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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Is a Gaza Ceasefire Deal Within Reach? How Palestinians Feel About Gaza Ceasefire Plan. Interview With Former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg; Interview With CNN Anchor and Author Jake Tapper. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired October 05, 2025 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:44]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, after almost two years of war, Donald Trump put forth a 20-point plan for peace in Gaza on Monday. Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu has put his support behind it. But Hamas weighed the deal for days.

Where does this leave Israel and the Palestinians?

I'll talk to Dan Senor and Diana Buttu.

Also, Britain's former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, had a post- political career in high tech, working at Meta. Now he's written a book on how to save the internet.

And an accused terrorist called Jafar sits in a Virginia jail waiting to stand trial for conspiring to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

CNN's Jake Tapper tells me why this is an important test of American law.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

For about a decade, the United States has been comforted by the notion that China had lost its way. After 35 years of astonishing growth Beijing stumbled internally and abroad. Its leaders cracked down on some of the country's most innovative sectors, from technology to education, driving entrepreneurs into exile or silence. Its wolf warrior diplomacy alienated its neighbors from India to Australia to Vietnam.

That era is over. China's leaders have corrected their course. This September, while President Trump accused nations at the U.N. General Assembly of being hopeless failures and harangued the U.N. for not hiring him to renovate its headquarters decades ago, President Xi Jinping put forward a global governance initiative to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.N.'s founding. He proposed strengthening the multilateral system along a series of dimensions, positioning Beijing as the constructive agenda-setting superpower.

As America doubles down on increasingly idiosyncratic protectionism, threatening 100 percent levies on foreign made movies, for example, China announced last week that it would no longer take advantage of any special privileges of being a developing country, a major concession sought for decades by free trade advocates.

As the U.S. levies crippling tariffs on poor countries in Africa and Asia, China has offered zero tariff based trade to any least developed country, and some middle income countries with which it has diplomatic relations, including 53 African nations.

Julian Gewirtz and Jeffrey Prescott argue in a recent "Foreign Affairs" essay that Beijing has shifted from a reactive defensive stance to a more opportunistic and strategic one. As Washington has left friends and foes grappling with how to respond to its volley of tariffs and insults, China presents itself as a serious country with predictable, consistent policies.

The most significant area of competition, of course, is technology. Here, China has already established a commanding lead in several areas. In green technology, from solar panels to batteries to electric vehicles, Beijing's dominance is now overwhelming. These act as a geopolitical lever as Beijing offers solar farms, battery plants and electric busses to nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Bloomberg has tracked 13 critical technologies and found that China now leads in five and is catching up fast in seven. In one area, however, Washington still believes it has an unrivaled lead, Artificial intelligence.

[10:05:04]

American firms like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google dominate the frantic race to artificial general intelligence, though few can define precisely the term or explain what it means to win this race.

China's approach to A.I. is strikingly different from America's. Instead of chasing AGI, Beijing has emphasized applications and diffusion. It seeks to embed A.I. into every corner of its economy and society, in logistics, in surveillance, in smart cities, in healthcare, in drones and robots. This strategy ensures that A.I. quickly produces real economic transformation and returns, raising productivity and embedding the new technology into daily life.

China has also chosen a different model of diffusion. Where many American firms are locking their frontier models behind proprietary walls, Chinese companies are releasing open A.I. systems, most prominently Deep Sea, that can be easily adapted and deployed. It's an irony that communist China now embraces open technology platforms, while the U.S. favors closed ones. This strategy could make Chinese A.I. a global standard, especially in

the developing world, where governments and firms are eager for cheap, customizable tools. Add to this, Huawei's emerging dominance in 6G technology, and it's quite possible that the technology interface for much of the world will be Chinese, not American.

What makes China's technology strategy particularly formidable is its integration across domains. It is not just building A.I. models, it is weaving them into hardware, infrastructure and cities.

Consider robotics. Chinese firms are producing humanoid and quadruped machines equipped with rich sensor arrays that allow them to see and think in real environments. Just last year, China installed almost nine times as many industrial robots as the United States. Or take drones and yes, flying cars. China is building what it calls a low altitude economy, carving out urban air for autonomous aerial vehicles.

In Shenzhen, drones already deliver packages. In Guangzhou, Yihang's self-flying cars have begun taking passengers. Again, the advantage is integration, sensors, A.I. hardware and regulation aligned to create transformative technology.

Meanwhile, in the United States, government funding for basic science and technology has been slashed. Our best universities are under siege, with the government locked in a war to take down Harvard by many measures the world's top ranked research university. While the government was on the verge of shutting down in Washington, the president and secretary of Defense summoned hundreds of the country's top generals to lecture them on staying slim and fighting woke ideology.

We need to get serious.

Go to CNN.com/Fareed for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

Tuesday will mark two years since Hamas's October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel, the deadliest terror attack in that country's history. It also marks, of course, two years since the war in Gaza began, which has delivered devastation and misery to the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

There is now a glimmer of hope. Israel and Hamas are preparing for indirect peace talks in Egypt tomorrow. This comes in response to President Trump's 20-point plan for an end to the war, which Israel has accepted and Hamas has agreed to in part. Is it possible that this plan could end the war?

I'll talk to a Palestinian guest in a moment. But first joining me is Dan Senor, an analyst, author of the book "The Genius of Israel" and the host of an excellent podcast, "Call Me Back."

Pleasure to have you on, Dan.

Hey, Fareed. ZAKARIA: In that excellent podcast, you say this is an Israeli plan

that they couldn't present as an Israeli plan, and they got Trump essentially to present it as his plan.

DAN SENOR, CO-AUTHOR, "THE GENIUS OF ISRAEL": Look, I think that Israeli officials always believed they was always enormous pressure inside Israel and from outside Israel. Where's your day after plan? And as Israeli officials argued, if we present a day after plan that's authored by us, it will be -- if it comes into Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank, it will be immediately rejected.

It has to be an American plan backed by the Arab world, preferably backed by the Palestinian Authority, and that the Israelis could live with.

[10:10:04]

And so that's what this basically is, but I should say, not only is it a win for Israel, and we can talk about why, but I do believe it's a win for the Palestinian people. It gets them a Gaza that's not run by Hamas. They're not going to be terrorized by Hamas in this -- if this deal is implemented. They get an end to the war. And it's a win for the Arab world that's clearly behind it that wants to restore some kind of stability. The only loser in this deal is Hamas and Tehran and their proxies.

ZAKARIA: So let's talk about what could go wrong yet, because it still seems like -- the part that Hamas has clearly not said they would agree to is that they would disarm and exile themselves or deport, you know, in some way or the other, leave.

My question to you is, is there -- is this worth Israel battling over because is there a Hamas left? I mean, I think that the Doha strike, the failure of that strike showed there's really nothing left of Hamas. I mean, if you're going to define Hamas as any armed militant who picks up a gun, presumably a lot of young kids have been radicalized by two years of war, that's not Hamas. The entire command structure seems to be gone.

SENOR: Yes. The command structure is mostly gone. The question is, what kind of weapons capabilities are still in Gaza? So that's why the disarmament is important. And I think Israel is going to be pretty firm on disarmament. And if Hamas has -- you know, they want Hamas out of Gaza, they'll exile Hamas out of Gaza. If there are some mid-level, low-level Hamas officials --

ZAKARIA: There's some secretaries left.

SENOR: I don't think that's going to be where this deal falls apart. I really think the game changing element of this deal is getting the hostages back. Israel, this is -- every time the hostage negotiations and ceasefire negotiations have broken down, it has usually been because Hamas was playing games with when the hostages would return, how many they would keep, what the phases would be.

The fact that this front loads the return of the hostages is the biggest deal for Israel. And a lot of the details to remain Israel can work out because they do believe that Hamas is not really the threat that it was, and especially with the pressure Israel has been putting on the Hamas stronghold in Gaza City, which Hamas is clearly spooked out about. That has had a huge effect.

ZAKARIA: What about what's going on in Israel? You do have two members of the prime minister's government that seem very unhappy with the plan. Could the Israeli government fall?

SENOR: Yes. So first there's six ministers in the government that I think could wind up voting against the deal, but that's still 20 -- some 20 ministers that will vote for it. So the deal I think would pass if it goes -- when it goes before the Cabinet. I -- for the government to fall, it would require both of those, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, to both pull out of the government.

ZAKARIA: And to vote against.

SENOR: And to vote against. I'm not convinced all that is going to happen, but I think from Netanyahu's standpoint, even if that does happen, if the government falls over the implementation of this deal, after Israel has taken out what was the biggest existential threat to Israel, which was Iran, after the Assad regime has fallen after being in power for 53 years, after the threat from Hezbollah on Israel's northern border is gone, and after Hamas, really the Hamas threat is just virtually nonexistent relative to what it was, I think, and he's got, as I said, and he's got the hostages back, I think he can go two elections on that.

ZAKARIA: Does this give enough to a Saudi Arabia for normalization or do they need more in terms of some commitment to a Palestinian state?

SENOR: I think they have always needed some expression of a path to statehood. There's language in this 20-point deal that talks about path to statehood. If Israel is serious about working with this stabilization group that's going to come in with these Arab countries and with non-Hamas Palestinians to help develop some kind of Palestinian technocratic class to work in Gaza, I think that's probably sufficient for Saudi.

I think the real question here is we've heard a lot over the last two years, really over the last few months, that this is a genocide, you know, which I obviously strongly dispute. But I think the first moral obligation for anyone who has been calling this a genocide for the last two years is there's now an opportunity to stop, to, quote- unquote, "stop the genocide." So why anyone is not rushing to embrace the deal that would, quote-unquote, "stop the genocide," to me either reveals that you were never serious that this was a genocide, it was just a political argument to use against Israel, and I think that the Saudis and others knew it wasn't a genocide.

And they actually do want stability and they want some semblance of statehood for Palestinians. I always was call it statehood minus, they recognize there has to be some security limitations in terms of what a Palestinian government could do in Gaza. But as long as there's a path to ending the war, ending the human catastrophe for Palestinians, I think they'll be on board. So I think the -- we could see a path to normalization.

ZAKARIA: Dan, Senor, always a pleasure.

SENOR: Good to be with you.

ZAKARIA: Next up, we'll get a very different take on the Gaza plan from a Palestinian human rights lawyer and former legal adviser to the PLO.

[10:15:05]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Though much remains uncertain, an end to the war in Gaza could be in sight, but many who have watched this conflict play out over the past two years have reservations about Trump's peace plan.

Diana Buttu is one of them. She is a Palestinian human rights lawyer and former legal adviser to the PLO. She joins us from the West Bank.

Diana, welcome. Let me ask you, given the devastation that has been wrought on Gaza, is this not worth welcoming as an end to the -- to the violence?

[10:20:03]

DIANA BUTTU, FORMER LEGAL ADVISER, PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION: Look, Fareed, there's nobody who wants to see an end to this more than the Palestinians themselves. We've had to live through two years of genocide, two years of seeing the Gaza Strip decimated with 90 percent of the homes flattened. More than 70,000 people killed, 20 percent of the population with injuries. There's nobody who wants to see it more happen.

My fear with this plan is that it's not going to bring an end to this, that it's simply going to be something for the short term, and that it's going to resume once again. So I'm looking for something that is going to be longer term where there are guarantees that Israel isn't going to resume again and that there are guarantees that Palestinians will finally be able to get the aid that they need, because Israel has blocked it, and that they'll finally be able to rebuild, which Israel has been blocking as well.

ZAKARIA: But would this be -- would it be worth going down this path, or is your fear that Hamas will give up the one piece of leverage they have, which is the hostages, and not get enough in return?

BUTTU: You know, Fareed, I think it's important to step back and look at what's happened. Palestinians have been the only people in history who've had to negotiate an end to their genocide, and that is quite repugnant. There should have been an end to the bombing a long time ago without Palestinians having to negotiate and go back and forth. But yes, the fear is that this will simply be very short term, three days, as is specified in the agreement, and that then again, the bombing will resume because once again, there are no guarantees. All of the guarantees that are provided in this 20-point plan are

provided to the Israelis. Nothing provided to the Palestinians. And so how is it that we're providing guarantees and providing a path and providing all of the things that the Israelis want, when they're the ones who've been committing this genocide over the course of the past two years? I heard your guest just earlier say that this is an Israeli plan, and this is precisely what it is. This is an Israeli plan that has been repackaged as an American plan.

And we know what the Israelis want. They want to commit ethnic cleansing. They want to commit genocide. And they've said as much. So on what basis is it that Palestinians should be -- should be looking at this and saying that there isn't some bad intentions in this? Once again, we do want to see an end to the bombs. We don't want to see an end to the bombs just for a period of three days.

ZAKARIA: Now, you know, there are lots of Palestinians, certainly, who I've talked to, and there's some polling that suggests that Hamas is not particularly popular in Gaza. Is this -- is it worth welcoming the reality that this might be a new start for the Palestinians in Gaza, that perhaps there could be some kind of technocratic authority that that takes it over initially, perhaps elections? There's been talk about the Palestinian Authority being involved. What are your thoughts about that?

BUTTU: So, Fareed, Hamas long ago said that they didn't want to be part of the governance, which is why when they issued their response to President Trump, they said, we will deal with this one part, being the captives and the exchange of prisoners, but they're not going to deal with the second part, because that's the Palestinian decision. And again, here's another problem. Isn't it for Palestinians to be deciding who's going to be presiding, who's going to be ruling? Shouldn't we be the ones who have -- who have a say in who is, who's in our government?

ZAKARIA: But how does one --

BUTTU: Why is it that it's always somebody else who does the deciding?

ZAKARIA: Diana, how does -- how does one do that? Hamas stopped holding elections. The Palestinian Authority stopped holding elections. So you have two entities neither of which are willing to let the Palestinian people vote.

BUTTU: And one of those reasons that there were no elections was because the Israelis also weren't allowing us to have elections. Remember, there have always been conditions that have been placed on Palestinians being able to exercise their rights, to be able to exercise their rights to hold elections. But there's a bigger issue here. This isn't just about elections. This is about freedom. And there's nothing in this plan that is guaranteeing Palestinians their freedom.

Palestinians now have been living under Israeli military rule, and there's nothing in this plan or in any plan that is guaranteeing that that yoke of occupation, that -- those chains are going to ever become free. Israel said as much. Just the other day Netanyahu said that they're never going to pull out of out of the Gaza Strip. And time and again, Netanyahu has said that there will never be a Palestinian state.

[10:25:02]

So on what basis is it that we're constantly demanding that Palestinians somehow choose different leaders when, at the end of the day, all that you're doing is constantly subjugating Palestinians? It's time now for Palestinians to be given their freedom. We have a right to be free. It's not a right that Israel gets to choose our leaders or the United States. It's our right. And that is why we should be pushing, not for the country who's committed genocide or the country that's funded the genocide to be putting together plans. It should be that the world should be stopping the genocide and we're allowed to be free.

ZAKARIA: Diana Buttu, good to have you on. Thank you.

Next on GPS, some say the internet is to blame for much of the political divisiveness in America and around the world. Does big tech even care?

I will talk to a former Meta executive, former deputy prime minister of the U.K. when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:30:25]

ZAKARIA: We live in an age of growing political polarization and rising authoritarianism around the world. Many blame social media for these woes, and they're not wrong. But how could tech companies be regulated to fix these problems? That's the question that Nick Clegg sets out to answer in his new book, "How to Save the Internet."

Clegg was the U.K.'s deputy prime minister in the early 2010s before joining Facebook. He left that company, now Meta, this year as their president of global affairs. I sat down with Clegg in New York recently to talk about his career in politics and tech.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Welcome, Nick.

NICK CLEGG, FORMER BRITISH DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: It's very good to be here.

ZAKARIA: So, before you get to Meta, you are in British politics. And you were a sort of centrist type and you watched as Britain plunges into populism with Brexit. Why did that happen? What do you think was going on?

CLEGG: So, I think there are lots of complex answers to that question. I don't think it's something that was just because of what happened that year or immediately before it. I think the brewing discontent in the United Kingdom about being part of this European club, more or less started from the moment which -- at which the United Kingdom joined the European community in the early 70s.

There's always been this tension between the kind of continental centric European Union built around, particularly, Germany and France, and the act of postwar reconciliation, and the U.K. being much more of a kind of maritime island nation. It's always had these tensions.

But I think that when the conservatives decided to hold the referendum, the thing that really, really kind of dominated all the headlines at the time was the Mediterranean migration crisis. People fleeing the conflict in Syria, in particular. And there's a stable of very Eurosceptic, anti-European newspapers in the United Kingdom who are very, very powerful.

And they extremely skillfully conflated the question of our economic status in this huge single market, which I remain of the view, had done -- had helped the United Kingdom enormously. They conflated that with, do you want all these people coming across the Mediterranean and flooding into our country?

And so, in one sense, the 2016 referendum in the U.K. was an early spectacular example of how the issue of immigration can upend politics in the most dramatic fashion. And it's exactly what happened during that -- during that referendum. It was a very narrowly won referendum, wafer thin majority.

ZAKARIA: But immigration was the rocket fuel. And it's almost everywhere in Europe.

CLEGG: I definitely think it -- I definitely think it was. Other people might -- some people say, oh no, it was because of all the economic difficulties post the 2008 financial crisis. I think that was definitely an important contributing factor. But yes, I think the very visible items on people's evening news, on the front page of the newspapers of this what came across to people as uncontrolled flight of folk across the Mediterranean definitely was, as you put it, the rocket fuel, for sure.

ZAKARIA: So, when you look at British politics today, you are this centrist, cosmopolitan, pro-European Union. Your wife is Spanish. Is there --

CLEGG: My views are not exactly -- my views are not exactly fashionable or in the ascendant at the moment. But yes.

ZAKARIA: What do you think happens to that kind of politics?

CLEGG: I think that kind of politics needs to learn how to deal with the populists by being a lot more aggressive and populist itself. I think at the moment, what we've got, certainly in the United Kingdom and across Europe, what you've got is you've got a bunch of political parties that were formed in a period of time which no longer applies. It was all about high tax, low tax, in favor of the state, not in favor of the state, and so on. Now, the dividing line is a completely different one. It's about culture wars. It's about openness or being closed, particularly around immigration, around globalization.

And so, you've got a bunch of parties who actually agree more with each other than they do with the insurgent populists, but they haven't yet worked out how to become the sum of their parts. So, I think you're going to see a huge amount of rearrangements in the party structures in Europe.

The churn and change is going to be very, very turbulent. But what the -- what the small L, liberal, you put it -- as you put it, sort of centrist, internationalist viewpoint needs to do is they mustn't vacate the battleground. They've just got to be a lot better at explaining -- not explaining but showing up the false promise of the populists.

[10:35:01]

And crucially, in a continent like Europe, with all these higgledy- piggledy countries living cheek by jowl next to each other in a dangerous part of the world, you've got the conflict in Ukraine, you've got the Middle East on one side, Africa on the other, and so on, that at the end of the day, a continent like that is only going to -- is only going to work if it becomes the sum of its parts. If people learn that they actually project more power, more sovereignty, more control for their citizens, providing them with prosperity and safety, if they do it together. And that -- and that -- and that's the bit that everyone's lost self-confidence. They've lost self-confidence in asserting. Actually, if you want sovereignty in a footloose, fancy free, globalized world, the more you do stuff together with people, the stronger you are.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll ask Nick Clegg why it seems that so many of the biggest tech CEOs are fawning over Donald Trump when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:40:35]

ZAKARIA: Now, more of my interview with Nick Clegg. He is a former U.K. deputy prime minister, former top executive at Meta, and now the author of the new book "How to Save the Internet."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: You get -- go from London to Silicon Valley. You look like, if I may say, like an English toffee or sort of upper class, you know, tennis playing Brit from London.

CLEGG: What's tennis got to do --

ZAKARIA: And you got -- and you got to --

CLEGG: What's tennis got to do --

ZAKARIA: I read somewhere you're a very good tennis player.

CLEGG: I enjoy it. I enjoy it.

ZAKARIA: And you get to -- you get to Silicon Valley and you're with the tech bros now.

CLEGG: Yes.

ZAKARIA: What was that like culturally?

CLEGG: Culturally, it was a huge change. I mean, firstly, as you will know, and I'm sure many of your viewers do Westminster, the House of Commons, where I'd been for 12 years, and before that I was an elected parliamentarian in the European parliament, but Westminster, particularly, is just drowning in the past. It's sort of -- it's a sort of Harry Potter. It's sort of pastiche really of sort of hammerbeam antiquity.

So, then I go from that to an environment in California where there is no past, because every building looks as if it was put up last Tuesday, and everyone is competing to lay claim to the future. And I found that very invigorating.

And then also, just the idiom of it all -- I mean, I'm not an engineer. I come from the -- you know, I come from a wordy place in Westminster where you cajole and persuade and argue and you deploy humor. None of that counted. It doesn't matter how much -- sort of how much you -- how good your rhetoric might be. You need to show the data and the stats and the systems.

They're engineers. They're building systems. And so, it was interesting for me to have to learn a new language in my 50s to try and make myself understood in this extraordinary engineering company on the West Coast of California.

ZAKARIA: So, when you think about that issue of all these engineers, maybe not a lot of EQ, you say in the book that Mark -- you know, Mark Zuckerberg sort of looked at everything really as an engineer. And sometimes people thought he had no emotions, but it was really the sort of highly analytic side.

Do you think that can contribute to this feeling that places like Facebook, Meta, were basically just chasing audience attention, do whatever it takes to keep people engaged, not aware of the broader social consequence of that?

CLEGG: Totally, they're companies. They're not -- they're not NGOs. They're not -- they're not churches. They -- the people who run these companies are not -- they're not philosopher kings. And they shouldn't be treated as such.

And when they claim that they are able to make great societal, ethical judgments, I wouldn't trust them with that. These are often young people who become extraordinarily wealthy. I mean, it's sort of -- a sort of way that's almost never without parallel since the days of the steel barons, perhaps, very, very quickly.

And of course, then they start thinking -- and I'm not -- by the way, I'm absolutely not personalizing this at all at Mark Zuckerberg. If anything, he was always quite reluctant to get involved in some of the wider stuff. But they then start pronouncing on the world and they --

ZAKARIA: They think --

(CROSSTALK)

CLEGG: -- start pronouncing politics --

ZAKARIA: -- profits about everything. Yes.

CLEGG: Yes. And they're treated by their fans. They're not -- they're companies. They're great companies. If -- you know, I'm not American, if I was, I'd be super proud that you've got these world beating companies. But they're companies. They have their own interests, and one needs to look unflinchingly at that, which is why I've always believed as an ex-politician however much regulation can sometimes be misplaced.

Governments and parliaments and lawmakers who are elected by the people, unlike these companies in Silicon Valley are, have every right to say, we are going to lay down the law, literally and metaphorically, about what you can and can't do. Whether it comes to sensitive issues like kids and the use of social media or content moderation and so on.

ZAKARIA: Why do you think all of them swung so far to the right with Donald Trump's second term?

CLEGG: I mean, you need to -- you need to ask them -- and indeed the corporate sector as a whole in the United States.

ZAKARIA: But again, the tech bros --

CLEGG: Yes.

ZAKARIA: You know, I mean, Elon Musk, David Sacks, there's this whole phenomenon. Zuckerberg --

CLEGG: Oh, sure. And if you speak to them, I'm sure you do, they will explain to you how enraged they were by their treatment of what they felt was sort of bad treatment from the Biden administration. I don't think the fact that you like or dislike the previous administration so much. I mean, it's a -- it's not a particularly -- it might be a good explanation why you didn't think things were great before, but it doesn't explain entirely this sort of joining at the hip that appears to have emerged between Silicon Valley, amongst all the big companies, and the Trump administration.

[10:45:10]

It might be fear that they worry that otherwise they're not going to -- they're not going to be able to protect their businesses. I think you get a herd behavior. I think Silicon Valley -- it's interesting.

In Silicon Valley, people sort of think that they're kind of being terribly mold breaking and unconventional. It's actually a very conventional place. They tend to move, you know, as a sort of herd. So, I think when two or three of them sort of do the thing and go off to Mar-a-Lago and spend time in the White House, then everybody else thinks they should do it, so they end up doing it together, which is what you saw just a few weeks ago, I think, in the -- in the White House.

There's only one thing which is worse than the private sector and government being at each other's throats. It's if they're in each other's pockets. So, think -- and I --

ZAKARIA: Which is happening now.

CLEGG: Well, I think ironically, what you're --

ZAKARIA: Government is owning Intel.

CLEGG: I think, ironically, what you're seeing in the U.S. is that the exertion of power by the -- this Trump administration over the private sector. Look at the deal on TikTok, for instance, basically forged by the politicians. Look at the pressure on media organizations. The intervention, deep intervention into sort of -- look at Intel. Taking payments from Nvidia for various things. All of this web of influence is, oddly enough, turning corporate America more into a kind of Chinese style relationship with government.

My view, in the long run is, particularly for Silicon Valley, that kind of -- that kind of wild gyration of technological and engineering innovation tends to thrive best when it's kept at a certain polite distance from politics.

ZAKARIA: Nick Clegg, the book is fascinating as is everything you are saying. All right. Thank you.

CLEGG: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, an accused terrorist currently awaits trial in Virginia for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. Only one such case has ever gone to trial. And Jake Tapper has written a thrilling book on the story, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:51:48]

ZAKARIA: Right now, there is an accused terrorist, known as Jafar, awaiting trial for his role in the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan which killed 13 American servicemen. Only one case like this has ever been to trial in a U.S. criminal court, and was highly controversial at the time. Jake Tapper has written a book about that case called "Race Against Terror." Jake, welcome. The story that you tell is about the first terrorist tried in a U.S. criminal court for killing American soldiers on a foreign battlefield. What's unique and controversial about this?

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR, "THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER": At the time, 2011, 2012, the idea of bringing foreign terrorists to a criminal court, instead of a military commission at GITMO, was incredibly controversial for any number of reasons. First of all, I think the country was still very terrified and terrorized because of 9/11. And there was this fear that these foreign terrorists -- it was as if they had like a Thanos-esque super villain powers. If you brought them to Manhattan, they'd escape and kill people.

But beyond that, there was a trial in 2010 of a guy named Ghailani for the 1998 embassy bombings, and he was acquitted of 284 of 285 charges. So, there was a real fear that these people would get off. They would be somehow able to escape justice.

But the case of Spin Ghul was fascinating because the prosecutors and the FBI did so much work, so much sleuthing, so much investigations in terms of finding evidence against him to prove that he was part of an al Qaeda ambush in Afghanistan in 2003, where two American service members were killed. To prove that he was part of a conspiracy to blow up the U.S. embassy in Nigeria -- that the case was just -- first of all, just an incredibly fascinating sleuthing story, but also ultimately a huge success.

And he has been sentenced to prison. And he's at a supermax in Colorado and will be for the rest of his days.

ZAKARIA: So, as you say, it was super controversial at the time. This was in the Obama years. Many Republicans came out against it, including Jeff Sessions, who later became Trump's attorney general. Now, Donald Trump is walking down Obama -- Obama's path and wants to try this terrorist, Jafar.

What does that tell you about the sort of trajectory of the war on terror or, you know, that Donald Trump is now doing pretty much the same thing that Obama did?

TAPPER: I think, first of all, he probably is doing so unknowingly. I doubt he knows, or even his attorney general knows that they are following the footsteps of Obama in what was a very controversial move at the time. But when President Trump announced at his joint address to Congress earlier this year that they were bringing Jafar to the U.S. for trial, nobody said boo. Nobody protested at all.

So, I guess -- I think we are in a consensus view that is neither Bush doctrine, nor Obama doctrine, nor Trump doctrine, where it's just kind of accepted that trying terrorists in criminal court is actually a very successful way to go after them.

[10:55:04]

More than 600 terrorists have been tried in criminal court. Whereas in the military commissions, I think, there have been two trials and one of them had part of it overturned and nine plea deals. It certainly does not have the same record.

But I have to say the one way in which Trump is not following in the footsteps of Obama, and I don't think this is a good thing, is the Trump justice department is purging these experts, these expert prosecutors from their ranks. And it just happened with Jafar's lead prosecutor, a guy named Michael Ben'Ary. He was just fired for political reasons. And I think that's a real problem.

ZAKARIA: This is such a fascinating story, Jake. And thank you so much for having done the research and putting it all together. We'll read this with great interest. Thank you.

And thank you to all of you for being a part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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