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Fareed Zakaria

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2016-10-06

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2016-10-06

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1. “When you were in office, that's what competition does. I grew up in a country that had very little competition, high tariff walls, and for all these kinds of good populist reasons. It was a disaster. What you end up with is totally dysfunctional industries that are uncompetitive, that cannot benchmark to global standards. That's not the answer. The answer is our workers should be armed and there are ways to arm them. Shutting off trade is not the answer. Unfortunately, I think that the mainstream political parties are losing their nerve on this in the face of all this populism.”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The answer is you want to have your workers be able to sell to everyone to be able to buy from everyone, but you want them to be armed with the best training, the best education, the best health insurance, the most portable benefits and the best retraining so that they can compete in that world. The solution to America's car industry, which had become deeply dysfunctional by the 1970s, was not that we should have kept the Japanese out. The solution was you should have let the Japanese and help them retrain so that they became more viable. The auto bailout is a good example. The auto industry was not profitable at 16 million cars. They are now profitable at 9 million cars. They're selling a lot more, but they became profitable. Why? Because they were forced to make the kind of changes and restructuring that you were able to impose.”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “It's fair to say that Most experts who've looked at it say that it provides more protections for workers in the environment than any trade deal has done before. If it fails, it says to mainstream political parties it's hopeless. You just can't make the case for trade. You just can't make the case for Has and Hillary Clinton. And I wish she hadn't. I actually think that you know this world much better than I. As a matter of policy, I think there was a way for her to say, I will demand a renegotiation of it and I want”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “The heart of that because it's partly psychological, it shows that the United States has an active, forward-looking vision. It provides that counter to the Chinese that deterrence to China. It reassures all the other countries that are nervously looking around. But there's another effect, I think, David, which is if TPP fails, if the Trans-Pacific Partnership fails, and I should be clear, I know the concerns people have, I think it's fair to say that.”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “You know, I think it has two effects. One is there's a kind of foreign policy effect, which is Asia is the future. In 10 years, four of the five largest economies in the world will be in Asia, the only non-Asian economy, if you consider the United States as a Pacific economy, which it is, the only Pacific economy would be Germany, of the top five. So that is the locus of economic activity. And it is the place where the single biggest shift geopolitically of the modern age has taken place. When historians look back, they're not going to write a lot about ISIS. They're going to write about the rise of China. That is the dominant trend that is going to change the world. China is going to rewrite the rules of the international system in Asia unless the United States is able to keep its coalition, keep itself present, and do it first in a way that is more inclusive. The TPP is at the”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Of that order that even some kind of uncertainty around it causes countries like Poland and Hungary and the Baltic states to go through real existential soul searching. I mean, the Baltic states are essentially suburbs of St. Petersburg. The Russian army could get there in a few hours. There's very little you could do. The only thing that stops them is the sense that NATO is guaranteeing their security, that NATO is a collective alliance, that that guarantee is automatic, and it involves nuclear weapons. You start to waffle on any one of those guarantees, and that whole region of the world becomes much more unstable.”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Oh, I'd say it goes way beyond anxiety. I mean, the Europeans are freaking out because this would be, you know, Hillary Clinton represents pretty broad continuity, not just in terms of with the Obama administration, but with the foreign policy of America from Truman through Reagan. The kind of broad internationalist alliance-based policy. Trump has said so many different things. pretty consistently seem to say that he wants the Europeans to fend for themselves. He wants NATO to be a kind of pay-as-you-go outfit. He wants the Japanese to take care of their own security, the South Koreans. If that means they go nuclear, so be it. This is a complete upending of the world order that the United States has created since 1945. And I think what Trump, and I think most Americans don't recognize, is we are so powerful in terms of the upholding.”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Dislikes Hillary Clinton. It's personal. He thinks that in the elections of 2011 and 12, Hillary essentially encouraged domestic opposition to him. He viewed that as an attempt by the United States to engage in regime change in Russia. He also has expressed a certain kind of disdain for Hillary personally. I sometimes wonder whether that has something to do with her being a woman. So there's something going on there. And given Russia's past in terms of what it has done in Europe, it's not so far-fetched to imagine that some efforts along the same lines.”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “What I've been struck by I don't know the honest answer to that, but I've been struck by the people in Europe who I talk to who are able to point out with extraordinary detail the way in which Russia has waged this kind of hybrid war where it funds some local parties, it engages in very determined media efforts, particularly on social media, it does all these things that are designed, that serve certain strategic roles. For example, in Europe, what they pointed out to me is they don't necessarily support or fund groups that are pro-Russian. Their goal is to break the European Union. And so it's always the most anti-European groups, the ones that don't want collective sanctions, that don't, you know, any collective policy. What's happening here, the reason I think it's plausible is”

   2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Yeah, you know, I interviewed Medvedev twice and I have met Putin a few times and even just atmospherically, they're very different people. Medvedev is, you know, he and his staff are very, I hate to put it this way, very European, they're very professional, everything happens on time. Everyone is polite to you. Putin is surrounded by thugs when you deal with him. It's very, very tough. They make you everything, you know, you're made to wait for hours. It's like an Asian potentate meeting you. And I think that the tragedy was, again, in that Western ISO file dilemma, the big problem was Medvedev ultimately had no power.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yeah, but I think one has to kind of ask oneself, you know, there's always a debate, there was always a debate in Russian history between the westernizers and the Slavophiles, the people who believed Russia had a distinct, unique identity that was Slavic. The Westernizers, of course, would point to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Pushkin and Tsaikovsky and say this is culturally a Western country. But what I'm struck is when you read that history in light of what's going on now, the Westernizers always lost. And if you think about the 20 years since the end of the Cold War,”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “And The sanctions have had a big impact. I saw Putin, I interviewed him, and it was in a situation where he was with Renzi, the Prime Minister of Italy. And what I was struck by, even in the green room, was how he was very determined to try to drive a wedge between the Europeans and the Americans. He kept saying to Renzi, why are you paying for American foreign policy? The Americans want these sanctions. The Americans want it. Do you know what? They don't pay any price for it. They don't do much business with Russia. You are paying a price. So clearly it is a number one goal, it seemed to me, was to get the Europeans to drop these sanctions, which means they hurt. If you look at the Middle East, it is a kind of 19th century power politics he's playing. It's not clear what he gets out of it. So there are all these things that Russia is doing”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Up parts of Russian territory by kind of having its businessmen go in and buy it by land. This would be a border to keep stable. Instead, what has Russia done? It has unified Ukraine, which was always a divided country, half pro-Russian, half anti-Russian. It has turned Poland deeply against it. It has unified Europe on sanctions against Russia. So it's not that smart. What I think is also...”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “But in those two spheres, yeah, I mean, Russia has returned to a kind of opposition, almost elemental existential opposition to Western foreign policy and to American foreign policy. And I've wondered a lot about this, particularly when you look at the situation with Ukraine and Eastern Europe, because in a longer-term sense, it's a very self-defeating strategy. Russia had been going down a path, even under Putin, where the Poles and the Russians were getting on better, the Ukrainians and the Russians were getting on, the Eastern Europeans, they were all dependent on Russia for energy. It was a nice situation to be in with the richest trading continent in the world, which is Europe. Russia also has huge problems on its south with radical Islam. It has problems to its west with a growing China that is gobbling.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Precisely call it the worst tragedy of the 20th century, the fall of the Soviet Union. So I think Obama, and I'm just guessing here, doesn't want to give Putin the pleasure of feeling like he has restored Russia to the position of being the principal antagonist of the only superpower in the world. So what he said at that point, if you remember, was Russia is actually a regional power, which I'm sure annoyed the hell out of Putin. The idea of him being merely a regional power. But I think it's true. Russia, there are two fronts on which it bothers us, the Middle East and Europe, but there's all of Latin America, all of Canada, all of Asia, Asia is the most important sphere of the world, and Russia is largely absent from all of those.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “He knows that Putin's goal is to create a sort of parity to return Russia to this kind of bipolar status where it is the other great power in the world you have to negotiate with. And I think that's...”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Kind of pure Muslims, and he's helping out the people battling, who, for example, all never call it even the Islamic State. They all call it Daesh, the Jordanians. So similarly, I think when Romney said that, I don't think it's that Obama doesn't know that the Russians are being uncooperative on a host of different fronts.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “You know, I think that sometimes in these situations, people don't understand. Obama is not speaking like an intellectual. He's speaking like the president. So people keep saying you should call it radical Islam. It's not like Barack Obama doesn't know that the promoter radical Islam exists, but he also knows that a lot of American allies like the Jordanians and the Egyptians say, please don't call it Islam because it legitimizes it. It makes it seem like all of Islam is a problem. So in a sense, consciously not giving them the pleasure, the ISIS people, of calling them.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Right, it's in rural Appalachia that they are worried about what these immigrants who they don't live with are going to do.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “The funny thing about some of the research is you probably have seen the same stuff I have, the people who communities in which these new immigrants live often are not fearful of them. They often, because they get it. They see these people, they see what benefits they provide, they see it's a mixed bag. No, no, no.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “We have competing interests, and by the way, I would argue that's true even with the most unskilled and because everyone says, oh, we need more people like me, immigrants who are kind of very skilled and had lots of fancy degrees and all that. But I think a lot of what makes America work is just the incredible hard work and determination of these people who come and they're willing. I mean, think about it, these people are willing to cross the border two, three times on pain of death so that they can go and wash dishes in a restaurant. I mean, that's drive. And again, I don't want in any way excuse anyone breaking the law.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “But they don't perceive it that way. As deeply offensive. That's the part that's very tough to know what to do about you.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And the people she describes that, they say to her, you're reading my mind, or I'm living this life. Now, the weird thing is, of course, the federal government massively is helping the white working class as well.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Arley Hockshield, this sociologist at Berkeley has written a book about this, which is fascinating. I've just been reading in it. At one point she tries out this hypothesis on these white working class people she feels are not racist, not bad people at all, but yet so suspicious of the federal government that they would rather the federal government starve than get help from it. And she says, you guys feel like you've been waiting in line. It's been a very long, tough line. It doesn't seem to be moving. And then all of a sudden you notice that the government is helping all these other people, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants. And that really, really annoys you. It enrages you.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “15% in many countries. It might be more changed than societies can accept that when we look at the cultural changes that that means, because these immigrants do come from places very different from the Western world often, you know, we have to think about Numbers of immigrants, the pace at which they come in, and I think we have to think about how to integrate them. The US has historically done very well at this, probably better than any country in the world. In fact, the Canadians now do well at it. The Australians do well. But if you look at what they're doing, they're basically just copying the US, and America does it, I think, almost unthinkingly. We're just very good at integrating people. But even for us clearly there is some pace of change can just be too fast for people to digest. And so it makes me think.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “So it's happening on a small incremental scale. I think I have a feeling the president would agree, if you were to be able to scale it and fund it at the level of something that would be hundreds of billions of dollars, I think it would have a huge impact. The Germans spend 0.9% of their federal budget on retraining. We spend 0.1. So they spend nine times on a per capita basis what we spend. It feels to me like you need something on that scale. But again, it's doing stuff we know works. That's what I mean. It's not some wild-eyed dramatic change. The one thing I do wonder about, David, is, and I say this as an immigrant, the United States' population of foreign people in 1970 was four and a half percent. It's now about 15%. In Europe, that number has gone from 1.5% to about 5%.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “The skills and government would pay. Now here's the part two that nobody wants to hear. It would be very expensive. This would be a massive new federal program on the scale. Some of that is going on now.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Honestly, I think maybe this is why I'm a centrist. I don't. I think that these forces that we're dealing with, globalization, the information revolution, are so large. I think that there is a reality to the debt burden of government. I'm not somebody who cavalierly thinks we could just spend our way out of this somehow. Look at Japan. Japan tried it for 25 years. The debt-to-GDP ratio is now something like 225%. It doesn't seem to have solved the problem. I do think probably I have one favorite idea, which is retraining. I think we need to approach retraining almost like the GI bill, which is to say any American anywhere who gets displaced should be able to show up at a community college and say, I want six to nine months of retraining. The local industries would identify the needs, what are the jobs that people need, community colleges would provide the”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Propose a lot of things that are going to dramatically change people's lives. It's all incremental, it's all small bore, it all yields results over the long run. And then you have the populace who say we've got simple solutions. And the simple solution is to turn the attention to foreigners and say, you know, Trump's message is basically to Americans, your life is hard and it's all because of foreigners. Mexicans are taking your jobs. The Chinese are manufactured are taking your manufacturing industries. The Muslims are threatening you. I'll beat up on all of them and you'll be better. Honestly, it's a much more compelling, dramatic message. And how to deal with that, I think, is the central challenge for mainstream parties because you have economic incrementalism on the one hand that doesn't allow you to do much. And then what do you do with the cultural slash racial element to it?”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Right, so if you think about globalization and the information revolution, they're great for capital, they're great for highly skilled people, but for the regular Joe, for the person with a high school diploma, maybe even a couple of years in community college, they basically mean two things. The job you do can be done in China or it can be done by a machine. So you look at driverless cars, amazing technology. We might look back and say, why did we ever do something as dangerous as driver carsels? I mean, the driverless car never gets drunk. It never loses its way. The rain is never obscuring its vision. But three million Americans drive trucks. Driving a truck, bus or car as a profession is the single most widely held occupation by an American man. So what happens to those people? That's the challenge. So you put all this together and you have governments, you know, you have the frustration, I think, that mainstream parties have, which is they can't.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Precisely. Social welfare structure. Exactly. In fact, it's twofer. You're exactly right. It's the aging of the population and then the financial crisis meant that the governments everywhere had taken on the debts of the private sector. And so you remember this well, in Obama's first year debt-to-GDP goes from 60% to 90%. It had nothing to do with virtually nothing to do with what he did. It was just the reality of the financial crisis. And that's happened all over the West. So governments are strapped. They face slow growth, a bad demographics. And the only solutions you have are very small bore incremental expand children.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “It's a great question. I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure this out. It seems to me what's really interesting is it's happening in the West. It's not happening in Asia. It's not happening in Latin America where actually populism is being discredited in places like Venezuela and Brazil and Mexico. They've lost, the populace have lost elections in all those places, Argentina. So what is happening in the Western world that is unusual? So it's two things I noticed. One is that you have a certain kind of economic maturity and stasis in Western societies. They're all facing a bunch of problems. Demography. The population is aging basically everywhere in the West. They have very high debt-to-GDP ratios. Government is strapped, partly because of the financial crisis. Debt has ballooned everywhere. So it doesn't give the government a lot of room for maneuver like big.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “There is no time limit that says that we can't, you know, every time we see one of these groups pop up, we can't deal with it. But I don't see, you know, we want some kind of clean, satisfying solution here. There isn't.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Anyone who produces oil has to sell it. Even ISIS goes around selling oil. In fact, what it does is it depresses the price of oil because they have to sell it at a discount. Our interest is in trying to prevent terrorism, and that means very good homeland security, very good intelligence operations, going in offensively with drones and special operations where we need to, but not trying to get involved in adjudicating the disputes between Sunnis and Shias and creating political order. We can't do that. It's a ruinously expensive task. People say so then you're just managing the problem. Well, you know, a lot of problems are better managed than quote-unquote solved, especially when you can't solve them. You can play whack-a-mole with these terrorist groups forever. Guess what? Whack-a-mole is no fun for the mole. I mean, you're getting beaten up all the time, and we're the richest country in the world. We could do that forever.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “You know, the Allies, particularly in the Arab world, are playing their own games in a place like Syria. They want the United States involved, but they also want to fund their favorite jihadi groups. And it creates for a circumstance where you're being gamed. Everybody is playing their own game and using you for their own purposes. I think that what you have to ask yourself is back to my realism, what is the core strategic interest the United States has? The core strategic interest the United States now has in the Middle East is really to avoid the export of terrorism because we don't need the Middle East for oil very much anymore. Most of what is being pumped out of Saudi Arabia is going to China. The United States obviously wants to maintain some degree of stability in the price of oil. But I think that that is much more likely to happen than people realize, look.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Exactly, and you know, the problem is, of course, we say that the truth is we're usually 90% of the operation, and it doesn't fool anyone that you've got a few hours.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “That are available to locals, but they're not available to somebody, particularly the richest country in the world coming in with guns blazing. And in some ways we are right. We do have the right answer, but nobody wants to hear it from us.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Exactly. And I think that one thing we often forget in the United States is the power of nationalism. That I remember there's this moment that may be apocryphal, but has been reported that when Gandhi was negotiating with the British, at one point, the Viceroy of India says to him, the representative of the British government, he says, Mr. Gandhi, if we just leave India the way you want us to, there will be chaos. You know that. And Gandhi looks at him and he says, Yes, but it will be our chaos. I think that there's a very deep sense of wanting to own your own country and not having foreigners tell you what to do. And I think we always forget that. You know, whether it's in Vietnam, whether it's in Iraq, whether it's in Afghanistan, that there are solutions.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “So the Sunnis, as a result, feel like it's better to be in violent opposition to these groups. And guess what? ISIS is the game in town, so they join ISIS. How do you change that dynamic? How do you create a local legitimate political order that everybody feels like they can buy in? In a way, that is the coin of the realm. You want to know how terrorism We've held two elections in Afghanistan. The good guys win, but the bad guys don't accept the outcome. They don't accept the process. They don't accept the legitimacy of that government. And they go into armed insurgency. Well, and as you say,”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “The problem here is that the governments in place that would naturally take over in Iraq or even in Syria are governments, the Shiite government in Baghdad, the Alawite government in Syria that are regarded as apostate regimes by the Sunnis and that do in fact systematically discriminate against the Sunnis. And when I say discriminate, I mean actually kill, round up in Murder. An extreme form of discrimination. I'm not talking about affirmative action kind of things.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “What you ask the central question which is not can we defeat ISIS but who would govern those spaces? You now own real estate in Syria and even actually in Iraq. That's the problem. The idea that the US army wouldn't be able to defeat 30,000 lightly armed men, mostly men, which is what ISIS is, is ludicrous. Of course they could. The question is, do you want to devote that kind of resource to it? More importantly, once you do, you own the problem, you own the territory. And we come back to this problem, which is”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “a huge historical transformations taking place in these societies. Maybe these countries will not exist fifteen years from now. And the idea that we could put a finger on that seems very uncommon.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Look at Afghanistan, David. I mean, we have been there for 15 years now. We've spent a trillion dollars. We actually have a popular elected government that is trying to be somewhat inclusive. But every town you leave, the Taliban in some way, there's a resurgence. You know, there are these deeper organic forces at work here. And I think we kid ourselves when we think, oh, if the United States were to just go in, and we do this with Syria, if the United States goes in, or it had gone in 2012 and we had found a moderate force, there are 1,000 militias operating in Syria. It is a battle of life and death for them. The idea that we would from six thousand miles away by funding a few thousand people, by even providing a few thousand troops or twenty thousand troops, would we really change the outcome? These are places.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “And they have Iran sitting there. So that dynamic, I think, is at the heart of it. If the US had some troops there, would we have more influence? Possibly, so it might have been a slower process of persecution. But really what happened was the Sunnis decided we're getting screwed and we're going to mount an arm to insurgency. And ISIS became the extreme version of that. We were able to damp that down for a year and a half when Petraeus had almost two hundred thousand troops in Iraq. He was doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Sunni tribes every month. And then the minute he stopped, these forces started to resume. It's tough to believe that in that circumstance if you had ten thousand troops doing training operations, this would change much.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “No, I don't. I think that the reason that we're in the situation we are is because the Shiite government in Baghdad decided that the way it was going to rule was to systematically persecute the Sunni minority. Now, we need to understand this is not as crazy as it sounds. The Shiites in Iraq were persecuted themselves for, oh, maybe 600 years. These guys have come to power from opposition. They are deadly scared that the old Saddamist Bathist elite are going to come back into power. So they are both acting out of revenge, out of a precaution, out of a sense that these guys are out to get them. And so that dynamic is what is at the heart of it, which is that the Shiite majority just can't be accommodating and inclusive. They just don't have it in their genes. There's no Mandela there. And by the way, there wouldn't be a man.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Right. We represent modernity. We represent the most powerful country in the world. When Bill Clinton was trying to negotiate the Camp David Agreement to do the most generous offer to the Palestinians any American president ever done, we now know that is when Al-Qaeda was planning 9-11. If you look at any of these groups anywhere in the world, they know that they know that the way they get attention, the way they get funding, the way they get kind of street cred is to go attack America. So I don't think we would have been spared that, but I do think that we would have less of a sense of being as deeply implicated in it.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Civil war that's taking place, I think would be taking place. I think there's very little likelihood that the Middle East could have stayed completely repressive, stagnant dictatorships for another 30 years. The big difference is we wouldn't have been in the middle of it. We wouldn't be as culpable as we are, and we wouldn't have lost not just American lives, but Iraqi lives.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Technology, I think, had a lot to do with it. I think the demographics of the Middle East had a lot to do with it. 60-65% of most of these countries is under 30, in some cases 60% is under 25. And what you saw in each of these countries, I mean, from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Syria, is that the tight repressive regime had contained under it all kinds of”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Is that I don't think we would be spared the instability that is now coursing through the Middle East because that instability was produced by forty or fifty years of incredible stagnancy, these regimes that were incredibly repressive, and something was going to give. If you look at the Arab Spring, basically what happened is people found some outlets, some way to get at these regimes, and then the dam burst. And the dam burst in social media.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “You know, the most honest answer I can give you, and I think I'm not trying to kind of look backward and try to justify the fact that I had supported the invasion.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source