Return to Transcripts main page

Fareed Zakaria GPS

How Revolutionary was the American Revolution; How the Iran War Transformed the Global Economy. Interview With BlackRock Chairman And CEO Larry Fink; Interview With Carnegie Endowment For International Peace Senior Fellow Karim Sadjadpour; Interview With Foundation For Defense Of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz; Interview With "The Financial Times" Contributing Editor Kim Ghattas. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired July 05, 2026 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:43]

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 from the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.

Today on the program, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, a look at how it all began with Ken Burns, director of the 12-hour documentary, "The American Revolution."

Then the American economy seems to be mostly powered by A.I. spending these days. How will that end? I'll talk to Larry Fink, the CEO of the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock.

Finally, the big picture on Iran with three great experts.

I'll bring you "My Take" next week. For now, let's get straight to America's big birthday.

Yesterday marked the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which began the country's democratic experiment. My next guest calls this revolution the most important event since the birth of Christ.

Ken Burns is a master documentary filmmaker who has told many of America's most important stories, from the Civil War to the Vietnam War to the history of Jazz. I sat down with Ken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where we discussed "The American Revolution" and his superb PBS series on that subject.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: What first asked you is, is it really a revolution? Is it really, as in your series, you say the most important event because, you know, I could make the argument and I have in my last book that it's not actually a social revolution in the way that, say, the Russian Revolution was or the French Revolution. It was a war of independence. We kept in place the entire feudal structure. Slavery was kept in place.

It was essentially a return to the rights of Englishmen that they had had, that were being abrogated by George III. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland say on their podcast, you know, the rest is history. The French Revolution is much more important. Was it?

KEN BURNS, CO-DIRECTOR, PBS' "THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION": No. This is the most, as we say in the film, in the opening, the prologue of it, the most consequential revolution in history because it's about ideas. And let me jump ahead just a little bit. I made a film 40 years ago on the history of the Statue of Liberty. It's designed and fabricated by a French sculptor, Bartholdi, in Paris, and it towers over on the Rue de Chazelle, the rooftops of Paris, and Victor Hugo, just a couple of moments from his death, comes to visit it, and he looks at Bartholdi. He looks at the statue. He looks back at Bartholdi, and he says, the idea, it is everything.

And what we have in "The American Revolution" is the introduction into the blood system of the human race. This notion of liberty and freedom. It is true that we can parse it in a purely political or social context and say, well, it didn't really do this. It didn't advance. It was more of the same. It's going to be the model, including the French Revolution, model for revolutions for the next 200 plus years.

It is, as the scholar Jane Kamensky says in our film, in the opening moments of our last episode, that it's about possibility.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANE KAMENSKY, PROFESSOR, SCHOLAR: I think to believe in America rooted in the American Revolution is to believe in possibility. That, to me, is the extraordinary thing about the patriot side of the fight.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNS: So we have built into this, this sense that we are expecting to change. We're expecting to innovate. We're expecting to be better. We're expecting to be unsatisfied. And that's, I think, the key that distinguishes this, that the first time in history you have people who, and admittedly, white men on the East Coast of the United States, who are new things, citizens and not subjects.

ZAKARIA: So let's talk about that reality, because that comes through very well in the documentary. We think of it as an anti-colonial uprising, but in fact, as you point out, with regard to the expansion of the American empire against other European powers and most importantly, against Native Americans, the founding fathers actually were the colonialists.

[10:05:16]

George Washington, while he is trying to figure out how to free himself from the shackles of the British, is busy making land deals to confiscate land from Native Americans all the way west, as far west as he can go. BURNS: Well before the revolution. He's doing that. Many so-called,

you know, recent immigrants and people are flooding want to flood across the Appalachians and just take Indian land. I think we have to understand that if we try to see this in a binary terms, we're going to be frustrated by the American Revolution. It is a lot of different things, and it is first and foremost a revolution. It's also a bloody civil war. There are people there. It's not the tyrant 3,000 miles away, imposing its tyranny on us.

Us means at least 20 percent, 25 percent in some areas, much more of people who are understandably loyalist. We have among us 20 percent of the population that are enslaved and free African Americans. We have Native Americans who have assimilated, who are trying to coexist within the borders of the 13 colonies. We have all of those native nations. So you get a, an A, I guess in schools, we hope not anymore if you just say taxes and representation.

But in point of fact, it's about Indian land. That's the biggest thing. The first big uh-oh in the relations between the British colonies and North America, the 13 and the mainland. They have 13 much more profitable colonies in the Caribbean, profitable because Jamaica and Barbados are 90 percent enslaved people. And that's the engine of profit for the --

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: It's all sugar.

BURNS: They're making tons of money. And they're not going to end that. And there's slavery is legal in all 13 of the colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia, the most profitable, if you can call it that, are Virginia and South Carolina for the obvious reasons. It's the civil war. It's a global war because you're competing -- the British have just won what we call the French and Indian war, and the rest of the world calls this Seven Years' War.

And they are the most far-flung empire on earth and unable to protect its colonists. The treasury is depleted. And so they've said, you can't cross the Appalachians. And that really upsets the ordinary colonists who's going over and wants to have land of their own. But it's really disturbing the Patrick Henrys and the George Washingtons and Benjamin Franklins, who've been speculating, surveying and speculating and believe they own Native American lands.

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: Let's just pause on that for a second, because what you're saying is the British were, in this sense, anti-imperial.

BURNS: No.

ZAKARIA: They were saying --

BURNS: No. If they had prevailed, they would have taken the whole continent and we'd be speaking with a funny accent.

ZAKARIA: They think we do speak with a funny accent.

BURNS: That's their problem. They don't understand. But the key to it and what -- your question is, Fareed, is so important to understand that it is so many different things. The -- they did not meet in Philadelphia at the Eastern Seaboard Congress. They did not appoint George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They called it the continental Congress, and they called it the continental army.

Everyone had dreams of empire. Everybody was interested in our revolution may be the fifth global war over the prize of North America, and prize means Indian land. They knew that California was out there and they wanted it, and they were going to get it.

ZAKARIA: So you think the British were just temporarily -- it was a truce with the Indians. If they had won this war --

BURNS: It's not a truce. It's --

ZAKARIA: But they promised them we will not --

BURNS: They're out of breath and out of money and out of men. And so they say, we can't protect our own people from crossing over so please stop. And that's the beginning. And then later on, because of that depleted treasury, they're seeking various forms of taxation to sort of balance the thing. You ought to be responsible for your own defense. We want to tax your stamps. Well, that didn't work out. Well, we want to tax your tea and we know how that works out.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll ask Ken Burns about what we can learn from the ideas of the American Revolution 250 years later.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:13:47]

ZAKARIA: The American Revolution was both a bloody war and a global conflict, but it was also a battle over big ideas about rights, the pursuit of happiness, and who gets to govern.

More of my conversation with the legendary Ken Burns at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: So you say it's a -- you say it's a revolution about ideas. What do you think the principal ideas are, and I want you to get to this point about the pursuit of happiness, because it is the most debated phrase in that second line. It's the one that John Locke talked about property, not happiness, just property. Life, liberty and property.

Tell us why you think it ended up where it did.

BURNS: Well, you have to understand that at its basis, this sort of disagreement between Englishmen over their rights, the colonists don't feel they have representation. They want to go into Indian land and take it. They don't understand. We don't have representatives in parliament. How is this? But in the course of the arguments, because we're in the middle of the enlightenment, and this is an enlightenment that is in full bloom in Britain as well, and in Scotland and of course the French have contributed with philosophical thing. They're a repressive monarchy, quite different than the British monarchy.

[10:15:05]

And so these ideas are there. And so all of a sudden these sort of arguments break into natural rights. So it's no longer once the cat is out of the bag, when you say we hold these truths, he first said, sacred and undeniable. And then he, being Jefferson, and it was changed to self-evident. And there's in a way, if you think about it, there's nothing self-evident except this new philosophical idea that we had natural rights and the sanctity of the individual in relationship to nature and nature's god, as they would say.

So the phrase goes on and it says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Lots of Americans would very much prefer this to be the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things. And what they meant was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. So the whole thing of happiness is not the pleasure-seeking happiness, but one that comes from self-improvement and making yourself more virtue.

They're reaching across the Dark Ages to the classical tradition and bringing up all of these Greek ideas of perfection.

ZAKARIA: It seems to me this point -- this was kind of an ongoing process, that the most important word there is pursuit, not happiness is very important when you think of it in these terms. We now think of the founding fathers as these demigods and whatever they said we worship. You know, if you look at drug policy, you know, how should we deal with marijuana? People say, what did James Madison think and say, you know?

BURNS: Exactly.

ZAKARIA: It seems that -- what I'm struck by is how they viewed their ideas as so malleable in that they write the Constitution and almost instantly they enact 10 amendments to the Constitution, which constitute now what we regard as in some ways the most important parts, or at least among the most important parts of the constitution, the Bill of Rights. They changed it almost, you know, months after they wrote it.

BURNS: It's not changing it. What they're doing is they're expanding it. So with the exception of Gouverneur Morris' relatively poetic preamble to the Constitution, the rest is boilerplate.

ZAKARIA: Right.

BURNS: This Ikea, you know, instructions.

ZAKARIA: Right. BURNS: There's not poetry here.

ZAKARIA: Yes. Yes. It's functional.

BURNS: It's a --

ZAKARIA: Here's who's going to do what.

BURNS: It's operating manually, you know, and it puts -- Article One is the legislative.

ZAKARIA: Yes, yes, yes.

BURNS: So I think if the founders come back, they go, wow, you made it 250 years. And what?

ZAKARIA: Exactly.

BURNS: You're yielding to the executive. That's Article II.

ZAKARIA: I've always had two biggest surprise, biggest surprise to the founding fathers today would be to see the imperial presidency.

BURNS: Yes, exactly.

ZAKARIA: The president was meant to execute the laws that Congress passed.

BURNS: So we have a -- there's a moment in our film and other things that we're dealing with is that Hamilton is anxious about it. He thinks, you know, what if someone mounts the hobby horse of popularity, he says, and creates chaos. No man is above the law. They're trying to reverse engineer for an authoritarian.

ZAKARIA: Right. Right.

BURNS: Jefferson trapped in Paris is writing to Madison saying, what if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind.

ZAKARIA: Right. Right. Reap the whirlwind.

BURNS: Reap the whirlwind.

ZAKARIA: Think of that phrase. Yes.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll ask the CEO of the world's largest asset management firm, BlackRock, about the forces shaping the global and American economy.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:22:53] ZAKARIA: Global oil prices have fallen since the U.S. negotiated an agreement intended to end the war with Iran. Where does that leave the global economy and the American economy right now?

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I sat down with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management firm in the world.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: So the Iran War is over. Oil prices are down. Let's say -- let's do this again. The Iran War seems to be over. Oil prices are down basically to pre-war levels. What does that mean for the global economy going forward? What does it look like to you?

LARRY FINK, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, BLACKROCK: Well, I would say if you just follow the oil market, you would say that globalization is really working. When you have an energy shock when between 10 and 20 million barrels a day were not being able to be transported, you know, generally the oil market trades on the last barrel and there was -- if you spoke to the leaders of the energy company, some of them were saying privately, we could see 200 plus dollars oil during that period of time.

But the global economy actually mitigated much of the stresses. China cut back their daily consumption by four million barrels. Now they used reserves. They probably used more coal. But also China is building 100 gigawatts to power through nuclear as we speak. They're building the largest solar fields in the world today. And so they're rapidly becoming less dependent on hydrocarbons.

Abu Dhabi, during this whole episode, left OPEC. And they had capacity to export another million barrels, the U.S., because of the resiliency of our production, we were able to produce an extra 3 million barrels. Venezuela went from 200,000 barrels pre U.S. involvement to about a million three. So it all -- it basically equalized and if there is a -- true peace, if Iran has the ability to sell their oil without sanctions freely in the market, oil is going to $50.

[10:25:17]

You know, and that's the power of push and pull of the global economies and how it could be rapidly mitigated. I mean, for me to watch how the global economy navigated this is one of the fundamental examples why I'm a long term optimist. We solve problems.

ZAKARIA: But in a way, what you're saying is, you know, if you think about the number of things this global economy has, you know, that things have been thrown at this economy. The global financial crisis, COVID, the liberation day tariffs, Iran War. And, you know, and somehow there has been extraordinary resilience in precisely because as you say it's global.

FINK: Well, you just cited three of some big downdrafts in the marketplace. You didn't mention dot-com market. I mean, the market had a downdraft about 30 percent, 40 percent at that time. And yet over the last 25, 26 years, the markets are up about eight times. And this is why things are right about. This just informs me that

capital and those who have the ability to invest are far better off than those who are just dependent on wages. And this is what I wrote about this past year, how -- we have to broaden economic success by getting more Americans or more Germans or more -- wherever country you're in to invest with your country, to grow with your country.

ZAKARIA: So let me ask you about this particular moment then in the market, because, you know, there are a lot of people who are long term optimists, who are long term optimists about even many of these companies who say the valuations are pretty frothy. When SpaceX IPOed, it was trading, I think, at 90 times revenues. To give you a point of comparison, Amazon trades at four times revenues. That seems a little high.

FINK: I don't think we have an earnings -- I don't think we have a poor valuations in the market today at all. In fact in most -- I mean we could talk about space specifically, but if you look at the overall S&P-PE ratio, it's pretty fair today considering where the markets are. But that being said, some of the great hyperbolic growth in some of some specific companies and their stock prices are more related to.

We have shortages in so many parts of the A.I. build out, memory chips, power. There -- these companies are able to sell their chips and other things at multiples of what they were able to just two years ago. So I don't -- we don't have a P/E ratio problem. We may just have inflated earnings and the question is how long will the inflated earnings? Or in other words, how long are we going to have shortages in all these fundamental components for our economy?

Because these companies that are able to benefit because of the shortage they have raised their prices quite considerably.

ZAKARIA: What you're saying is everyone is spending on A.I.. Because there's so much spending on A.I. there are shortages. You just don't have enough chips. You don't have enough copper wires.

FINK: We don't have enough power in the United States.

ZAKARIA: Right. Right. So is that sustainable? What happens if everyone is going to spend as much money as they claim they're going to spend, which is, I think, in the $2 trillion to $3 trillion range, what happens?

FINK: Well, hopefully we create new technologies to mitigate some of the supply shortages.

ZAKARIA: But this is going to happen in the next year or two.

FINK: No. So when you -- so if you think about in the United States, one of the big fundamental problems we have in the United States today is we have a terrible power grid. We have 19 segments of our power grid, Europe has one power grid. Now they have supply of power problems. We have plenty of power through natural gas, but we can't distribute it in a proper way. It is estimated we're going to have to invest hundreds of billions of

dollars to build out our power grid. And if we don't do that, we are not going to succeed in A.I. You know, A.I. is just a bunch of electrons. So you need the power to create the electrons. And if we don't have the distributing power of -- distributed that, those electrons, we're in trouble. We're not going to succeed.

ZAKARIA: Do you think these A.I. companies that are spending these hundreds of billions of dollars are going to see a return on their investment, or are we going to have a moment of truth and there will be winners and losers?

FINK: At this moment, there's more demand than supply. We have shortages of compute right now which to me is the biggest problem we have in this country today. You know, there's much have been written about these new models. Mythos, that's the Anthropic model. And there's -- OpenAI has a similar model. BlackRock is using the OpenAI model to inspect how -- what type of vulnerabilities we have. And indeed, these new models are showing huge new vulnerabilities that we all have.

I'm not worried about BlackRock or J.P. Morgan having the money to invest in these -- pay for these models so we could have a secure platform. But I am very worried about municipalities or hospitals. Are they going to invest in this?

And so we do have a lot of big risks with these new models in a societal way. But the biggest issue that I have -- right now, these models are being produced by only a few companies. What does that mean for small and medium businesses that don't have the ability to pay for these models?

So for this to work in the United States, we have to bring down the cost of compute. So it's -- so we could democratize A.I. in a way that everybody could participate. Every hospital, every municipal transport, subway systems, state and local governments. And if we can't do that, then we're going to have some real structural issues.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll be back with more of my conversation with Larry Fink.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:36:09]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: What do you think about the way in which the economy in the United States now seems to be increasingly run on the basis of politics more than economics. By which, I mean, the president is putting tariffs on. But the tariffs are put on pretty idiosyncratically and he withdraws them and threatens them based on who he's met that day and whom he doesn't like.

I mean, he himself admits this. You know, he had a conversation with the Swiss president and jacked up the rates. And, you know, you and I were both at Davos when he said. And then they came and saw me and I brought them down.

He decides he likes Intel. So, he invests in it. He decides he doesn't like Anthropic so he --

FINK: Stock went up 10 times since he invested.

ZAKARIA: It is up. But as a general proposition what do you think about running an economy with that much government interference on a fairly idiosyncratic basis in the economy?

FINK: I would say throughout the world you're seeing -- I don't -- I don't agree with the world interference. More government involvement, though. I think it's fair to say that we woke up to a need that -- for national security issues. And Europe is waking up to national security issues, and the Middle East are waking up to national security issues that we need to have more. I would say, participation between governments and business.

OK. We have been 100 percent dependent on chips manufactured in Taiwan. We're 100 percent dependent on rare earths to China. OK. We should have a government focus on how do we mitigate those national security risks.

I'm not here to talk about behaviors but, you know, if you think about Europe now, Europe is saying, we underinvested in defense. We have to take control. Europe, has shortages of power. How do we take control?

I think every government, every large government today is focusing on the balance between public and private in ways that we never did. And let's be clear, when you just have the free market acting on it, you're going to go to the cheapest source of manufacturing. And that led to these, I would say, security issues that the U.S. government is facing, that Europe is facing.

So I'm not here to tell you one thing is better, another thing. But I do think for the future of the United States, we need a more sustainable economy being less dependent on the world for some of these goods.

ZAKARIA: You've talked a lot about the deficit.

FINK: Yes.

ZAKARIA: It is huge and getting much bigger.

FINK: Yes.

ZAKARIA: And it's going to get way bigger once the baby boomers really start retiring and Social Security and all those payments go up. What is your solution to tackling the deficit? FINK: Grow the economy by three percent. That's it. If we cannot grow the economy by three percent a year, we're in trouble. And I could tell that to every politician who wants to raise taxes. We have to empower private capital to invest. We got to find ways of streamlining, permitting.

I mean, you know, if you -- I mean, one of the great examples of how bifurcated our country has become -- during the Biden administration they came out with an IRA bill, which was the big bill for renewables and -- I think it was voted 90-10 or 95-5, Dems versus Republicans.

If you looked at the history of where that money went, it was about 80 percent in red states. And they didn't vote for it.

[10:40:00]

And the reason why is the permitting process in red states was a fraction of what it is in blue states. And so here are all -- all the blue states voted for this, in favor of it, because they believed in the concept, but none of the money went there. To me, that's -- this should be wake up calls to every politician.

How do we -- we got to be growing our economy. And if we could grow our economy and if we could get more and more Americans to invest in our economy, growing with the country, we're going to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the middle class.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was signed over two weeks ago, but the bombs have not stopped falling in the Middle East. Where does the region go from here? I'll bring you a panel of experts from the Aspen Ideas Festival.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:45:31]

ZAKARIA: America and Israel's war with Iran has fundamentally reshaped the Middle East. Many in Iran's old guard have been killed. New leaders have taken over the regime. America's longtime alliances with Israel and the Gulf Arabs are now being tested. And a strategic shipping chokepoint has proved to be one of Iran's most potent weapons of war.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I sat down with three of the sharpest voices on the region to discuss these shifting dynamics, Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, Kim Ghattas, a journalist and a contributing editor for "The Financial Times," and Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Karim, describe from your point of view the pros and cons of where Iran is. You know, what has it gained? What has it lost in this war?

KARIM SADJADPOUR, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: So Iran is in a much better place now than it was four months ago, before the war. I think the biggest advantage they now have is controlling the Strait of Hormuz, which, Mark -- I think Mark Twain said that Americans learn geography through war. So, everyone now knows where the Strait of Hormuz is. For them they want to try to turn it, if not into the Panama Canal, but at least have administrative control over it, like Turkey and the Bosphorus.

I also don't think that they plan to make any meaningful compromises on the points which President Trump hoped to advance before the war, which is their nuclear program, their missile program, their regional proxies. If you read that memorandum of understanding, which I call a memorandum of misunderstanding, you know, the two sides are very different takeaways from that.

Really the only thing it asks of Iran is a vague nuclear compromise, but it concedes the idea that after 60 days, perhaps they could control the strait. There's nothing in there about missiles or proxies.

And then internally, this is a regime which last January it carried out one of the worst massacres in modern history, potentially killed, you know, tens of thousands of its people, experienced, you know, mass popular uprising. And right now it's -- whereas four months ago, I used to describe the Islamic Republic as a zombie regime with a dying ideology, a dying leader, dying legitimacy. I fear, at least in the immediate term, that we've kind of breathed new life into this zombie regime. It has a newfound self-confidence.

And the last thing I'll say here, Fareed, is that there's a big question about, you know, how does Iran choose to conduct itself now in the postwar? And the most brilliant observation which has been made about Iran over the last few decades, was something that Henry Kissinger asked a couple of decades ago, which is, you know, is Iran a nation or a cause? Iran has to decide whether it's a nation or a revolutionary cause.

And after this -- the war and the popular uprising in January, a lot of governments would say, you know what? It is time for us to prioritize our economic and national interests first, instead of our ideology being death to America and death to Israel. That has gotten us into two catastrophic wars. It's triggered continuous popular uprisings.

But I actually think the regime has reached the opposite conclusion, which is that revolutionary ideology is not an albatross around the neck that's going to sink the regime. It's actually proven to be a life preserver, and we're going to double down on it.

ZAKARIA: So, Mark, let me summarize and maybe expand a little. And I would add, let's do the -- let's do the pros. What did the war accomplish? It did degrade substantially Iran's nuclear capacity. It did degrade its missile capacity. It did sink its Navy. Though I will point out most of Iran's aggression was not using its conventional army. It was using proxy militias.

But in return, it found that it had a usable nuclear weapon, the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. It has divided America's Gulf allies in pretty bitter ways.

[10:50:00]

It has created a huge fracture in the American-Israeli relationship. And it has caused the United States plainly to not achieve its objectives, objectives stated repeatedly by the -- by the president. Oh, and we probably have spent $150 billion when you total it all up. Seems like a bad idea. What do you think?

MARK DUBOWITZ, CEO, FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES: So, Fareed, I think you ticked off some accomplishments, but I want to just take you back to not February 28th, but I want to take you back to October eighth of 2023, which was the height of the power of the Islamic Republic, right? October 7th, brutal invasion by an Iranian backed terrorist organization. Israel, literally, on its knees.

And after October eighth, Hezbollah began to fire on Israel. And now Ali Khamenei, the late Ali Khamenei, and let's underscore the late Ali Khamenei, which deserves a whole round of applause, his vision was now, I'm going to activate my axis of resistance, or what I call the axis of misery, which is all these terrorist organizations across the Middle East that essentially had built a ring of fire around Israel and a ring of fire around our Gulf allies.

And I am going to continue to build up my missile shield, right, which are thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles and an intercontinental ballistic missile to target the American homeland. And under that missile shield, I'm going to build a nuclear weapons program. And they, in fact, had gotten very close, and under President Biden.

And this is not a partisan point, because we're not right of center. We're nonpartisan. But most of Iran's nuclear expansion occurred under Biden because the Iranians do not fear American power, American military pressure, American economic pressure. So, they were essentially days away from nuclear breakout. And they had this huge missile arsenal that actually is an existential threat to Israel.

They don't need nuclear weapons. They can just completely take over and fire weapons into Israel. And Israel's defensive shields cannot stop thousands of ballistic missiles being fired at Israel. And this is where we were last June.

And I don't look at it as one war. I look at it as a continuous war. The 12 Day War, Operation Midnight Hammer, the 38 Day War, Operation Epic Fury, and the interregnum between the two wars where there was pressure and diplomacy and more pressure and more diplomacy.

Where are we today? Well, Ali Khamenei, I'm really sorry, but your dream of permanent control over the Strait of Hormuz, nuclear weapons, ICBMs, missiles, 500,000 drones, the Chinese-Russian built military, and hundreds of billions of dollars of sanctions relief, either in the JCPOA scenario or the no attack scenario.

Ali Khamenei, you lost because now your successor Mojtaba Khamenei, your son, and the IRGC played the Hormuz card not when they were strong, but when they were weak. Because if we had allowed them to develop that lethal end state they would not have temporary control over Hormuz. They would have permanent control of Hormuz.

So, America is winning. Israel is winning. Islamic Republic of Iran is losing. So, why would you take that incredible military leverage and negotiate a fatally flawed MOU, which looks like it was written by the Qataris, written by the Iranians, translated by ChatGPT into English, by the way, replete with spelling mistakes if you go back and read it. So, don't use ChatGPT.

And it's a terrible agreement. Like why would you squander all that leverage to the negotiating table? I'll end with this. Why? Because Trump needs to hold the House. He needs to hold the Senate. He needs the punch in November. He needs to open Hormuz. He needs to get gasoline, oil prices down, inflation down, and punch in November, and he's got two years and three months to double down on his Iran strategy.

ZAKARIA: Kim, since you're the first person to -- you're the only person who lives in the region. You live in Beirut. I thought, here we are. With this ceasefire, with the war that took place. Tell us what you think things look like in the Middle East, particularly in the -- in the Gulf and that area after the war.

KIM GHATTAS, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, FINANCIAL TIMES: I have come a long way from Beirut. And what I can tell you about the mood in Lebanon and in the region at large is that there is a sense of limbo. And to quote President Trump himself, a ceasefire in the Middle East is kind of when they fire a bit less, right?

Because I live in Beirut I want to point out that the impact on the people of the region, the impact on the people of Lebanon, the impact on the people of Iran is something that we cannot forget. It is also about their future. And President Trump may not care. The Iranian leadership certainly doesn't care. But the Iranian people feel betrayed.

[10:55:01]

They had been told by President Trump, help is on the way. And instead they're finding out that perhaps they're at the mercy of an Iranian leadership that is even more hard line and more entrenched.

And in Lebanon, there is really this sense that we're stuck between two fires. And that what is demanded of Lebanon is to deliver everything for Israel, and then Israel will withdraw from the south. And that is putting a lot of pressure on what is a weak government, even though we have at the moment a great president and great prime minister. So, that is in a nutshell.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week from the Aspen Ideas Festival. I will see you next week.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)