Fareed Zakaria

- Is this the most revolutionary time in our history?

This week on "Firing Line."

- Back!

Everybody back!

- Get behind the barrier.

- [Margaret] From political and social upheaval, to the way artificial intelligence is transforming society, author and journalist Fareed Zakaria says the current era of transformation could be the most dramatic yet.

- These movements forward have been very deep and disruptive and the backlash is very strong.

- [Margaret] Zakaria's new book, "Age of Revolutions," examines progress and backlash over the past 500 years, and what those patterns tell us about our current revolutionary moment.

- We're in the midst of a full-blown cultural backlash.

We've seen 30 years of breakneck progress and there's a lot of people who feel like, "Stop the train, I wanna get off."

- [Margaret] With wars waging abroad [air whooshes] [explosion booms] campus protests escalating at home.

- [Protesters] There's no silence.

- [Margaret] And a pivotal presidential election on the horizon.

- This contest between solidarity and division is perennial but this time it's so different.

- Now, if I don't get elected it's gonna be a bloodbath.

- [Margaret] What does Fareed Zakaria say now?

[serious tonal music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Asness Family Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

[serious tonal music continues] Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. and by Pfizer Inc. - Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to "Firing Line."

- It's such a pleasure to be back.

- Your recent book, "Age of Revolutions," examines revolutions through the prism of progress and backlash in the last 400 years.

In this cycle in American history, where are we?

- We're in the midst of a full blown cultural backlash, I would say.

And you can tell, you can sense it by looking at two events, the rise of the Tea Party 10 years ago, which is when I began thinking about the book.

So here you had a cultural movement really taking over or upending the Republican Party, which had till then really been governed by the Reagan formula: low taxes, limited government, you know, spread democracy abroad.

The second piece you can look at is to look at the election currently.

The economy is doing very well by really every measure, and yet Joe Biden's approval ratings are basically the lowest any president has ever been.

Why?

It's because the things that are motivating people to vote these days are not economic issues.

They are cultural issues.

Immigration on one side, abortion on the other side.

And so that's the moment we're in.

We've seen 30 years of breakneck progress, globalization, information revolution, you know, a kind of identity revolution, the role of women and minorities.

And there's a lot of people who feel like this is, you know, "This is a lot of disruption.

Stop the train I want to get off," and are very willing to hear politicians who say, "I'm gonna take you back to before this was all so crazy."

- You describe Trump as, quote, "The culmination, not the cause of the identity politics revolution that has swept through Western democracies."

Should we have anticipated a Trump like figure?

- We probably should have.

I mean, I don't pretend I did.

I think, you know, what we should have noticed was that this was a lot of change very fast, and that people were going to find it disorienting.

You know, just even look at something like immigration.

And I think this is something the left sometimes doesn't want to admit, but it's been a lot of change.

In 1975, about 5% of Americans were foreign born.

Today, 15% of Americans are foreign born.

You know, and I say this as an immigrant who thinks obviously immigration has enriched the country.

But it's also true that we've done a lot of it, and it does have the effect of unsettling people.

- We've also done a lot of that throughout the course of our history.

- And it has caused lots of backlashes throughout the course of it.

Don't forget that American history is characterized by enormously pro-immigrant sentiment and lots of backlashes.

- Based on what you've learned from previous revolutions, their backlash, their progress, what does that say about the staying power of a strongman?

Is Trumpism here to stay?

- It's a great question.

Look, I think that this is not going away anytime soon, because these changes, these movements forward have been very deep and very transforming and disruptive, and the backlash is very strong.

And I can't tell you for sure that we'll come out of this the right way because strongmen, sometimes these backlashes go on forever.

Look at a country like Iran.

The Shah tried to modernize Iran too far, too fast, and he was also a rapacious dictator.

But the backlash, the rise of the Islamic Republic is now - 35 years, yeah.

- Almost four decades in the making and shows no signs of, they're not showing any signs of leaving power.

The good guys don't always win.

[chuckles] - Or the bad guys take a long time to recede.

- To lose.

Exactly.

- Only because you just mentioned immigration.

You quote David Frum saying, "If only fascists enforce borders, voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do."

Against the current backdrop of the president's choices around immigration, why hasn't he done more to secure the border?

- So it's a, it is now a complicated story.

Before this it wasn't, in that Biden just wasn't doing enough and he wasn't taking it seriously enough, and the reason was he felt he had a progressive wing within his party that wouldn't listen to reason.

The reality is that the asylum system is broken.

Just so your viewers understand, the big shift that's taken place is in the 1980s what we think of as illegal immigrants were people coming in furtively through the border, sneaking into the country, running away from law enforcement.

That was the model in the '80s and '90s.

Today, people are coming in, aided by cartels to whom they pay huge amounts of money, and they're not running away from law enforcement, they're running towards law enforcement because they have figured out that all they have to do is say the magic words, "I have a credible fear of persecution," and bingo, you're in the country illegally.

You get two court hearings, they could take seven years.

Meanwhile, you slip into the shadows of the economy.

So the whole system is broken.

And Biden needs to confront that and say, you know, "We are gonna have to reform the whole system."

I would wish he'd do something much more extreme, like say, "The old asylum system is dead.

No one is coming in through that process.

You have to apply from your home country."

- Which was a Trump policy.

- Which was, you know, a Trump... And also the Mexico, you know, you have to be in Mexico to apply.

I think that's all correct.

- So strategically, you think that- - [Fareed] I think that it would be- - If Biden would tack towards Trump policies- - Yeah.

And by the way- - He would have a better political chance.

- And it's also the right policy.

Because the old asylum system is being gamed by millions of people.

- Yeah.

- Now, you know, at this point I say it's complicated because Biden did actually recently make this big compromise where he essentially accepted what the Senate Republicans were asking for and gave them the bill that they wanted.

And then, of course, Trump comes in and says, "Don't sign this bill because it's better for me to have chaos on the border than to solve it."

So, you know, I still think what Biden should do is declare an emergency, national security crisis, send the National Guard, shut down the amnesty process and say, "We're going to redo it."

It's quite possible courts will throw out elements of what he does.

But this is a place where Biden should learn something from Trump.

Much of what Trump did: the Muslim ban, you know, banning TikTok, the shutting down the border was overturned by courts.

But people remembered that he was trying.

- Strong action.

- Where he was.

- Symbolically, it helped him a lot.

Biden needs to do something symbolic at the border.

Bill Clinton had a great line.

He said, "The American people don't need the president to succeed, but they need to catch him trying."

He's got to be seen to be trying to do stuff.

- In your book, you write about the Industrial Revolution.

You say we are now in a fourth industrial revolution with the advent of artificial intelligence.

Is it fair to say that you mostly believe that the contributions of artificial intelligence will be complementary to the human experience?

- I think on, you know, look, net how can you think that the explosion of human intelligence, because that's what it will be, or the augmentation of human intelligence is going to be bad for us, right?

If you think about what artificial intelligence will allow us to do in terms of curing diseases, preventing diseases, if you imagine what it might be able to do, for example, with figuring out models where you can take carbon out of the atmosphere.

There's all these areas where artificial intelligence, it's just gonna be amazing.

We've never been in a situation where the human mind has been able to be expanded.

On the other hand, it is difficult to see how it doesn't lead, at least in the short term, to a lot of displacement and disruption.

- Economic displacement- - Yeah.

- Economic disruption.

- You can't have productivity increases without having a temporary, in the short term, a loss of employment.

And we just hope in the long run of capitalism, generally, there are new jobs that come up and new industries that we don't even think about.

What I worry is this is gonna happen so fast that the time lag might, there may be a long time lag.

- How do you think about AI in the context of national security and, you know, the real chance that revisionist powers end up beating us?

- You raise a very important question which is, will this new, next phase of technology favor China?

Look, I think there are some very important ways in which it probably does.

Artificial intelligence fundamentally rests on data.

You use data to train the computers, the models.

And China has a lot of data.

My own guess is that in areas like health care, where the government can centralize all that data and use it very effectively, they will actually do much better than we will, just because our data will tend to be much more fragmented, and we will not be able to get the returns to scale.

On national security I wonder because the US, we're still ahead.

You can see that with our AI companies compared to theirs, you know, doing much, much better.

So I'm pretty hopeful that the United States will be able to maintain the edge.

And I base that on something that should be something that "Firing Line" understands, which is I fundamentally believe that a bottom-up market system is going to be more innovative.

So Xi says, you know, "There are going to be massive government investments in AI, in quantum computing and things like that."

I just don't think that, those are rarely the way that massive technology, the funding helps- - Innovation doesn't happen from top down.

- Right.

But do you need people to fail.

You need lots of models.

You know, look, even we, the US is now copying the Chinese model, frankly.

We're funding chip companies to manufacture in the US.

I'm not sure we're doing it right.

You know, look at the company we picked to give the most subsidies to, Intel.

Intel is the company that lost out to TSMC in making the most cutting edge chips of the last generation.

It's losing out to Nvidia in making the cutting edge chips for the AI generation.

- You're saying government shouldn't pick winners and losers.

- Well, you know, you look at it and you say to yourself, "You can see why they picked Intel.

It's safe.

It's secure.

It's sort of like the IBM of the moment."

But you know, by the time a company becomes- - Texas Instruments.

- Yeah, by the time a company becomes so stable and secure that the government is willing to pick it, the market has moved and it's found new innovators.

- Yeah.

Your book talks about the rise of the rest.

And you're not so much describing American decline as much as you're describing the ascent of other countries, and you write about a post-American world.

Explain how the ascendance of other countries' influence, economic influence, cultural influence, gets us to a post-American world.

- Absolutely.

So what I was trying to convey, and you're right, the first line of that book is, "This is not a story of the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else."

So if you look at America's percentage of global GDP, what's stunning to me, and it's an incredible testament to American strength, is our percentage share of global GDP in 1980, Ronald Reagan era, was 25%.

Our percentage share of global GDP today is 26%.

But we have seen this extraordinary rise of the rest.

So China has gone from 1% to 18%.

India has gone from basically 0% to 3 or 4%.

And what you see is that those countries that used to either be irrelevant or used to take directions from the United States, countries like Turkey, like India, like Brazil, like Mexico, have just become more powerful and as a result, are much less willing to take directions or orders from anyone.

And then, of course, you have the Chinas of the world, which are actively competing with the US.

You put that all together, and it's no longer a world where America, despite its great strength, has the ability to just write the rules, dictate what's going to happen.

You know, there's a lot of contestation.

There's a lot of uppity middle powers that are saying, "Nope, we're not gonna do what you tell us to do."

- So where does that put you in terms of your outlook for sort of the prospects of American leadership?

Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?

- I'm very optimistic about American strength.

I think, as you say, we have the best technology companies in the world.

We have the best financial system in the world.

The dollar is the reserve currency of the world.

We, most people don't realize this, but we are the world's energy superpower.

We produce more oil than Saudi Arabia, we produce more natural gas than Qatar, and we do fantastically in green technology as well.

Our demographics, because of immigration, are better than any rich country in the world.

That's an amazing package.

Our politics is the problem.

But I think that in order to lead the world, we're gonna have to learn much more how to do it in consultation and collaboration with these other countries.

You can't just do it by fiat.

That's the challenge.

You know, can we find a new mode of leadership where we figure out how to be the coalition leader rather than the hegemon.

♪ From the river to the sea ♪ ♪ From the river to the sea ♪ ♪ Palestine ♪ - The protests on campuses for the Palestinian cause, really since October 7th have, in my view, too frequently been displays of blatant antisemitism.

And I wonder how you reflect on what has happened to campus politics.

- Yeah.

It's a big and complicated subject, I think.

So I want to be careful what I say.

An older generation of people, particularly Jewish Americans, but I think most Americans, looked at Israel in kind of heroic terms.

This was the country that, in 1948, the Arab states tried to wipe out and couldn't wipe out, and it fought back and triumphed.

And that sense of Israel as David against the Arab Goliath is, I think, a very core part of the way in which a lot older generation sees Israel, really.

For a younger generation of people, all they've seen really is the last 15 or 20 years when Israel has been the superpower of the region, the economically and technologically strongest country with the incredible, awesome military, 200 nuclear weapons, and 15 years of Bibi Netanyahu's government in which they have oppressed the Palestinians, confiscated land, engaged in extra judicial, you know, killings and arrests and all kinds of things that certainly there are allegations to to that effect, and it looks to them like the Palestinians are the David and Israel is the Goliath.

I think that what's going on on campus in terms of the conduct of the war, it is a perfectly legitimate thing to say the Israelis are conducting a brutal war in Gaza and that they want to protest it.

It's perfectly legitimate, in my view, to say the occupation, which is now 56 years old, you know, needs to end, that Palestinians need to have some political rights.

But you're right that it has too often morphed into antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which are views that I profoundly reject.

- On Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza you've been pretty critical of President Biden's strategy.

You said it has failed almost completely, and his policy, "Appears hapless, ineffective and immoral."

What should President Biden be doing now?

- So just to be clear, what I mean by that is, look, President Biden keeps signaling privately and, you know, his administration officials do, they did not agree with the wholesale invasion of Gaza, they did not agree with the kind of leveling of 50 to 70% of the buildings.

They did not agree with, you know, the lack of humanitarian corridors.

So I keep saying, you know, "You keep saying this stuff, but the Israelis keep doing all the things you're saying are terrible.

At some point, you have to admit you've had no influence on the policy, and your strategy was to hug them close so that you could have influence on their policy.

It's just not working so you've got to think of other ways to have an influence on their policy."

- Where's the breakdown, do you think?

- I think Bibi Netanyahu is a very shrewd politician who understands that at the end of the day, you know, if Biden is going to support him, he can pocket the support and ignore the pressure.

And he's, you know, Biden has been played by Bibi Netanyahu.

And Biden does, in his gut, feel very strongly that he needs to, that he wants to support Israel.

But he's also wanted to influence their policy and he's gotten nowhere, and what I'm saying is he needs to try some tough love.

He, you know- - What does that look like?

Does that look like Chuck Schumer saying there should be change in Israeli leadership?

- I wouldn't have done that.

I would have said there should be a change in Israeli policy, and if there isn't change in Israeli policy there will be a, you know, and Biden has said this, a change in American policy.

But then do the change.

In effect, the Israelis have called the bluff and you've got to deliver.

You got to say, "Okay, we're not gonna send the aid.

We're gonna delay the aid.

We're gonna delay the arms shipments until you commit to more humanitarian aid, more humanitarian corridors."

Look, the USAID administrator, Samantha Power, says there is already a famine ongoing in Gaza.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, there's a larger issue of whether Israel is even, whether it's succeeding for the Israelis.

They have leveled 70% of Gaza.

All hospitals are now dysfunctional.

All schools are dysfunctional.

1 1/2 million people have been displaced.

And notice what's happening in northern Gaza.

The fighting has restarted.

- They've returned.

- The Israelis face an insurgency in northern Gaza after all this, which is what the Americans- - They didn't secure it.

- Were saying to them from the start, which is, "You're never going to get rid of the idea of armed resistance.

This is part of the problem with the occupation and what we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan is if you don't have some idea about how you're gonna govern this space afterwards you're always gonna have some disgruntled militants who are waging an insurgency against you."

And my fear is Israel is stumbling into exactly the mistakes we made.

- In the book you write that the risk in Ukraine is, quote, "The most fundamental rule underpinning international stability."

In 2021, you came on this program and you discussed why the conflict is so important and why the U.S. should give Ukraine the support it needs.

Congress, after waiting several months, eight months, has finally approved a $61 billion package of aid to Ukraine.

Now that that is passed, what should the Biden administration do to ensure the outcome in Ukraine is consistent with the support we've given them so far?

- I think you put it exactly right, which is, what do we need to do to make sure the outcome is what we want it to be.

We've entered this fight.

To my mind, once you enter a fight, there's only one question: are you gonna win?

You know, and I feel as though still the Biden administration, the West in general, we're still being too reluctant.

We're fighting this war with one hand tied behind our backs.

We say, you know, the Ukrainians shouldn't use missiles that will reach too far into Russian territory.

They shouldn't launch attacks on Moscow.

We will certainly not send any troops.

Do we want to win or do we not want to win?

You know, at the end of the day, if we want to win, and if we think the stakes are as high as I do, why would you rule anything out?

Why wouldn't you let Putin guess as to whether or not the missiles will be long range, whether there will be air power used, whether there might be Western support?

Because the alternative is that Putin wins.

- Right.

- And if Putin wins, a naked act of aggression against a neighboring state is ratified and becomes part of the new norm in international relations.

And by the way, also, that the most anti-American, powerful state in the world gets emboldened.

That is Russia, Putin's Russia.

So it seems to me the stakes are very high.

We should fight to win.

- In 1999, you appeared on one of the final programs- - Second last program.

- Of "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley Jr. Take a look at this clip.

- I think there are elements of isolationism in both parties, frankly.

But the mainstream of the Republican Party, I think, is entirely comfortable with America's role in the world.

Let us not forget, we have a military budget that approaches $300 billion, which is more than the next five great powers put together, we spend more on defense research than the rest of the world put together, we guarantee the security of almost 20 countries.

We've just added three with NATO expansion.

No Republican in Congress is objecting to this.

- We've just watched Republicans stall Ukraine aid for several months.

If Donald Trump returns to the presidency how do you think the current faction of Republican isolationism ends up expressing itself in our national foreign policy?

- I'm very worried about it.

I was accurately describing where the Republican Party was in 1999.

I think we have a new Republican Party today.

And I think that this has been one of the, to my mind, most damaging legacies of what Donald Trump has done.

He has returned the Republican Party back to its isolationism.

What people often forget is the Republican Party was deeply isolationist in the 1930s.

People like Buckley and Reagan and Nixon transformed the Republican Party and made it an internationalist party.

But what Trump has done is he's taking it back to its isolationist roots.

And I worry a great deal about this, because until now America's international engagement was not partisan issue.

The particular policies might have been, but the idea of America being deeply engaged with the world was something both parties agreed on.

- Final question.

The book is about the rise and fall of great powers.

Many refer to this upcoming presidential election in the United States as existential.

Do you believe it's existential?

- I think it's incredibly important.

I tend to be a little bit more sanguine in the sense that, maybe it's because I'm an optimist, but I think we have very strong domestic institutions.

So even if Trump were elected, he's in many ways an anti-democratic figure.

Our courts, I think, would hold up.

I think most of our institutions would hold up.

I think the democratic culture in this country is very strong.

America, we will survive.

But, you know, I'm an immigrant.

I've always had faith in this country, and so maybe I'm being a little naive.

- Fareed Zakaria, thank you for the book.

Thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Margaret, it's such a pleasure to be with you.

[serious tonal music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Asness Family Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

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