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Amanpour

Washington Follies: The World Watches; Defending the Arab Spring; Imagine a World

Aired October 04, 2013 - 17:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone, I'm Christiane Amanpour, and welcome to the special weekend edition of our program, where we take a closer look at some of the big stories that we covered this week.

Now it was a week dominated by continued dysfunction in Western democracies. In Italy, a country that was shocked by the deaths of large numbers of African immigrants seeking a better life in Europe, their boat sank off the coast of Lampedusa, there were also Machiavellian games in parliament, as former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi threatened to bring down the government.

All of this was playing out as the government shutdown continues in the United States, a shutdown that has put paychecks for more than 2 million federal employees on hold. It's closed down health and nutrition programs for children across the country and it's damaged America's ability to, quote, "protect the safety and security of this nation," that is according to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

All this and more costing taxpayers an estimated $300 million a day. President Obama has called congressional heads to the White House to try to break the impasse. But those talks went nowhere.

Meanwhile, each day brings the government even closer to blowing through its borrowing limit. And in the words of one former Republican presidential candidate, who's against closing down the government, "if the shutdown is a hand grenade he said, failing to raise the debt ceiling would be a thermonuclear explosion," a potentially devastating blow to the U.S. and the global economy.

The shutdown impacts America's foreign policy as well. President Obama has now been forced to cancel his planned visits to Malaysia and the Philippines, half of a scheduled trans-Pacific tour putting a crimp in his administration's famed diplomatic pivot to Asia.

And in the face of critical developments in Iran, Syria and elsewhere, dysfunction at home threatens to erode confidence in America's credibility and its capacity to lead abroad.

Ironically, while all of this plays out in one of the world's oldest democracies, a lesson in compromise and consensus comes from Tunisia, one of the world's newest. And we'll have more on that and on the parliamentary follies in Italy in a moment.

But first, I spoke with Ryan Lizza of "The New Yorker," a shrewd observer of American politics, earlier this week, together with British broadcaster and publisher, Andrew Neil. He joined me here in the studio in London.

And I asked them both how the world is reacting to the shutdown follies playing out in Washington.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Gentlemen, thank you for joining me.

Let me ask you first, Andrew, how is the world reacting to this in Britain today?

ANDREW NEIL, BRITISH BROADCASTER AND PUBLISHER: I think the rest of the world thinks it's so incredible they don't quite believe it. You know, we're used to dysfunctional governments in Italy or Greece or some banana republic.

But on a basic function of government to set tax and spend and agree a budget, the fact the United States can't do that, people don't quite believe it; so they've not yet faced up to the consequences that could follow.

AMANPOUR: And what about you, Ryan? Is there any silver lining to any of this?

Is this something that's going to pass?

Are they going to reach their senses in a day or two?

RYAN LIZZA, "THE NEW YORKER" MAGAZINE: You know, is there a silver lining? I hate to say this, but I think one outcome of things backfiring on the folks who brought us to this point is that perhaps this ends the cycle of budgeting and governing by fiscal crisis.

Don't forget, in less than two weeks, we have a much, much more significant deadline coming up here. And that is the government is going to run out of its borrowing authority unless Congress acts affirmatively.

So we have two major crises right on top of each other. I think some folks think that this has to end badly for the side that got us into this place for us to not be in this point, just in a few more weeks.

AMANPOUR: Let me just put up these polls, then, because the American people are squarely blaming the Congress and the Republicans.

Seventy-two percent of the people oppose a shutdown; only 22 percent support it. When it comes to the debt ceiling, 64 percent of the American people would oppose any blocking of that, of raising that.

And when it comes to gridlock in Washington, 55 percent blame Congress; 33 percent blame President Obama.

So Andrew Neil, the real looming disaster could be this debt ceiling debacle. We've seen it a couple of years ago. America has never faulted on that. It may have shut down the government, but it hasn't done this.

NEIL: And that's when the ridicule of the rest of the world will turn to anger, because it's not just America that's going to have to live with this. If the debt ceiling isn't agreed, the new one isn't fixed, there is a strong possibility, indeed, even a probability, that the U.S. will default on its bonds. It won't have money to service its debt.

Now the U.S. bonds are by far the most important in the world. They're the benchmark for the rest of borrowing in the world. If America, of all countries, can't service it, we are potentially into a financial crisis much bigger than the one sparked off by Lehman Brothers and that's when the rest of us begin to suffer and not just the Americans.

AMANPOUR: You know, I want to play you both two little pieces of interviews that -- or speeches that both the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, said last night and President Obama also in a radio interview. I want you to listen to this about the negotiations or lack thereof over the current crisis.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BOEHNER, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: I talked to the president earlier tonight. I'm not going to negotiate. I'm not going to negotiate. I'm not going to do this. Well, I would say to the president, this is not about me. And it's not about Republicans here in Congress. It's about fairness for the American people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

OBAMA: I shouldn't have to offer anything. They're not doing me a favor by paying for things that they have already approved for the government to do. That's part of their basic function of government . That's not doing me a favor.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Ryan Lizza, the president is being criticized for not negotiating and for sounding kind of petulant in this regard.

On the other hand, ObamaCare is his signature legislation and it's merely bringing, you know, America's health situation fairly in line with the rest of the world.

Who is, do you think, not negotiating correctly?

LIZZA: Well, look, you know, in our business, Christiane, it's really comfortable for us as reporters to have two sides to blame equality, that Republicans are doing this and Democrats are doing this and, you know, you, the public, make up your minds.

I genuinely don't think that that's the case here. This crisis is the result of about 80 Republicans forcing a course of action on the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, a course of action that he publicly said he did not want to go down.

Boehner said he did not want to threaten a government shutdown based on trying to defund ObamaCare. Eighty very conservative Republicans, who won their districts by an average of 34 points, in other words, they don't care about Democrats opposing them; they only care about Republicans primarying them, they forced Boehner to do this.

And remember what the crisis is here: it's just -- it's just a continuing resolution. It's just legislation that funds the government at current levels. They could have passed something that funded the government for another week as they negotiated some of these other issues.

So in that sense, there's no reason for the government to shut down. So when the president says, look, that policy is in place; this is their basic responsibility, I think he's got a decent point there.

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: Well, let me put this to Andrew. Let me put this to Andrew, because he may have a decent point, but also when it comes to the substance, Andrew, you know, we live here, across this country, across the rest of Europe. People believe they have a right to health care and they have it.

NEIL: Of course. But the issue isn't really health care. It's much more fundamental than that. There's two things that have happened. Americans love their Constitution. They think it's one of the greatest political constructions the world has ever known. And it is.

But it has this complicated system of checks and balances which, if it doesn't operate, leads to a rigor mortis that would be inconceivable in a parliamentary democracy like Germany or the United Kingdom. And this rigor mortis happens when you look at what's happened to American political culture. They don't want a compromise. They don't want to agree. They hate each other.

If you're going to have a system and parliamentary democracy where an overall majority means you can do what you want, that's fine. That's the way we run our system. If you're going to have a system of complicated checks and balances, then compromise and give-and-take has to be built into the system.

And the political culture is such in America at the moment that it's not -- and this is a systemic problem and it's not going to go away. This will happen again. I mean it's already in 30 years we've had 18 kind of incidents like this. And you know, America's good at lecturing the rest of the world of governance. I think the rest of the world is either going to give America a few lectures on governance.

LIZZA: I agree with Andrew; the problem is -- the problem is in our system, if you don't have a willingness to compromise, it doesn't work. And right now on the far right flank of the Republican Party, the idea of compromise itself is opposed.

AMANPOUR: And Boehner is criticized for not even bringing this to a vote. Some say it may actually win because all the Democrats would vote for it and maybe some Republicans.

NEIL: Yes, but, you know, I spent six weeks with the Tea Party a couple of years ago. They're irreconcilables on this thing. They ain't going to give in. And Mr. Boehner doesn't control them. Indeed, they despise him. They despise him almost as much as they despise President Obama.

LIZZA: If you look at the 80 Republicans who forced this course of action, they come basically from where you'd expect, right, the South, the Midwest and the rural West.

They're not in places with major cities and they're not -- they're not representatives who were elected because of their foreign policy credentials or because of their interest in international economics.

And frankly, if you read the conservative press closely, there's an argument that has taken hold among some of these folks that a default on the debt would not be as catastrophic as most people would think it would be.

And there are some people who think that it would be a -- I know this is crazy to say, but that it would be a good thing, that it would finally force a conversation about spending. And that's probably the most dangerous argument that has taken root.

AMANPOUR: Playing with fire, Ryan Lizza, thank you very much for joining me from Washington.

Andrew Neil, thanks for being with me here in the studio.

AMANPOUR: And as we mentioned also this week, a near-crash and burn in another Western democracy, Italy. The former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, threatened to topple the current government in order to stop it from taking away his Senate seat because of his tax fraud conviction.

The current incumbent, Enrico Letta, stood his ground, though, and it was a red-letter day for him as Berlusconi's own party turned against him at the last moment and backed the government in a confidence vote.

Letta's predecessor as prime minister is Mario Monti, and he told me that now that Letta has dodged the Berlusconi bullet, it's time for him to really lead.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARIO MONTI, ITALY'S FORMER PRIME MINISTER: I think the prime minister who runs such a grand coalition needs to be pushing on the political parties. He needs to present them with packages of measures which are good for the country even though they displease both constituencies, on the right and on the left.

And I strongly hope that Mr. Letta, now that he has brilliantly overcome this difficult trap that Mr. Berlusconi was -- had been preparing for him, will become more forthcoming, more daring , more ready to expose to the public opinion in the country the tricks and delaying games that the two main parties too often make use of.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So as Italy carries on with its fragile government and the United States Congress comes apart at the seams for want of cooperation and compromise, what if I told you these two established democracies should look to a new one, in a North African nation where the Arab Spring began? Peaceful, political compromise in Tunisia.

President Moncef Marzouki has overseen and he'll tell us how Tunisia beat the odds when we come back.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

Now the United States may be the world's most powerful democracy. But the government shutdown shows how far Congress has veered away from the path of political compromise. Incredibly, that idea has been easier to implement in the very crucible of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, where a street vendor set himself on fire and lit the struggle for democracy across the region.

It faced a constitutional crisis after the assassination of secular leader Chokri Belaid and, of course, chronic economic problems.

But last weekend, as troublemakers in the United States and Italian governments were careening off a cliff, Tunisia's Islamist-led government resigned and in return the opposition ratified a new Tunisian constitution that their opponents had labored over for a year and a half.

That is the kind of compromise and political maturity that neighboring Egypt and Libya can only admire. And presiding over this peaceful move was President Moncef Marzouki, who's a doctor and a human rights activist.

So how did Tunisia manage to achieve consensus? I asked him when he attended the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Mr. President, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

MONCEF MARZOUKI, TUNISIAN PRESIDENT: Thank you for your invitation.

AMANPOUR: Let me ask you because Tunisia does seem to have escaped the kind of worst problems that are plaguing your neighboring Arab Spring countries, whether it be Libya, Syria of course, Egypt.

How do you think Tunisia has managed to hold the line so far?

And keep basically all sides of the political equation in conversation rather than splitting apart?

MARZOUKI: Well, I think the situation in Tunisia is much easier because, first of all, we have a homogenous society; this is extremely important. We have a strong civil society; even under the dictatorship we used to have very strong civil society.

I am confident. I am confident because it engenders a lot of resilience. But I think that we are really targeted because -- well, I can tell you that inside the country and outside the country there are a lot of forces that don't want the Arab Spring to succeed in Tunisia. They don't want a success story in Tunisia.

AMANPOUR: How does the situation in Libya, for instance, affect you? I spoke to the prime minister last week and, you know, he said to me, it's not that we're a failing state; we're not a state yet.

How does that affect you?

MARZOUKI: After the revolution, I can understand how difficult it is now to have a state and to have a civil society and so forth. They had really to begin from nothing.

Now all the terrorists coming, they come from Libya. There is smuggling, arms smuggling, coming from Libya. And this is why we are working very closely with our Libyan brothers to control the frontiers, like we are working also very hard with our Algerian brothers.

AMANPOUR: Do you have enough to control the frontiers?

MARZOUKI: No, no. Not enough. It's a huge task. This is why we're asking for support from outside. We badly need this help from outside because really we feel -- for the first time feel that we are threatened in Tunisia by the terrorists.

AMANPOUR: The situation in Egypt, the now -- the expulsion of the Muslim Brotherhood, the expulsion of their first democratically elected president, the fact that the army has entered the political arena again, what is your reaction to that?

And how does that affect Tunisia?

You have managed to escape without having the army in politics.

MARZOUKI: As I told you, we have a professional army, never involved with politics since independent. But you know, I'm very worried by what's happening in Egypt, I would say, as a democrat before being as a head of state, also as a democrat, because what's happening in Egypt is extremely dangerous.

I'm very surprised; and even I can say I'm very shocked by the fact that you have so-called liberals, so-called human rights activists and so forth, backing the ouster of an elected president, crackdown on political parties, accepting this level of violence against a civil population. That's extremely shocking for me as a democrat.

But the important part of this liberal, I think they betrayed democracy.

But on the other hand, I am also very, very afraid that, you know, Muslim Brotherhood is the central part of this wide spectrum of the Islamists. On the other hand, you have the Islamists, the new Islamists who fill this vacuum.

There's a guy who would say never again with democracy. So we're going to have this confrontation between secularists, extreme secularists and extremist Islamists. And this will be extremely dangerous, not only for Egypt but for the whole region.

This is what we're trying to avoid in Tunisia.

AMANPOUR: You're obviously going to cause a lot of controversy with those statements.

Do you buy what the Egyptian liberals say, which is that the Muslim Brotherhood pushed the envelope, was actually not moderate enough, was too extremist, called its opponents infidels and was not willing to have a political dialogue? It was sort of my way or the highway.

MARZOUKI: I'm not defending Muslim Brotherhood. I do believe that, you know, their policy was not a good one. They should have done the same thing in Tunisia, keeping the dialogue with opponents and so forth.

But once again, my problem is not the Brotherhood. My problem is democracy. And as I told you, what happened is extremely dangerous for democracy. I hope that democracy will resume (ph) in Egypt, but I'm afraid that it will take a long, long time.

AMANPOUR: Obviously, you know, a lot of the Arab Spring, well, frankly the Arab Spring started in your country. And it was about the economy mostly, a young vendor set himself on fire. And the economy is something that you all have to really worry about.

A new Pew poll said that 54 percent of Tunisians now view democracy favorably. That's down from 63 percent last year. And a majority say the country is worse off without the previous dictator.

What is your reaction to that and the fact that they feel that they're not getting their economic gains?

(CROSSTALK)

MARZOUKI: Before being a head of state, I had been professor of public health, I know how -- this is not serious. These kind of polls are not serious. You know, I can assure you that a Tunisian would stick to democracy because they know what dictatorship means.

Of course they are a little bit deceived, because you know, after a revolution, the level of expectation is very, very high. And we have to explain to them that now they got freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of faith. And this is very, very important.

But we have also -- I am explaining all the time to the people that, you know, we had this heritage for more than five decades of corruption and so forth. And we're not going to solve the problem, the economic problems overnight.

And the problem is that all three challenges are linked. The more we wait, you know, the more we have economic failure because people would not invest in a -- before having a stable government and so forth. This is why we're fighting on three, you know, on three fronts and that -- but once again, I'm very, very confident. I think the Arab Spring which started in Tunisia will not die in Tunisia.

AMANPOUR: President Marzouki, thank you so much indeed for joining me.

MARZOUKI: It's my pleasure. Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: And finally, imagine a world without the antics and the ego of Silvio Berlusconi. Italy, which held its umpteenth election just nine months ago, stepped back from the brink of political chaos this week, following a power play by its flamboyant former prime minister.

Berlusconi, the septuagenarian Caesar had commanded five members of his People of Freedom Party, a name only George Orwell could love, to withdraw from the fragile coalition government. He laid the blame on a proposed sales tax. But others say that he crossed that Rubicon to prevent a vote that could banish him from the Senate after he was sentenced to jail for tax fraud.

And just as a Caesar named Julius met his fate in the Senate, so was Berlusconi deserted by his own party, leaving him no choice but to fall on his political sword and back the prime minister, Enrico Letta.

And yet is it too soon to recite his funeral oration? I asked another former prime minister, Mario Monti.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MONTI: I definitely do not believe that this time around Mr. Berlusconi can escape his fate. But I also think that just because he has been pronounced defeated and out of politics many, many times in the past, he has given proof of an incredible resilience. But I believe this time he will not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: In ancient Rome, as Caesar rode in triumph in his chariot, a slave would whisper in his ear, "All fame is fleeting," he had warned.

To this modern-day Caesar, the ride may at last be over.

That's it for our program tonight. Meantime, you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com and follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for watching. And goodbye from London.

END