Return to Transcripts main page

FAREED ZAKARIA GPS

What Brought Down EgyptAir 804?; Egypt's Modern Crisis; A Great American Elder Statesman; George Shultz On Hillary Clinton. Aired 10- 11a ET

Aired May 22, 2016 - 10:00   ET

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


[10:00:15] FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: 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 today.

We have an important show for you today, starting with the latest on the crash of EgyptAir 804. Also, the great American elder statesman George Schultz. He was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, Richard Nixon's secretary of Treasury, and much more. Schultz will talk about international affairs and the American economy and this stalwart Republican will offer his thoughts on the GOP's presumptive nominee.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: And terror and its frightening lineage. I will tell you about the direct line that can be drawn from the most recent jihadi attack on American soil all the way back to the founder of modern radical Islam.

Finally, does the United States need a new Cabinet member, a secretary of the future? Maybe. I'll explain.

But first, here's "My Take." Silicon Valley has more than 23,000 start-ups. At least according to the networking site AngelList. It certainly feels that way when you're in Palo Alto, when I spent most of the week. But it turns out that this place is the exception to a worrying trend. It is by now well documented that start-up activity has been slowing down in America for about three decades, dropping sharply over the last 10 years.

Even as American culture has turned entrepreneurs into rock stars, the American economy is producing fewer and fewer of them.

Why is this happening? No one is quite sure. Some are quick to blame big government. There's something to this critique, but the story is complicated. If high taxes discourage would-be entrepreneurs, then how to explain the burst of start-ups in the 1970s and early '80s when tax rates were sky high? Even today California ranks toward the top of the nation in terms of taxes and regulation. Yet it is home to some of the most vibrant entrepreneurial activity in the world in sectors as diverse as high tech, entertainment, and energy.

But clearly, ever multiplying regulations do hamper business activity. The "Economist" magazine argues that the American economy has grown less competitive in the last 20 years. After a wave of deregulation in the 1980s, red tape has proliferated, licensing requirements have expanded, and legal costs have risen dramatically. Large, entrenched firms armed with lawyers and lobbyists are able to navigate this regulatory landscape much better than new ones. The game may indeed be rigged "The Economist" concludes.

But a less-noted factor that might be crucial is generational. You see baby boomers have proved to be great entrepreneurs, launching companies when they were young and keeping at it as they aged. Succeeding generations have been much less likely to found their own firms.

Leigh Buchanan, citing Kauffman data, has explained that the percentage of start-ups launched by people in their 20s and 30s fell from 35 percent in 1996 to 18 percent in 2014. Meanwhile, the portion of founders in their 50s and 60s has actually increased over the past decade.

You see, young people today dress like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, consume technology voraciously, and talk about disruptive innovation. But they want to work at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Google. They are earnest, intelligent, accomplished, and risk-averse.

Is this caution born of years of stagnant incomes, the financial crisis, and a sluggish economy? Maybe. But I think there's something broader at work. Baby boomers were shaped by the 1960s and its counterculture. They were told to tune into their passions, to drop out of the old establishment. They were rebellious about everything. Politics, parental authority, old-fashioned morality, big institutions. Their willingness to strike out on their own was not a pose to get venture capital funding. It was an expression of their passion.

Out of that bohemian world came the informal start-up culture that has now gone mainstream. Steve Jobs once explained that using LSD was one of the two or three most important things he ever did.

[10:05:05] When describing his intellectual influences, he pointed to the beatnik bible "The Whole Earth Catalog." Its founder Stewart Brandt argued in an essay that we owe to the hippies the leaderless, individualistic, and decentralizing revolution of personal computers and the Internet.

Of course, the counterculture's assault on the establishment and traditional values caused enormous political and social upheavals. There was an erosion of law and order, trust in government, family structure, and deference to authority.

So the question I suppose is, can we get disruption but of a kind that's, well, not too disruptive?

For more, go to CNN.com/fareed, and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

Let's get right to the latest on the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804. There are many developments to discuss with CNN's Nic Robertson, who joins us now from the Cairo airport.

Nic, thanks for being with us.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Pleasure, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Is the Egyptian investigation proceeding with a kind of clarity and efficiency? Do you feel like you understand where things are going?

ROBERTSON: I think we have a certain level of information, but it's limited. The same man who headed the investigation into the Russian Metrojet crash in November last year is heading this investigation. There was a lot that wasn't made public about that investigation. The fact that he's been appointed now tends to indicate there's a validation of the way that he handled that investigation and the way that this may go.

Egyptian authorities have shared pictures and images of debris retrieved. They've talked about human body parts retrieved from the sea. However, where those pieces go, what tests are being done right now, what is being learned, none of that is clear at the moment. So I think the way that this is proceeding at the moment appears on the surface at least to be slow. But the emphasis for the Egyptian authorities is really to find those black box voice and data recorders.

How they are progressing with that, are there setbacks, are there positive gains, we're really not getting a running commentary. And I think this is what we can expect going forward, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: And anymore news on the passenger list and whether or not there is anyone suspicious on that? I know the first time around, it yielded nothing. Anything further?

ROBERTSON: Not that we've been told so far. And of course, the concern about a passenger list, particularly with a flight passing out of Europe at the moment, is there is a possibility that there could be somebody on that flight who would not be on any terrorism watch list but who might have -- might have connections to a terrorist organization or might be influenced by the rhetoric of a terrorist organization.

ISIS obviously would be the first one you would say at the moment, and the fact that the plane took off in Paris, where there have been two attacks, serious, terrible attacks last year, is an indication that within the European law enforcement circles, there's a lot that's not known about some of their citizens at the moment. So the fact that the first sort of scrub and wash of the passenger manifest hasn't provided information, I think at this stage cannot be taken to the bank as conclusive that there isn't somebody on there who is going -- who may be potentially coming under further scrutiny right now. Again if it is, it's not made public so far, Fareed. ZAKARIA: Nic Robertson, always a pleasure to have you on.

I want to turn now to CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen.

Peter, the part here that seems puzzling to me is -- I understand why French authorities or others can't protect a cafe in Paris, a restaurant, but an airport. That seems to me -- again, if this is terror related, it seems striking that they were not able to secure the environment for an airport. What does that tell you?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, Fareed, I think this is the Achilles heel of many airports. We've had al Qaeda sympathizers working at Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom. We've had people in the United States who then join Shabaab, the Somali terrorist group, working at the Minneapolis Airport. We have somebody who joined ISIS who also worked at the Minneapolis Airport.

So there are a lot of people working at airports. There are a lot of airports that fly to the United States. And as we saw with the Metrojet airliner, this is a pretty good way to get a bomb on a plane, if you can -- if you have the right people in place.

ZAKARIA: What do you make, Peter, of the fact that there has been no claim for responsibility?

[10:10:03] I can't recall a case where that happened for as long as this time. Is it possible -- of course, it could be not a terrorist attack but it could also be some kind of lone wolf suicide bomber. Is that possible?

BERGEN: I mean, it's possible. I agree, Fareed. I think it's puzzling that we haven't had a claim of responsibility if this is terrorism. But you know, one, if I was being particularly Machiavellian, I would let -- and let's say this was a terrorist attack, one way to generate continuing news coverage is to not claim responsibility because, you know, CNN and other news organizations are going to continue to cover this quite aggressively in the absence of a credible claim of terrorism, but once that claim is out there, you know, in a way the open-ended nature of this story becomes less so. So, you know, that could be an explanation. But the bottom line is, yes, very puzzling if this is terrorism. No claim. That is pretty unusual.

ZAKARIA: Since I have you, Peter, I have to ask you about the other big terror-related news. Drone strike that killed the leader of the Taliban. The Taliban, of course, operating in Afghanistan. But of course like Osama bin Laden he turned out to be in Pakistan.

What is the significance of this -- of this drone strike?

BERGEN: Well, you know, it shows that President Obama clearly doesn't have much faith in the potential of renewed negotiations with the Taliban. Typically you don't kill the leader of a group that you think is moving towards peace and the peace negotiations with the Taliban, as you know, basically they've yielded nothing. And I do think -- I think also importantly, Fareed, it raises the question for the next president about what to do in Afghanistan. It's really the first important national security decision the president will face, which is, what do we do with the troops we have in Afghanistan? Do they continue to stay there? How long? What kind of role do they have?

And the Taliban now control a third of the country. We have presence of ISIS and al Qaeda in the last year or so growing larger. And you just recall what happened in Iraq after the total withdrawal of American troops at the end of 2011. You certainly wouldn't want something like that to happen in Afghanistan. So I think that's really a critical decision for the future president and really should be a subject that the campaigns address now about what their plans might look like.

ZAKARIA: You know, when you look at, as you said, the Taliban gaining ground in Afghanistan, al Qaeda gaining ground in Afghanistan, it appears that there are more terror groups proliferating. Al Qaeda is trying to make a move into Syria.

Do you feel as though these terrorist groups are gaining strength or is it that the states in which they are operating are weakening even further?

BERGEN: I think the latter point is the critical point. I mean, you can almost make a political law, which is the weaker that the state is in the Muslim world, the stronger will be groups like ISIS. And in failed and failing states like Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, of course these groups are doing well. And then you add to that a regional civil war between the Sunni and the Shia, that's, you know, got pretty powerful states, amping it up, and then add, you know, the rise of European fascism essentially, it's a pretty toxic brew, which suggests that terrorist groups are going to be doing well in the Middle East and also to some degree in Europe for the foreseeable future.

ZAKARIA: Peter Bergen, as always, a great pleasure to have you on.

BERGEN: Thank you very much.

ZAKARIA: As we've heard, this EgyptAir crash is the latest in a string of troubles for the Egyptian nation. What in the world is going on? Well, the troubled politics of the country and the region certainly had a major role to play in some of the past incidents of terror.

When we come back, we will explore what is really going on in Egypt and the Middle East in general.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:18:31] ZAKARIA: Less than 24 hours after Flight 804 disappeared from radar, officials in both the United States and Egypt were bare pointing to terror as a potential cost to the crash. Why? Well, certainly aspects of the disappearance have led them in that direction. But I would posit that also important in these considerations is the troubled politics of the country whose name was painted across the fuselage, Egypt. Just in the past year, Egyptian aviation has had a hijacking, a foiled bomb plot, and a passenger jet carrying more than 200 people explode over its territory.

To help us understand what is going on in Egypt, I wanted to bring in Robert Worth, whose new book I raved about recently on the show. It is called "A Rage for Order."

Robert, welcome.

ROBERT WORTH, AUTHOR, "A RAGE FOR ORDER": Thank you.

ZAKARIA: So when we look at Egypt, on the surface it seems as though order has been restored. The public clamored for this new general, General Sisi who's maintained order pretty effectively. And yet you see all these incidents, you hear a great deal of sort of rumblings beneath the surface. What is going on?

WORTH: Well, one of the striking things about Sisi is his approach to the jihadi problem. It's very different from what we saw in the past. And that is really, in a sense, an outgrowth of what happened in 2011 with the overthrow of Mubarak. Sisi has declared a total and unqualified war not only on terrorists but on political Islam itself.

[10:20:01] And we've seen two effects, I think. One is -- but unfortunately his -- the way he fights the terrorists and this terrorism is centered in the Sinai Peninsula. I was there a couple of years ago and saw that. His forces have killed a lot of civilians, destroyed a lot of houses. And so the counterinsurgency is not going well. But more broadly, he, unlike Mubarak who always had a relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, Sisi has outlawed the Brotherhood. He has jailed tens of thousands of Brotherhood members. He came to power in 2013 in a coup against the Brotherhood.

And so he's pushed a lot of those people underground. Now most, I think, of the Brotherhood remain peaceful in their aspirations and their philosophy, but some of them have been pushed through this violence to radicalism. Some have certainly joined ISIS. And some have joined smaller groups. We've seen not only attacks by the Egyptian branch of ISIS in the past couple of years, we've seen smaller attacks not just in the Sinai but across Egypt including in Cairo by smaller, new groups with names like Revolutionary Justice.

And so there's a sense that Sisi has perhaps less ability to communicate with political Islamists and less ability to control them and even monitor what they're doing.

ZAKARIA: In your book, Robert, you point out, you highlight, you profile a person who started out enthusiastically part of the Tahrir Square pro-democracy movement and then who ends up joining ISIS. For most people, this is completely puzzling. In some ways, this is the heart of -- you know, of your book, explaining this transition. How pro-democracy people could end up pro-ISIS. Explain that dynamic.

WORTH: Sure. Well, it is remarkable to have people like this. The man in question, his name is Ahmed Darrawi, started off as one of not just a participant but part of the vanguard of the young protesters in Tahrir Square. His life was transformed in that moment like so many people. He saw an enormous hope for the future. He ended up being a spokesman in some ways in the months following that revolution. And in the fall of 2011, he ran as an independent for parliament. He didn't win, but he continued as an activist like so many others.

But as Egypt's politics polarized, he became increasingly distraught. And by the end of 2012 when you had the same people who had joined together in Tahrir Square now fighting each other and even killing each other in the street, he really lost hope. And his friends and relatives told me that he became increasingly depressed and ultimately went to Syria, initially to do humanitarian work, but he ended up joining ISIS.

And I think for people like him, it's hard to know how many there are, people who had, prior to 2011, resigned themselves to living under a dictatorship, living with a diminished sense of hope with a corrupt government, with a sense that they couldn't really get too far, they suddenly glimpse this radical sense of hope in Tahrir Square. And I think when that collapsed they wanted some similarly radical sense of something they could look forward to.

ISIS presented them with that. And even though it sounds awful and apocalyptic to us, it answers questions that a lot of people in that part of the world desperately want now. They feel they've lost everything. The world has collapsed around them. The state is either gone or radically changed. Their sense of any -- any sense of religious unity is gone. Their families may have been broken up, and they're desperate for someone who will tell them exactly where they stand and how they should live. And ISIS does that.

ZAKARIA: And finally, Robert, in your book -- and you have to do this briefly, but what I'm also struck by is the collapse of order in a place like Syria and in Iraq and in so many parts of the Middle East has led people to fear for their own security, and they want the strongest force out there that they think can protect them against people who might kill them. As they see it, the Baghdad government, the Damascus government. And again, that brings ISIS in. In other words, underpinning it all is this breakdown of order, which you talk about in Syria.

WORTH: Yes, yes. Well, I wrote about Syria through the lens of ordinary people's lives because I think too often we see this through jihadi groups on the one hand and on leading politicians on the other. And what I tried to convey was that if you're an ordinary person in Syria, you end up seeing, depending on which side of the line you fall, a radically different view of everything happening around you. And I think that explains so much of the polarization we've seen.

My chapter on Syria was about two young women, one of them Sunni, one of them Alawi, who were good friends and whose friendship was destroyed because they really start to inhabit two totally different worlds. Different worlds that are completely opposed. So these young women ended up defining each other in the end as enemies.

[10:25:03] ZAKARIA: Robert Worth, terrific book and thank you so much for that very, very interesting analysis.

WORTH: It's a pleasure. ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, if it does turn out to be Islamic terror that

brought down the plane, the inevitable question that will arise will be, why? Why do some Muslims hate America, the West? More on that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Perhaps we won't know for a while exactly what brought down EgyptAir Flight 804, but right off the bat, Donald Trump pointed his finger at terror.

If it does turn out to be Islamic terror that brought down the plane, the inevitable question that will arise will be why, and the broader question, why do some Muslims hate the West?

It's a question that is central to my new documentary, "WHY THEY HATE US," premiering Monday night at 9:00 p.m. Eastern on CNN and CNN International. I wanted to give you a sneak preview at two sections of the work. In one part, we trace the story of the San Bernardino killers all the way back to one man who started it all, the founder of modern radical Islam. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[10:30:00] ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Now scrambling to figure out exactly what turned this couple into mass murderers.

ZAKARIA: Tashfin Malik, the wife in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How and where was the 29-year-old mother of a newborn radicalized?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've all looked at her and asked, how? How does a young mother drop her baby off at grandma's after nursing that baby and then proceed to massacre 14 people and give up her own life in a twisted act of martyrdom? There is a way to understand this because you can draw a straight line from Tashfeen Malik directly to the roots of modern radical Islam. Let me explain by going back to the beginning of the story.

Bizarre though it may sound, today's radical Islamic movement started with a popular American song. 1949, the place was Greeley, Colorado. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" was playing on an old gramophone at a church dance. An Egyptian student attending a local college happened to stop in. Syyid Qutb was a deeply conservative Muslim and he was horrified by what he saw at that dance. He wrote later of what he called, the animal-like mixing of the sexes, the halls swarmed with legs, lips met lips, chests met chests. The worst sight of all, he said, the outline of women's breasts in tight sweaters. Syyid Qutb's essay about his time here, "The America I Have Seen", became a sensation in parts of the Arab world. He wrote 24 books urging the return to Sharia law and terrorism against the leading modern nation in the world, the United States.

(END VIDEOTAPE) ZAKARIA: There are many reasons why radicals hate us, but some believe the seeds of that hatred were sown in the pages of the Koran. Yet one Muslim reformer says, the Koran and Islam are being twisted by radicals to suit their own ends.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IRSHAD MANJI, AUTHOR: Islam is being manipulated. It is being used.

ZAKARIA: Irshad Manji points to one colorful example of manipulation in a famous Koranic story.

The Koran promises a martyr in the name of Islam 72 virgins. Is that true?

MANJI: It is not true.

ZAKARIA: Manji says that several scholars studying the original text came to a startling realization.

MANJI: Nowhere in the Koran does it promise 72 virgins, 70 virgins, 48 virgins. What it promises, as far as heaven goes, is something lush. The Arabic word for virgin has been mistranslated. The original word that was used in the Koran was the word for raisin, not virgin. In other words, that martyrs would get raisins in heaven, not virgins.

ZAKARIA: 72 raisins. Imagine the surprise of the terrorist who expected something completely different.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: For more, don't miss "Why They Hate Us", premiering Monday night at 9:00 pm Eastern on CNN and CNN International.

Coming up, a former secretary of state, secretary of treasury, secretary of labor, and director of the OMB, the budget office. That's all one person, George Shultz, coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:38:02] ZAKARIA: I spent much of the past week in the San Francisco Bay area where I had a chance to have some extraordinary conversations. We'll bring you more of them in the coming weeks, but now a very special treat from Palo Alto. President Reagan's long-time secretary of state, George Shultz. Before that job, Shultz had an extraordinary run in government from Richard Nixon's secretary of labor to his treasury secretary and more. He also found great success in the private sector. He was dean of the University of Chicago's business school and also president of one of America's biggest private companies, Bechtel. I talked to America's 95-year-old elder statesman at Stanford's Hoover Institution where he is now a distinguished fellow. Very distinguished, indeed.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Mr. Secretary, pleasure to have you on.

GEORGE SHULTZ, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Thank you. Glad to be here.

ZAKARIA: When you were secretary of state, you were dealing with a world in which there was an existential threat to the United States. The Soviet Union had thousands and thousands of nuclear missiles on a hair trigger. Do you look at the world today and think it is more unsafe or less unsafe than when you were dealing with politics and diplomacy?

SHULTZ: In those days, we had a program and a strategy. We were convinced it would work. Now, what I see is a world awash in change. Almost everywhere you look is instability. And still, there are too many nuclear weapons around. There's also the threat of climate change. In other words, there are things that need to be worked on by more than one country at a time, and countries are having a hard time governing themselves, let alone interacting in a positive way. So I think it's a very dangerous time.

ZAKARIA: What would you do about terrorism? When you look at this problem, terrorism largely emanating out of the greater Middle East.

[10:40:00] SHULTZ: Well, first of all, we have to recognize that for the first time in three centuries, war and religion have been put together. And what that means is it's a different kind of a war. It's not located just in one place with a front. There are places, more than one, and there are tentacles. So you have to have a strategy that deals with this religiously based war. So that's the way you have to address it, I think.

ZAKARIA: We are now involved in a counterterrorism sense, in counterterrorism operations in seven, maybe more countries, as far as I can count -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya. How should we approach this issue of counterterrorism? Because we have now been in Afghanistan for 15 years. We've spent a trillion dollars. And yet, creating political order in these societies -- you can beat up the bad guys, but whenever you leave, instability persists, crumbles, the insurgency gains ground. Is there a way out?

SHULTZ: First of all, we have to do everything we can to see that we don't have terrorist acts take place in the United States or to U.S. citizens wherever. That means you have to have an intelligence sharing and a special effort to see things coming before they come, as I was saying earlier. And people have to know that that's what you're doing. You're not going to tolerate it. And you can be successful, and we need to recognize that now we have this war where religion and war are joined and we have to figure out how we're going to cope with that. And I think the way to do it is to put together a coalition. We don't do everything ourselves, but we want to work with other people. For example, in the Middle East right now, I think if you put together a coalition of Saudi Arabia, the the Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, maybe Turkey, Israel, I think there's more of a sense of community now. Then enlist some of our European allies, and we can be a leader or an organizer. Doesn't mean you do everything yourself. I think probably the boots on the ground in that area need to be locals. ZAKARIA: But isn't that essentially the Obama strategy?

SHULTZ: Well, it is sort of like it, although they seem to be very incremental. I think what you have to do is say, all right, here's our strategy. So what do we need in order to accomplish our goal? Then commit those forces, whatever they may be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: We'll be back in a moment with more of my interview with George Shultz. I ask him about Donald Trump.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:47:12] ZAKARIA: We are back now with more of my interview with the former secretary of state and secretary of treasury, George Shultz. What does he think of the Donald? Listen in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Secretary Shultz, I have to ask you about the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Let's take climate change, to start off. You think it's a crucial danger to us, to the world. He says, he has tweeted that he believes it is a plot invented by the Chinese to steal American manufacturing.

SHULTZ: Well, we laugh, don't we?

ZAKARIA: What do you make of the fact that of the 17 candidates who ran, this is the man who has almost won the Republican nomination?

SHULTZ: I think he's won it. He'll be our nominee. So we'll have to see how this evolves. I'm very -- I know Paul Ryan reasonably. He's a fantastic guy and he has a strong agenda. He's trying to put together an agenda with his house colleagues that says, here is our -- what we're for. At least as I read the tea leaves and I watch him and Trump interacting, he's exposing Trump to this, and we'll see what happens.

ZAKARIA: Right now, could you vote for Donald Trump?

SHULTZ: I will have a secret ballot, and I'm not saying what it's going to be right now.

ZAKARIA: Do you think he has the temperament to be president from what you've seen?

SHULTZ: I don't know him, so it's hard for me to make judgments on people that I don't know. But I think that the oval office is awesome. And when you think about yourself in it or even being there advising a president, you -- it does something to you. So this is something very serious and we have to work on it hard.

ZAKARIA: What do you think has happened to the Republican Party today? SHULTZ: We have a world awash in change. We have an economy that is

not anywhere near its right capacity, and I think people are sort of dissatisfied in a general way.

ZAKARIA: But I guess what strikes me about it is that the party has been defined since Reagan by conservative ideas and there were many candidates espousing those ideas. I think it's fair to say that by most normal measures, the least conservative candidate won. Does that say to you that conservative ideas are not in favor?

SHULTZ: No, I think what happened is the electorate is less motivated by ideas and policies than it is by a sort of emotional content.

ZAKARIA: You've watched every subsequent office holder of the job you held, secretary of state. How do you think Hillary Clinton did as secretary of state?

[10:50:08] SHULTZ: Well, we have a little club of former secretaries, and we support each other. So I look on her problems and I see that she worked on them hard. That's fine.

ZAKARIA: She worked on them hard, but --

SHULTZ: She had some intractable problems. She had -- I don't know about her relationship with the president, but I don't think it was really strong.

ZAKARIA: Does she strike you as intelligent and capable?

SHULTZ: It's been a quarter of a century since I was there so I don't know all of the intimate details of what she did and didn't do. I do say this, though. If you're secretary of state, you have a managerial job to do. It isn't just ideas. And you have a line. I learned this in business. You're the secretary. Your line of control goes to the assistant secretary, the bureau, to the ambassador. And you put into that line, if anything happens extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad, I want to know about it right away, immediately. So I think that kind of administrative structure needs to be there. I don't think it's there right now.

ZAKARIA: Your 96th birthday is when?

SHULTZ: This coming December.

ZAKARIA: So, listening to you, people are going to be struck by the clarity and the wisdom. What is the secret of your success?

SHULTZ: Well, I have a wonderful wife, and I have five children. I have 11 grandchildren. The 11th one graduated from college a couple weeks ago, so they've all graduated from college. But I now have 4 1/2 great grandchildren. So these little kids are an inspiration. Life is exciting. They're curious about everything. And you look at them and you say, what kind of a world are they going to inherit? And what can I do to make it better? So that's my motivating idea.

ZAKARIA: George Shultz, pleasure to have you on. (END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Thanks to George Shultz, the former secretary of state and treasury, for hosting us at Stanford. Next on GPS, does the United States government need a new cabinet member, a secretary of the future? It's an intriguing idea. I'll tell you about it when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: This week, president Obama will visit Hiroshima. He will be the first sitting president to go to the city where the United States dropped an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. That bomb, known as Little Boy, killed 80,000 people instantly and over 100,000 more with its radiation and other effects. Japan surrendered soon after. It brings me to my question of the week -- how much more powerful is the most destructive nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal today compared to Little Boy? Ten times more powerful, 55 times more powerful, 80 times more powerful, or 120 times more powerful? Stay tuned and I'll tell you the correct answer later.

This week's book of the week is William Leuchtenburg's, "The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton". At a time when we're all pondering what qualities it takes to make a great president, this distinguished 93-year-old scholar has done a public service by condensing his wisdom into a fascinating set of essays that examine the nature and power of this extraordinary office.

And now for the "LAST LOOK". The United States has a secretary of defense to fight its wars, a secretary of state to negotiate peace, a treasury secretary to oversee the economy. What about a secretary of the future? Someone whose sole job would be to ponder the horizon and prepare the nation for the long-term, to dream big, just like the innovators in Silicon Valley. If the idea sounds far fetched, meet Kristina Persson, Sweden's Minister for Strategic Development and Nordic Cooperation. Her mission is to promote long-term thinking throughout the government, and she has come to be known as Sweden's minister of the future. Working in tandem with the business community, academics, unions, and others, she's focused on three areas -- the future of work, making sure the labor force has the skills it needs to the years to come, managing the transition to a green economy, and promoting cooperation with other countries on issues like migration. Government should have someone focused on long-term thinking, who is not consumed by the crisis of the weak, Minister Prsson told us.

Sweden isn't the only country with an eye toward tomorrow. Finland's parliament has a committee for the future, focused on science and technology. The United Arab Emirates has a ministry of cabinet affairs and the future, in part to prepare the country to be less dependent on oil. I know this is somewhat gimmicky, but we spend most of our time, money, and energy in the United States, especially in Washington, on the short-term, so I like the idea of a person whose job it would be to force us all to think about the long-term. What priorities do you think an American secretary of the future should focus on? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter using the hashtag #fzgps.

The correct answer to our GPS challenge question was C. The B83 nuclear bomb, with the greatest destructive force in the U.S. arsenal, has a yield that is 80 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, according to the federation of American scientists. In total, there were an estimated 15,350 nuclear weapons in the world as of early this year, the federation estimates, down from a Cold War peak of around 70,300 30 years ago. Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

\