that you can't just take another country's territory by force. So I don't think that there is a future out there that I can predict for you because it depends on our actions. But the lesson I came from is, I drew from it is, you aren't going to be able to move forward. You are not going, you know,

the forces of progress and acceleration and individual liberty don't win by themselves. You know, it's not going to happen naturally. You can't be fatalistic about this and say, oh, time is on our side. You know, Steve Pinker tells me it's all going to work out in the end. No, you got to fight for it. You've got to really get in there and fight back the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. You write in the book that throughout history, there's often a pattern of great power rivalry in which an agrarian land power is pitted against a maritime trading power. Is this still the case today? It sounds like you're describing the tension between China and the U.S. Say more about that.

Yes, both Russia and China in some ways are fundamentally land powers. So China has a very large coast and, you know, kind of functions in both ways. And they're both launching this very spirited campaign. And it's not just a geopolitical balancing. One of the things that I realized when reading more and more of what Putin and Xi are saying, it's a cultural balancing. One of the things that I realized when reading more and more of what Putin and Xi are saying, it's a cultural balancing. They really believe that these ideas of Western liberal democracy are destabilizing their societies, destabilizing their basis for power. You know, Putin goes on these rants about how, you know, the United States is turning into the sexual fantasy land of trans rights and gay rights.

You know, he came out one day in favor of J.K. Rowling against the people who were canceling her. Xi Jinping talks a lot about how he wants women back in the kitchen, you know, assuming their traditional roles. So there's a lot here that's about cultural reaction and cultural counter-revolution. But the geopolitical piece of it is very important because they regard the liberal international order that the U.S. has set up and run as one where they don't get to do whatever they want, right? There are constraints, there are rules, there are norms. and they're going to push. They're going to keep pushing. And we have to figure out, do we have the willpower to fight

back? We have the capacity. Scott, if you looked at the Cold War, the coalition against, arrayed against the Soviet Union, comprised, say, by 1970, it was about probably 40% of GDP, of global GDP. Today, the coalition that is supporting Ukraine against Russia is 60% of global GDP. If you throw in India and a few others on the fence, you'd get to about 70% of global GDP. The question is, do we have the willpower, the staying power? And most importantly, in that regard, is does the leader of the West, of the free world, have that staying power? And do we want to fight that? Do we understand the stakes? And the problem I have with Trump on international affairs is I really don't think he understands the stakes, that we are up against this challenge of, is this order that we've built since 1945? That's unique in human history. Before that, it's like the jungle of realpolitik for thousands of years. And then we set up this system where you have a much, it's the longest period of great power piece in human history. It's the greatest explosion of global economics and trading in human history, the lowest

number of conflicts in human history, is that all going to go away because we're going to allow a return to the jungle of realpolitik? It's interesting because you talk about pushing back and it strikes me, I love what you're saying, we kind of have the muscle. It's a question of whether we have the mentality or the will, because I was reading that as a percentage of our GDP, our military spending is actually quite low relative to historically, but yet just whatever it is, 3% of our GDP is 800 billion, which is greater than the next 10 economies combined. I mean, we have the resources, right?

It feels as if the great threat, and this is a thesis and you push back or tell me that, you know, if America was a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. It's that we don't like each other. We can battle any external threat. We just can't, we have the muscle. I'm just not sure we have the coordination or we're starting to self-harm. Does that make any sense? 100% right. Think about it this way, Scott. You know, one of the points in the book is that the country that leads in technology always ends up being the dominant power. So it's Netherlands in the 17th century. It's Britain by the end of the 18th century. It's the United States in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the United States

leads in technology like it has never led before, like no country in the world has ever led before. If you look at the world of information revolution, biotech, nanotech, AI, whatever you want, the U.S. is so far ahead in the lead. Those seven or eight companies that are top technology companies, the market cap of those companies is larger than the market cap of the entire countries of Britain, France, Germany, and Canada put together. Apple's market cap alone is larger than the stock market capitalization of the total country of Germany.

We make more energy than anybody in the world. We make more oil than Saudi Arabia. We make more natural gas than Qatar. Our banks are the dominant banks in the world. The dollar is the dominant currency in the world. And unlike any other rich country in the world, we are demographically vibrant because of immigration. Every other rich country in the world is declining in population. They're basically turning into Florida's retirement communities. We are vibrant. You put all that together and you say, could we handle China? Of course we can handle China.

Could we handle Russia? Of course we could. It's the problem is our dysfunction within, you know, that's taking this amazing hand of cards and making us play it badly. You described the phenomena you call the rise of the rest, which examines how nations outside of the U.S. have gained strength and confidence. Which nations are you paying the most attention to, and how have they kind of shifted the world order? So when I wrote that book, obviously the one I focused on most was China, which was rising fast, and you could see that China has. And India has

that scale. And it has an incredibly vibrant economy. It's growing from a very small base. People don't completely understand when they sort of talk about India as the next China. So the Chinese economy is still four and a half times bigger than the Indian economy. And so India is going to have to take a while to catch up, but it is on that scale. But then there are, you know, under those two, there's Indonesia, there's Brazil, there's Nigeria, there's South Africa.

And the most interesting feature of all of these, Scott, is that they're becoming politically stable and economically dynamic enough that they're getting culturally and politically independent and economically dynamic enough that they're getting culturally and politically independent and proud. So you can't boss them around anymore. That's the dilemma of the world we're in, in terms of kind of management, if you will. It's not that there is a superpower that can truly rival the United States. There isn't. And it's not that the U.S. has declined. I mean, we are still 25% of global GDP.

You know what we were in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected? 25% of global GDP. It's amazing. With all this change, our share of the world economy has stayed the same. It's the Europeans and the Japanese that have gone down. They've been the losers.

But it's a world of uppity middle powers, if you want to put it that way, that aren't going to be taking directions from Washington. And how to navigate a world like that, how to corral these countries into some collective action, that's, you know, that's where the skill of diplomacy becomes really important because you don't have, you don't quite have the muscle you had in the past. You've got to use words as much as muscle. Coming up after the break. This is largely a second-order issue. It's a sideshow compared to the big forces that are shaping the world. Israel is the dominant power in the Middle East and will remain the dominant power in the Middle East. Stay with us.

The last time we spoke, we spoke the week after October the 7th. So it's been five months. And by the way, I was saying off mic, the video or the video of the podcast we did with you got, I think, 1.2 or 1.4 million views. And I was ribbing you that more people watched you on this podcast than watch any CNN show, which is a different talk show about how the world of media is changing. But what, in the last five months, in terms of the war in Gaza, give us a sense for the state of play, how it's unfolded, and what has surprised you, and where do you think it's headed? Sure. So, I mean, in terms of these broad systemic things that we're talking about, it's worth putting this in perspective. This is largely a second-order issue. It's a sideshow compared to the big forces that are shaping the world. Israel is the dominant power in the Middle East and will remain the dominant power in the Middle East because it is the technologically most advanced country. It is politically the most potent. It has the military

that none of these other countries can match. So you put all that together. And Israel is not just there to stay, but it's there to be the dominant player. Now, is it handling this challenge appropriately? My view, they went from an appropriate response to an overreaction. And I think I, in this regard, basically share the Biden administration's view that they've just gone too far. Donald Rumsfeld used to have a rule, which he said, which I wish he had followed himself after the Iraq war. But when he was Secretary of Defense in the war on terror, he would say, are we creating more terrorists than we are killing by our actions? And I think about that

when I think about Israel now, you know, it's killed about 15,000 Hamas militants by their own, by the Israeli government's own count. They've killed about 30-odd thousand Palestinian civilians. They've destroyed about 60% of the buildings in Gaza. And if they do, Rafa, it'll probably be worse because these people have now, these one and a half million people have now been displaced three times. And my question is, is it worth the next, you know, this last 5,000 Hamas militants, given the costs you are generating in terms of the radicalization of Palestinians, the radicalization of the Arab street? I don't think they've got the balance right now. Frankly, we got the balance wrong after 9-11. So I understand it. There's a lot of rage. There's a lot of outrage in this, particularly for Israel, a feeling of existential vulnerability

that I don't think we appreciate enough. I mean, this is a country that from the day it was founded, its neighbors tried to eliminate it. And then 20 years later in 67, tried to eliminate it again. And then in 1973, tried to eliminate it. So this is not a case of being paranoid. This is a case of there were real enemies. question it should be asking itself is, in a world in which these moderate Arabs want to make peace with us, in this world in which, you know, we have so much more strength than the Palestinians, if you think about it before this and from the West Bank, there have been no terror attacks on Israel because that wall that Ariel Sharon built, which I supported at the time, it worked. You know, it had just, the incidence of West Bank terrorism went down to basically zero. And so that piece of it is, I think, without any question, working. The challenge is, what's the long-term sustainable strategy? Where does this go in terms of a post-war settlement?

Can you get the Arabs on board to create some kind of governing structure in Gaza? And I think all that becomes harder if you're just pummeling and pummeling and pummeling. And so that's my view. I get Israel's desire to completely eliminate Hamas as a fighting force. I just think that the price you pay for those last 5,000 militants might be quite high, and I'm not sure you get anything out of it, because what is Hamas? It's the idea of armed resistance. You know, if you kill them, you're saying there aren't going to be any Palestinians who believe in armed resistance, particularly after the last six months? I'm not sure. So just for the purposes of the discussion,

some pushback. But what this comes down to is what is the proportionate response to this type of attack or terrorism, right? And this is almost an impossible thing to calibrate. I look historically at the Japanese killed 2,200 servicemen at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill 3 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night, and the terms are unconditional surrender. Al-Qaeda kills 2,800 Americans. We go on to kill 300,000 to 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terms are unconditional surrender. We killed 5 million Germans. The terms are unconditional surrender. When Israel is attacked, at least as severely as we were in any of those instances, why do they not have the same rights to demand unconditional surrender? It's a great question.

And the fundamental reason is the Palestinians live within land that Israel controls and are going to be there for the next hundred years. In other words, Israel has to live with these people and has to figure out a way to live with them in a way that we didn't have to figure that out with the Germans. We didn't have to figure that out with the Japanese. We didn't have to figure that out with the Taliban in Afghanistan. These are all 8,000 miles away, different countries. This is the problem for the Israelis, is that at the end of the day,

unless you believe there's going to be a wholesale mass expulsion of five and a half million Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan, you got to live with these people. And does it make sense to do that in the context of people who technically Israel isn't in charge of, right? When you take land, the people who are on that land become part of your legal responsibility. So that's, to me, the fundamental difference. Do you worry that if Hamas is left in power or there's any sort of ceasefire,

that we're just going to wash, rinse, and repeat, that we're going to have the same... I mean, the people in power who we're calling for a ceasefire, we were calling for some sort of a truce, which we had October the 6th, you leave Hamas in power. Haven't they just explicitly said that they're committed to rebuilding, taking whatever aid they have? It might take a year, it might take 10 years, but doesn't this just happen again unless we figure out a way to, quite frankly, eliminate Hamas the way we eliminated the Third Reich or we demanded that the emperor in Japan acknowledge that he wasn't a god? I mean, aren't we just kicking

the can down the road? And as painful as it might be, as much of a humanitarian crisis as it might be, isn't the only solution to take out Hamas fully? So I am very much of the view that Hamas should not govern Gaza after this. And I think that I've talked to people in Qatar and Egypt who have been working on talking, frankly, to Hamas. They believe that that is attainable, that is already attainable, that Hamas does not have the capacity

to regain control in Gaza, particularly if you can work out some security system post-war, because that becomes the key. Unless you believe you're going to literally, you know, kill every last Hamas militant and there will never be another one, there are going to be some scattered remnants and scattered violent resistance, right? So the question is, who governs Gaza? And your ability to set up some kind of government of Gaza depends on being able to bring in the Arabs, bring in the Palestinian Authority. But they're not going to be willing to come in as Israeli stooges. They're not going to be willing to ride on the back of Israeli tanks and govern a restive Palestinian population. So that's why I think the dynamic at work that's

most important to ask about is, are you going to be able to get some kind of stable governance in Gaza? And again, that's why I think it's different. Japan has been governed by itself for 5,000 years. You knew that, you know, when you left Japan, the Japanese would be governing themselves. Whereas what we are trying to do, as you say, is prevent the return of Hamas. And I really do believe that Hamas in that sense is an idea. They can call it something else. They'll call it Islamic jihad. They'll call it some new term. What we're trying to do is to make sure that there isn't so much radicalization in the population and in the broader neighborhood that you can get moderate

Arabs to come in, you can get the Palestinian Authority to come in, create some structure of authority, you can then pass it off to them. Otherwise, Israel is going to be back in Gaza. And we know how that movie ended. What it takes from Israel in terms of material, in terms of men, you know, to run these places, and what it takes in terms of the fabric of a liberal democracy to run a, you know, a kind of colonial occupation is very, very tough for Israel to manage. What do you think a solution might look like?

I mean, they call you, and I'm sure you get these calls, and they say, Farid, what does a post-truce world or a post-war Gaza look like? My sense is Hamas is still actually quite popular among the populace. My understanding is 70%. If anything, it's gotten more popular because know, five months of pummeling. So you got to find some way to bring, I think, to bring some, in some way, the Palestinian authority from the West Bank has to be a partner here. You got to get the moderate Arabs involved

because those are the people who are going to have credibility on the ground. You've got to create some kind of structure that gives people hope that there's rapid reconstruction of their houses, you know, of return of normalcy to their lives. And then I do think one thing has come out of this whole episode, which is the Israelis have always argued for a demilitarized Palestinian state, you know, those Israelis who have been willing to talk about a two-state solution. I believe that that argument becomes pretty powerful now. In other words, you can see why a non-demilitarized Palestinian state would be an existential threat to Israel.

And so if you think about, you know, if you say to yourself, look, you've got to have a 20-year horizon here. You're not going to solve this. In a 20-year horizon, the fact that maybe, you know, I would argue in some ways this whole business has made us all realize not Israel right now, but you've got to find some two-state solution.

Otherwise, you're going to go on with this, you know, occupation forever. And you can't as a democracy, as a Jewish liberal democracy. But you can also understand that, look, you can't have a normal Palestinian state. Because for whatever reason, it is infected with enough radicalism and enough violence right now that the Israeli concerns about security have to be addressed. And if you can imagine those twin forces moving forward, that you've got to have a political solution, but there is not going to be a normal state with a normal military, that, I think, provides outlines for a possible solution. Because, frankly, if you had a Palestinian state, and they have a flag and a national anthem and a parliament, or however they choose to govern themselves, if they don't have an army, the

worst thing they can do is some kind of a terror attack. And that'll become, by the way, from, as I said, the West Bank, the wall has essentially eradicated that threat. You can do the same thing in Gaza. You can build effectively a version of what Sharon built. And Israel will be largely impregnable. And in that circumstance, disentangling these two peoples from this kind of joint existence is probably, in the short term, the only solution. I love what Robert McNamara said in The Fog of War, that to defeat an enemy, you just, you really have to empathize with them, walk in their shoes, and really try and understand things

from their frame. And I look at the objectives of Hamas, or I try to understand the objectives of Hamas on October the 6th, and it was. And I'll outline three, you tell me if you agree and where this leaves us. But one is kill Jews. They accomplished that. Second worst day in history for Jews. Two, I think we're hoping to bring attention to their plight. And I think they've accomplished that. I think there's a lot of people in America who, when they look closely at Israel's leadership, think Israel has not draped itself in glory. There are huge bigots and racists on the Knesset, over settlements. I think there is a greater understanding of and appreciation for some of the suffering

of the residents of Gaza. I think they've achieved that. And the third thing is I think they were hoping to inspire a multi-front war to see above number one, kill more Jews. And that has not happened. I'm curious if, I'm surprised or I'm hopeful, happy that, and I think it's the function of two-carrier strike forces sitting offshore, but I'm curious if you agree with those three and how they have played out. Yeah, I agree entirely with those three. I think you put it exactly right.

And I think that's why, in some ways, I think that there's a possible path to a solution because it has made people realize that the current situation is unsustainable, both for Palestinians and Israelis. The reason the third hasn't happened is a really interesting one, because what you're really referring to is the fact that at one level, Hamas is part of a larger strategy of what the Iranians call an axis of resistance. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iraqi Shia militias in Iraq, the Assad government in Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. These are all through Iranian forces that Iran has variously encouraged and funded. And in some ways, this is part of that larger struggle that we were talking about. The

Iranian mullahs regard America and its liberal democratic ideology as, you know, the kind of great cancer, and they regard Israel as a outpost of Western liberal democracy in and real politics. So they're aware that they are facing a formidable foe in the United States. And you talk to administration officials over the years, by the way, and they'll say there's one thing very interesting about Iran. When you push, they are very cautious. They don't needlessly provoke. They don't needlessly get into, you know, into conflicts. So if you remember that moment when the Houthis fire a drone at Americans in Jordan and they killed three American servicemen, that could easily have blown up. And the Iranians did everything they could to signal, A, they had not authorized this. B, they did not intend to, you know, this was not a step in an escalatory cycle if they had anything to do with it. Hezbollah, Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah after the October 6th attack, made a very interesting

speech where he said, you have our warm wishes, you have our, you know, you have ideological support, but basically you're on your own militarily. We're not going to get into this militarily. So again, you see this very interesting pragmatism that they have. And I think your point, Scott, is exactly right, that Biden did exactly the right thing in sending those two carrier task forces. It just reminds them, you know, if you want to escalate, this can get very messy. And the U.S. has incredible firepower. It's just incredible.

It's sort of what's old is new again. If you look at the battle lines in Ukraine, it looks very similar to 1917. And if you look at your analogy, it's a really interesting one, agrarian versus naval power. I've heard in almost all the biographies I've written on U.S. presidents, whenever kind of quote-unquote shit gets real, the first question they ask is, where are our carriers? It's still really a battle of the seas and delivering violence and firepower via, you know, blue ocean waters. I want to put forward a thesis, and I apologize I'm digressing a bit here, but I'm curious to get your thoughts. I went to UCLA, and I had a lot of close friends who were Iranian. There was a big influx into UCLA of Iranians after the revolution. And I always thought

the most American kids in my fraternity were Iranians. They were hardworking, really into commerce, which is a plight way of saying they're capitalists and into money, generous, really into education. Just the most American kids that I thought at UCLA that I met were Iranians. And I'm one of my mentors, Hamid Moghadam. I've always thought, I've always held out this hope that it feels to me like Iran and the U.S., culturally, we would be great allies. That when I go to Israel, I see a version of America. And I always thought if I went into Iran, if Iranians were like the Iranians I know here, and maybe that's self-selection bias, do you think there's ever a chance that Iran and the U.S. could become allies?

Well, I think you're absolutely right about the culture. Iran is a very worldly, it's a trading culture. It's been a trading culture for 5,000 years. More modern than many Arab nations, right? Exactly. There's a bazaari culture. When I talk to people who negotiate with the Iranians, they say, you know, you always feel like you're in the bazaar. They're always scanning. They're always clever about it. Love to trade.

The experience you're describing, I have an even more vivid version of that, which is, you know, when I used to go to Egypt and Iran, what I was always struck by was here you'd go to Egypt where the government was resolutely pro-American and the people hated America. And then you'd go to Iran where the government hated America and the people loved America. When I went to Iran and you're on the streets of Tehran, they are incredibly pro-American. Now, this has been changed a little bit by the last 10 years of really ruinous sanctions and particularly Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal, which really meant that the Iranians, you know, the brunt of the effect has been felt by ordinary Iranians and they blame America for it. But if you go back 10 years, it was amazing how pro-American the people on the street were. So I think, you know, what we have in Iran is a counter-revolution,

if you put it in the terms of my book, a cultural reaction, you know, reactionary forces that have hijacked the country for 35 years now. And it's a reminder that history doesn't always move in a, you know, in a positive direction. For the Iranians, it's been going backwards for a long time. Can that regime break? The problem is, somebody once said about Leninism, when these groups come to power by revolution, they know one thing, how to prevent another revolution. Because they're experts at revolution. And this regime is very good at

that, I think. They do a mixture of repression, patronage, and escape valves. The repression, we all know. The patronage is they spend a lot of money, particularly in the rural areas, among conservative people, among older people. So they do have a kind of constituency. And the escape valves is they have an election here or there. You know, they do things that in some way let off steam. And by doing all three, they have managed to stay in power despite, you know, frankly, so many predictions that they would leave. So I wish it were not true, but I think it's going to be very hard to dislodge this regime. We'll be right back.

In our remaining time, I want to talk about domestic affairs. And I'm terrible at sports analogies, but this won't stop me. I was with my father a couple weekends ago, and we used to go to Rams games, which were the football team in Los Angeles, and we'd always lose to the Dallas Cowboys or the Minnesota Vikings every year in the playoffs. And my dad would constantly say, there's nothing like the Rams to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And I kept thinking that when I saw him. I was thinking of how he used to say that to me all the time. And I thought, that kind of sums up perfectly how I feel about America right now. We have no reason to lose. We're just so incredibly strong and prosperous right now. And yet it feels like that's not going to stop us, quite frankly, from the jaws of victory. And if you want to talk about the election, but I think it's bigger than Trump.

What do you think are the social policies or the economic policies or just the way we approach being American that can save us from ourselves, save us from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? So look, I think Biden has been a good president. He has done one thing that has been really important in America. We have, for the last 30 or 40 years in America, not had enough public investment., all of that is an investment in America, a long-term investment in America.

And I think that that was much needed, and a lot of it is going to areas which have been left behind. You know, I think one calculation was two-thirds of the money is going to rural areas, and two-thirds of the jobs being created don't require a college degree. And that's really good, and that's the right direction to go. The thing that Biden is not, I think, understanding enough is it's not just about money. It's about the sense that these people have that their world has gone away, that their communities have disappeared, their faith has crumbled. You have to play in the cultural arena, and you have to play offense in the cultural arena. You can't be playing defense. And I think on things like immigration, on this whole woke stuff, Biden has to get out there, and he has to make clear that he is not with all this stuff. The two most successful left-of-center politicians in the last 30 years in the West

were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And they both understood that if you want to help people and you want to get your agenda through and you want to get your ideas implemented, you've got to reassure people that you're not some crazy radical. And it's all culture.

It's not economics. So my favorite example of this is Bill Clinton comes out very powerfully in favor of school uniforms. Now, the president of the United States has almost nothing to do with state education anyway. It's a state government issue. And he has really nothing to do with what clothes people wear at public schools. What he was doing was engaging in symbolic politics to tell all those people out there, I'm not some crazy, hippie, radical, you know, I believe in what can be more bourgeois, what can be more mainstream than school uniforms. Blair would do similar kinds of things, you know. You've got to realize that people do get unsettled by all this change,

and they get culturally unsettled. And you can't just, you're not going to be able to bribe them. You've got to engage at that cultural level. Biden should make a speech against the woke agenda. He should go out there and basically declare a national emergency on the border and say, we're not going to, and let the courts challenge it. That's not the point. Clinton had another great line. He'd say, the American people don't always expect you to succeed, but they want to catch you trying. And Biden needs to be caught trying on some of these issues to show Americans where he is. I think if he did that, it's a powerful combination. You're never going to be wildly popular, but if you look at some of the guys who've managed to survive, Justin Trudeau and Macron, they all do this. They combine being kind of, if you will, tough on some of when Clinton, I think he was somewhere in Michigan or in a Rust Belt state, and he said, your jobs aren't coming back. I'm not going to lie to you. And I think he immediately got so much credibility among moderates, like, well, finally, someone's going to be honest with us. I think even the union bosses appreciated that. Talk a little bit about what's happening on campuses or any thoughts you have. We, you know, the fundamental advantage we have over the rest of the world is other countries,

Singapore, South Korea, they teach people how to do well at tests. We teach people how to think and problem solve. That is a fundamentally different way of approaching education. It's a deeply American way, and we do it very well. Now, I think two things have happened over the last 20 or 30 years. One of them is that you have had a certain degree of, you know, the young

population has been getting more left-wing for, you know, particularly on cultural issues and things like that, and that's a real trend. I don't pay too much attention to that in the sense that people forget in the early 1970s, the Harvard Crimson was writing editorials in favor of Pol Pot. It was writing editorials arguing that the North Vietnamese should win the Vietnam War because they were the forces of progress and liberation. These are 1920-year-olds. They've often been radical. There were a lot of Maoists at Yale when I was there. They're supposed to be pushing the limits, right? That's the idea. Right, exactly. What has changed, and I think what makes it much more cancerous, is this building up of this diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus and bureaucracy.

And I want to be clear about one thing. It's not that all these people are bad. Many of them are very good people. They are right-minded. They're trying to do the right thing. It's a good example of incentives and institutions. When you create these large bureaucracies, they have a kind of self-perpetuating reason to exist and to grow. And what that rests on is there being problems, those problems being highlighted, those problems being exacerbated. And one of the things I noticed on college campuses, so I went to Yale and then I served on the board, you know, decades later.

Between those two periods, mid-1980s when I was at Yale and around 2008, 9, 10 when I was on the board, what had happened is you had this whole apparatus of segregation that had built up because you created African-American house, Latin American house, Hillel, South Asian students, African-American students. Just you created this huge apparatus of these organizations and these administrative officers whose almost job it was to separate people, reinforce that separation, emphasize all the problems, the lack of the kind of ways in which people felt discriminated. And what that ended up being was it, in sum total, what you ended up doing was creating a more segregated, more resentful, more hostile campus than was necessary. Because you're feeding these

fires instead of saying, we're a campus about integration. You know, what we really want to find is to see the commonality in all of you. And I understand where, you know, as I say, it might have been well-motivated, but what you've now created is a completely balkanized campus where you have these, you know,

these groups that think of themselves as victims, this bureaucracy that feeds that. And every time there's a problem, the demand is give us more money, give us more funding, so it reinforces the segregated identities. And I think this is a huge problem and it's fundamentally illiberal

because we are not looking at human beings as human beings anymore. We're looking at them based on ascriptive identities of race, ethnicity, national origin, which is fundamentally opposed to the liberal project, which sees, as Martin Luther King so beautifully put it, judges people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's flagship international affairs show,

Fareed Zakaria GPS, as well as a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including 10 Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World and his latest, Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. He joins us from his home in New York. Fareed, I always, you're one of the few reasons I turn on the television,

Premier League games, and I like to watch you for whatever reason on the big screen in our home. I think you're doing fantastic work and having a huge impact. Appreciate your time. As they say in the Talmud, from your lips to God's ears. There you go, Fareed. Thanks, man.