interview with jon huntsman head to cnn.com/sotu. thank you so much for watching today. if you missed any part of the show, find us on itunes. just search state of the union. fareed zakaria "gps" is next for our viewers here in the united states. this is "gps the global this is "gps the global public square." welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world, i'm fareed zakaria. fascinating, important things to talk about today. we'll start with north korea's saber rattling and the u.s. response. could it really lead to war? i have an all-star panel, tom friedman, richard haass to talk about that, the global economy and more. then, we found a way to convince china to start worrying about global warming, i'll explain. morgan stanley predicted that china, india, brazil and russia will all slow down.

check, check, check, check. so, what does he say about america's prospects? then, we'll talk to the great historian ian morris. we'll take you all the way from the ice age to the far distant future. first, here's my take. time for the fat and thin envelopes. the annual ritual when colleges send out admission and rejection notices to well over a million high school seniors. american higher education remains the envy of the world and it has been the nation's greatest path to social and economic mobility. sorting and rewarding talented kids from any and all backgrounds. but there are broad changes taking place at american universities that are moving them away from an emphasis on merit and achievement and towards offering a privileged experience for an already privileged group. state universities, once the highway of advancement for the middle class, have been utterly

transformed in recent decades under the pressure of rising costs and falling government support. a new book "paying for the party" how college maintains inequality shows how they have established a party pathway. admitting more and more rich out of state kids who can afford hefty tuition bills. these cash cows are given special attention through easy majors, lax grading, social securities and luxurious dorms and facilities. now, that is bad for the bright, low-income students who what the book's authors call "the mobility pathway." they are neglected, burdened by college debt and they fail in significant numbers. the country's best colleges and universities do admit lower income students, but the competition so intense and the percent admitted so small that the whole process seems somewhat arbitrary. when you throw in special preferences for various

categories, legacies, underrepresented minorities and athletes, it also looks less merit based than it pretends to be. in an essay a in the american conservative, a mountain of data to charge that america's top colleges and universities have over the past two decades have an upper limit of about 16.5% for haitian americans despite their exploding applicants and their high achievements. his data is not complete. that number is actually probably around 20% and maybe higher. but institutions that rely on more objective measures for admission have found that their populations have risen much more sharply over the past two decades. cal tech and the university of california at berkeley, for example, are now about 40% haitian. new york city stuyvesant. makes it twice as selective as

harvard. it is 72% asian-americans. the u.s. math and science olympiad winners are on now on average 70% asian americans. but the single largest deviation from merit, far more than race or legacies is the recruited athletes program. the problem has gotten dramatically worse in the past 20 years. colleges now have to drop their standards much lower to build sports teams and many of these students, in turn, perform terribly in classroom. a senior administration officer at an ivy league school told me i have to turn down hundred of highly qualified applicants including athletes because we must take so many recruited athletes who are narrowly focused and less accomplished otherwise. william bone, a former president

of princeton university has exhaustively documented the damage the system does to american higher education. and, yet, no college president seems to have the courage to change it. the most troubling trend in america in recent years has been the decline of economic mobility. the institutions that have been the best at opening access in the u.s. has been colleges and universities. if they are not working to reward merit, america will lose the dynamism that has made it long distinctive. for more on this, go to cnn.com/fareed for a link to my "time" column this week. let's get started. let's get right to our all-star panel today. tom friedman is the author "from beirut to jerusalem." won many pulitzer prizes. the op-ed columnist for "new york times." katrina vanden heuvel, richard

haase is the council of foreign relations and bret stephens editor for the "wall street journal." we begin negotiations and they get some kind of concessions, life goes on, then they threaten, again, or they cheat and threaten, again. but is there a danger here that this thing will spin out of control? >> certainly a danger, fareed. and it is true, like cue up the north korea column. so, if i cue up the north korea column, it always comes to the same conclusion. one power that could end this story very quickly. human tragedy of north korea and this incredible farce of a regime and that country is called china. north korea gets its food by fuel to china. keeping the border seal would north korea, it basically reinforces the camp. ann applebaum had a post, you open up the border to north korea, just like opening the border to east germany. >> but, of course, that's why the chinese know that.

and the south koreans know, in a weird sense, nobody wants north korea to collapse. >> one thing from the chinese, they love north korea so much, they want them to be two of them. that's what they said about germany. until they get out of that mode, i don't see what is going to change. >> if you with are in the security council, it looks like everything tom and i are saying is probably true. but don't you have to plan for the prospect that they might actually launch one of these missiles and they probably can't get to the u.s. or get to guam or something like that, or japan? what do you do? >> you plan for it. but the odds are extremely low because the north koreans know if they were to do such a thing, this would not be just the second korean war, but it would end with north korea being a separate sovereign state. you do it for another reason, to not simply deter the north koreans but reassure the south koreans than japanese and some extent ourselves. we have 28,500 americans in south korea. we have treaty commitments.

but one of the things united states has to think about what is the surviving architect of asia. history in asia, as you know, is unfolding. it's catching up, if you will. not just an economic zone any more. one of the questions then is what happens. do you want, i think the answer is no, south korea and japan to say, we need our own nuclear deterrence. we don't trust the united states. that would be a recipe, potentially, for instability. that kind of a transition. so, what we want to do is be reassuring to our friends and our allies. at the same time, we push back against the north koreans. tom is exactly right. this is about china. if chinese want to stop north korea the guys at the border who oversee the goods going in, can go on leave for a couple of days. the north koreans will get the message and the problem is not the chinese are worried about immigrants. they are worried about unification of korea, which seoul is the capital as part of the american security orbit. >> nuclear weapons and 40,000 troops --

>> one of the interesting diplomatic things we tell the chinese, look, we're prepared to negotiate about that. it doesn't have nuclear weapons. another possibility is that we can talk about american troop presence. we can talk about a lot of things. but you have to be willing to use your influence. >> do you think the obama administration has handled this well? >> as painful and unnatural for me to say this, i think they handled it. superbly. predecessors george w. bush and bill clinton. >> both of whom fell for this -- >> both who fell for this story not understanding this is a regime that doesn't stay bribed. they manufacture crises in order to extract concessions from the west and then you have a period of a year or two. meanwhile, the crisis serves the purpose of kim jung-un, or however you say his name, because it helps consolidate his power base. you don't want that to happen. i agree with tom that china is the country that can solve this. but china is the country that will never solve this because their interests are too, i think, i think they've had a conviction for a very long time

that reunified south korea as a disaster for them and also a, potentially, a humanitarian problem for them. there are millions of koreans who will be streaming north if you have a disaster increase. so, they are going to prop up this regime for a long time. the obama administration and japan and south korea, i doubt russia, is going to have to engineer some kind of policy towards north korea that works to make kim's rule shorter. that creates humanitarian avenues for north koreans to lead and puts public pressure on the chinese to allow the underground, the north korean underground railroad to move people to mongolia or thailand or however they get out. so far this administration has done better than anyone. >> something that we haven't talked about, it seems to me, i don't think we can outsource our diplomacy to china. we need to restore high-level engagement and i don't buy the argument that that is bribery. secretary of state john kerry is going to the region next week is

critical. we need to restore that engagement to have that high-level dialogue and, clearly, kim jong wants it. i'm not going to cite dennis rodman, which, i mean, that was crazy in many ways. but what does he come back with? he comes back with one line that they want talks. so, you talk clearly with no illusions and that is diplomacy. people have done it several times and we have seen some success. >> from the left criticizing obama and you're from the right defending him. quick thought on this talking to them, restraint. >> i think it would be a terrible idea. madeline albright tried that in 2000. president clinton went to rescue the two journalists. all it does is create an image of kim jung-un the brilliant young general that has brought john kerry to pyongyang to as a supply cant to offer -- >> here's the danger.

here is the danger. there is the danger of miscalculation. america is now going to do an asian pivot. there is going to be confrontation in the region that we haven't seen before. the darng of nuclear proliferation. the dangers are unwanted war. i think to give space to a different course, a sane course. we should test every possibility because we've seen the militarization of nuclear proliferation. countries which have, you know, worry about u.s. military action, threatened or not, are acquiring weapons. and we need to break the cycle and i think high-level negotiation. john kerry is talking about going to the region to talk about denuclearization. it won't happen. but tests and tests. >> just one thing, north korea is a giant auschwitz. the whole world has to work to end that auschwitz. that's the basis of the policy. >> to threaten it is not going to end it. you have to engage. when we come back, the lightning round.

egypt, israel, guns, the economy. i don't know that we'll get to all of it, but when we come back. in a three-hundred-ton rocket doesn't raise as much as an eyebrow for these veterans of the sky. however, seeing this little beauty over international waters is enough to bring a traveler to tears. we're putting the wonder back into air travel, one innovation at a time. the new american is arriving.

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♪ the question is how do you make sure you have the money you need to enjoy all of these years. ♪ and we are back with tom friedman, katrina vanden heuvel, richard haass and bret stephens.

>> richard, one of the big issues, if you travel to the middle east, is the united states is seen as sort of supporting president morsi's brotherhood. government, muslim brotherhood. fair or unfair. there is the question of what to do this guy does seem to be liberal. he served lots of powers and he's using emergency authorities in various ways. what should we do? >> at the moment, it is what we shouldn't do. we shouldn't support a loan unless it has the strictest terms. if the egyptians get this money, they will then allow them to go into the private marketplace to get more support. we do not want the muslim brotherhood in egypt to succeed on their terms. we only want them to succeed to if they are willing to proceed by terms that protect the rights of egyptians and respect the interests of the united states

and its neighbors. i am skeptical whether they will do that. we should hang very tough and say we will only work with you under specified conditions. your sovereign right to protect those conditions and our sovereign right to not work with you. worse things in this regime. >> place is already a complete mess. >> i think one of the things that surprised me, fareed, about egypt is just how incompetent the muslim brotherhood has been. number one, what also surprised me is how the opposition has been. it seems to me what we need to do is stand up for principles of constitutionalism. you have to rewrite the constitution it was done in a sham and hasty way and particularly abusive to women in several key areas. i think we have to stand for elections, though, and we've got to get the opposition in there to play the game. and, look at the situation. the country's starving. they're running out of foreign currency and the opposition, no, we're not going to run. this is when you run, this is when you win. you're playing their game if you don't do that. >> i have to ask you about obama's israel tribute even though it was a long time to go.

critic of president obama's israel policy. what did you think of him, the speech? >> i'll say this much, it's good. it's smart that he's improving the mood music. what he did in his first term was just foolish. he was alienating, not only the israeli government, who is alienating a lot of israelis. that just didn't work. now, i just had a conversation and it was one of the jokes where israelis and palestinians agree on the president's effort to reach terms. the deal just isn't there. until you have one palestinian government, not hamas and gaza and fatah in the west bank. until there is some, i think, in terms, until there is some real sense of stability and direction in the region, we're not going to find a deal. so, the question is, where is the president's political capital going and is it really best spent on a palestinian israeli deal? you have syria in a shambolic state, we were just discussing egypt and there is only so much

a president could do. >> i agree with bret on one thing. i don't think this president should expend his political capital -- on the palestinian israeli conflict. particularly at a time when it is so -- >> you gave me a good segue. president should use political capital on israel. should he use it on gun control? i mean, he's putting a lot of political capital now behind something and, historically, gun control is very, difficult to get through the senate. >> i think we've seen extraordinary possibilities, but it's not going to happen in congress. the president should keep talking. it took five years to get the brady bill, the ban on assault weapons five years ago to get a ban on large capacity magazines, but what we're witnessing is movement around this country in different states. it may bubble up to congress. the president should keep talking. i think it's very important to build that movement, that national dialogue and to understand that 90% of americans, how many times do 90% of americans agree on something, they agree on universal

background checks. keep talking about those commonalities but let the progress come from the coalition of anti-gun violence advocates in the states. >> like i said, lightning round. quickly ask you, tom, you had a column this week. u.s. education, you talked about how every high school can now benchmark itself against the world. we don't have these big averages because we know in america there is a big difference between schools in massachusetts and schools in alabama. are you fundamentally optimistic about what is going on because people thought the trend was downward for a while. >> what that study really showed, fareed, is that the education reform movement in america is showing real progress. there is a charter school network in newark that cracked the top ten in the world. these are from really disadvantaged neighborhoods. so, really, the conclusion is, we have schools that are not only, you know, the equal of shanghai and singapore, they are

actually better in certain categories. we're doing fantastic. the problem is, we don't have nearly enough. and how do you take those successful models, charter and public and scale them? >> you have a new book that is coming out, soon. foreign policy begins at home. revitalizing the american economy and revitalizing the american education. what do you think is the key here? if you are talking about obama spending political capital? >> two things. one is immigration reform which helps in many areas. the other is beginning to talk about getting us on a fiscal trajectory we can sustain. talking about entitlements in a way we can do something about it. issues have a moment where you can do something about them. you can't do something right now about the palestinian issue. you can do something about immigration reform. gun control is down the road, but you can talk about it so maybe in a year or two you can

get something done. he has to have an honest conversation with the american people that we are basically on unsustainable trajectory and what he has to do is prepare people for the fact that we have to make some changes. we can't sustain this approach to medicare, in particular, to medical spending. 18% of our gdp. this is unsustainable, unless we do something about it, we will not be viable at home and strong abroad. >> would you bring us back so we could have a big debate about that? >> next time, i can tell katrina is dying -- >> we would agree with the title, but i totally disagree with the lack of job creation and infrastructure. >> thank you. >> make sure you look at the gps blog. up next, what in the world. china's rivers have seen dead pigs and dead ducks. now, the rivers themselves are dying by the thousands. why? when we come back. tdd: 1-800-345-2550 searching for a bank designed for investors like you? tdd: 1-800-345-2550 schwab bank was built with

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now, for our what in the world segment. china's rivers have been in the news for all the wrong reasons.

fist, they found thousands of dead pigs in one river. then they found hundreds of dead ducks in another. and now, entire rivers are going missing. thousands of them, in fact. a new survey has found that china has 28,000 fewer rivers than previously thought. they have been built upon, overused and are drying up. the study comes from no less an authority than china's border of resources and the natural bureau of statistics. something else has gone missing in china, clean air. a study out this week shows how air pollution in china led to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. a separate study by china's economy of environmental planning found that in the same year, 2010, environmental derogation has cost the country $230 billion. they tried to address the issues but never at the expense of slowing down growth in any way. issues of pollution and climate

change while troubling are long-term trends not immediate threats. the chinese communist party's overriding priority remains growth and, of course, its own strength and survival. that's why i'd like to recommend a book for china's leaders. it's a collection of essays called "the arab spring and climate change." in this preface of the book, ann marie slaughter makes clear that one can't say climate changed the arab spring, that's too simplistic. but there is enough proof to show that climate change creates stresses that can trigger social revolution. consider some facts from the book. in 2010, climate driven factors led to a 33% drop in wheat production in russia and 19% drop in ukraine. separate climate events in each case led to a 14% drop in canada's wheat output and 9% drop in australia's. as a result, wheat prices doubled in the space of seven months. note that the world's top nine

wheat importers are all in the middle east. seven of them saw political protests leading to civilian deaths in 2011. because of a truly globalized marketplace, a small regional climate event can now have a large global impact. again, no direct causality but the links are increasingly clear. dliemtic stresses -- climatic stresses on the environment can lead to shortages of water and food which kwoud lead to anything from increased prices to disease. and all this, of course, can and does lead to protests. if there's one thing china's leaders fear most, it is wide-scale protests. thousands of local protests take place in china every year, most of which the state clamps down on. beijing can trace many of these protests to climate-related stress, pollution, water supplies, food production problems. so far they've never become larger challenges to central authority. of course, protests didn't grow larger in the arab world until in 2011, they did.

perhaps china's leaders can be convinced to find ways of more sustainable growth. it may turn out to be a simple calculation, prevention is often cheaper than the cure. up next, some good news for america, why a top investor says the era of the brick nations might be over. why it's time to be positive about the united states. right back. there's a reason no one says "easy like monday morning." sundays are the warrior's day to unplug and recharge. what if this feeling could last all week?

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in afghanistan, a young american diplomate was killed in an attack on a the u.s. convoy. 25-year-old anne was delivering books to a school in southern afghanistan. a civilian and three u.s. service members also died in the attack yesterday. north korea could test a missile this week, according to south korea. seoul is basing that assessment on a move by the north to urge workers to leave an industrial complex near the border by april 10th. meanwhile, the u.s. is delaying a planned missile test in california. the u.s. says it has nothing to do with north korea but it wants to avoid any misperceptions. and the family of mega church pastor rick warren is asking for god's comfort and

peace today. they are in mourning for their son matthew who committed suicide. we will find out how the family is coping and the entire community for that matter straight ahead at 2:00 eastern time. >> fareed sa cara gps continues right now. ruchir sharma says every investment idea is right for a while. in the 1990s investing in japan made you a big winner until the '90s came around. then it was about tech stocks and the tech bubble burst. the fad for 2000s was emerging markets. why is that trend over and what is the next one? ruchir sharma's book "breakout nations" is now out as a paper back this month. you predicted this. but let's look at the first chart and sue hoe the growth in brazil, india, russia and china

has slowed down. it happened with all of them. why? >> the main point last decade every single emerging market boomed. the hiked up countries of the last decade are slowing down. the most outstanding statistic i find is this, in the coming few years, i think, russia, south africa, brazil, these countries are unlikely to grow much faster than the u.s. at about 2.5% or so. so, this entire concept that all these markets and economies were destine to catch up to the u.s. is now the question as they run in to their own domestic problems. >> the second graph that you have which shows you what happened in terms of the equity markets here. i mean, 40% decline. >> what this tells you is that these markets are disappointing because growth expectations are not being met. now, brazil's growth rate last year was 1%. russia's growth rate this year should be no higher than 3%. india's growth rate has slowed down from 9% to 5%.

you want to say 5% is not too bad. india's per capita income -- >> compare would $45,000. >> at that per capita income level growth rate of 4% to 5% truly feels like a recession and, in india, that's the mood there. no economic gloom about what happened out there. >> talk about china, because china, after all, has grown at 10% a year for 35 years. fastest growth in human history. and, of course, it's going to slow down. you know, the communist party was seven five-year plan said we'll slow down to 7%. that's still a pretty high number because china's per capita gps is now $6,500. so, they seem like they're sill, chinese growth is still considerable just from, you know, from a much higher base they're going to grow somewhat slower. >> yes. listen, i've been a huge fan of

what china has achieved. it is absolutely unparalleled. but here is my concern about china. in their desire to keep growing at what is a relatively fast growth rate, they are creating far too much debt to do so. just one simple statistic here. until about 2007 it took roughly $1 a debt to generate $1 of growth in china. last five years, it's taken more than $3 of debt to generate $1 off growth in china. >> people don't think of china as indebted. they think of it as a huge foreign exchange reserves and the country doesn't run fiscal balance sheet is very good. what do you mean when you talk like that? >> if you look at the debt of the system, not just central government's debt which many people focus on and appears to be low. look at the total system's debt. it is 200% at a share of gdp. it's 200% for total debt of china is the highest for any developing country in the world

today. it is a really high number. the u.s. comparable number is 350%. but, remember, the u.s. per capita income today is that of china. so, adjusted for that, i would say china's debt problem today is more worrisome than that of the u.s. >> how do you feel about the u.s.? >> that is the way i end this book, which is i travel the world and i come to the conclusion that the u.s. is not such a bad place. it really feels increasingly as the best house in a bad neighborhood. and especially in the developed world. many things the u.s. has going for it and i think those factors have all been underrecognized for the past few years and now i think we're seeing a lot of people come to those conclusions. all of a sudden, the u.s. is making it to the cover of magazines and stuff about how the economy is more resilient because people are seeing what is happening in europe and they're seeing the way things are sort of unfolding and the large, emerging markets and the problems coming to the floor and realizing that maybe the u.s. is

not that bad of place. >> bottom line you point out in chart number three, if you look at the percentage share of world gdp, what you see is the big story at the end of the day, over the last, you know, 25 years, emerging markets go up, u.s. down a bit, europe down, japan down, but here's the interesting part. you point out over the last few years the u.s. share has been stabilizing and flat lining where europe and japan are declining. >> that's right. the last year was particularly interesting. for the first time since 2003 over the last 12 months, the u.s. economy has grown at the same pace as the global anch. therefore its stabilizing. now this is happening for two factors. one, the rest of the world is doing quite poorly, including emerging markets. the growth rate in emerging markets has come down from 7.5% to 4.5%. still growing faster, because the per capita income is faster

but growth rates down significantly and europe and japan, the decline continues. so, we have to really look at how the u.s. looks relative to its other countries in the same per capita, other rich countries. in that respect, it really seems to me that the u.s. is still at the leading edge. >> if you look at the future, you look at, you give us chart number four and you say, still a reason for optimism for the u.s. because look at this percentage share of global r&d. other people are catching up, but at the end of the day when you take a snapshot, we still dominate. >> we still dominate because the u.s. is the largest economy in the world. even as a share of the economy, the amount that the u.s. spends on r & d is very high. only a couple other countries in the world spend a bit more. what the u.s. spends is a lot. a lot of sort of negatives about the infrastructure out here but we tend to overlook the fact that the u.s. is still spending

a lot of right things. a lot of cutting edge production in the world is still coming out of the u.s., even compared to japan. what the u.s. has done is really remarkable because it spends so much on software and on r&d and cutting edge innovation. >> pleasure to have you on. you heard the outlook for the next decade or so, my next guest takes a longer view from the ice age all the way to the distant future. the historian ian morris on whether we're going to make it as a species. ♪

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we want to know will the east eclipse the west? is it inevitable that china will become more power than europe and the united states. my next guest says if you take the long view, the west rise is the actual anomaly. ian morris wrote the best selling "why the west rules for now." he has a new book out, a continuation, essentially, called "the measure of civilization." a professor at stanford university, but we managed to drag him to new york. >> thanks for having me here. >> what do you mean by a blip?

do you mean that for most of the previous history, the east was dominant just because these were large, vast countries, agriculture was the basis of most economic productivity and that governments didn't do anything with it. they didn't mobilize that wealth in any way. >> through most of history, you get powers and civilizations that are dominated to just one part of the world. that through, if you go all the way back to the end of the ice age, 15,000 years ago. the most developed part of the world is around the mediterranean sea. but a great limit on how far they could project the power. not until you get to industrial revolution that all of a sudden these nations, mostly around the shores of the atlantic their power anywhere in the world. about 200 years ago the west quite abruptly starts to dominate the whole planet. >> why does america rise? >> well, i think this is a continuation of the same kind of processes. through most of history, of course, the americas completely

separate from the rest of the world and doing their own thing and developing in their own ways and then start getting drawn into an economy based on europe, starting in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries and initially all driven from europe, by the european capitals and the people coming out from europe. by the time you get into the 19th century, though, you are able to start building railroads and the telegraph comes in and distances are shrinking increasingly as this happens americans are moved to a global system. it's all about the shrinking of space. the geography is driving the story, but what the geography means keeps changing. >> so, if you look at china, most importantly in india and to a lesser extent rising. at the very time that you are having this dramatic shrinking of space, does it, does it matter as much? will they -- will it have the

same kind of impact the rise of the west had? >> i think it will. we have this long story here where we're seeing similar kind of processes unfolding in different parts of the world. so, first of all, you have the . first, you have the atlantic ocean shrinking for around 14 arms to western europe up to the top of the pile, atlantic ocean shrinks more, america too in the 19th century, then the 20th century we have seen the shrinking of the pacific ocean, which is so big that right up until the late 19th century, it's just very difficult for people to exploid the pacific. >> when you travel to asia, you take the flights and you realize, my god, the pacific is a long, long ocean. >> it's really illuminated just to look at the globe. you turn the globe and face the atlantic and see the continents on either side. turn it around to look at the pacific and if ils the entire field of vision. just a huge thing.

as the 20th century went on, tuck knowledge shrinks, the jet liners, and i think what we're seeing now with east asia and particularly china, is like the united states 200 years ago, they're now being drawn into a global economy. and for quite a while, they were a periphery, some still are, really, periphery to an american dominated global system. but the big trend is pushing towards them rising to the top of this global system. >> and do they have experience, two views. one is look, china is it was always backwater, the middle kingdom, fine, they dominated their own part of asia, but they had no real interaction with the world. they stopped building big boats because they got less interested in all that. >> yes. >> and so they actually have no experience with this. it's going to be a very new thing. and then there are those who say, no, no, this is a 5,000-year-old civilization.

>> yes, you could look at the history, and i can see how people can draw both of these conclusions. but what strikes me most long-term chinese history is that china has always been just as interested in the rest of the world as every other major power. a lot of the time, though, they would get in a situation where there wasn't much attraction to send out voyages to the end of the world or people across central asia to reach india and iran, but whenever it has been attra attracti attractive, when there has been something to gain, they have not hesitated to do so. they say we're going to see new things where new dependentacy will come to the floor, but if you look back over chinee history, they have been as aggressive as anyone else in pursuing their own interests whenever the use of force seemed a good way to get those interests. my guess would be a world system

dominated by china would not be so very different in the way it runs from the kind of world we are used to today. >> pleasure to have you on. >> thanks very much for having me here. >> up next, when is a solid a liquid sn it's not black magic. it's the longest running lab experiment in the world. yl expla yl explain when we come back. ot that can be taken with or without food. my doctor recommends citracal maximum. it's all about absorption.

jamie mcmurray: a boy born in joplin, missouri, was fascinated by anything with wheels and a motor. the odds of him winning both the daytona 500 and the brickyard 400 in the same year? 1 in 195 million. the odds of a child being diagnosed with autism? 1 in 88. i'm jamie mcmurray, and my niece has autism. learn more at autismspeaks.org/signs.

in 1997, the h5n1 strain of avian influenza first infected humans causing global concern. since 2003, there have been nearly 600 human infections from that strain. then in 2009, we had the swine flu pandemic,h1n1, now there's a new bird flu claiming lives and authorities are watching it closely and it brings me to my question of the week. what is the name of this new killer avian influenza strain. a, h 2 n 1, b, h 6 n 2, c, h 7 n 9. d, h 9 n 7. stay tuned, we'll tell you the correct answer. go to cnn.com/fareed for more of the challenge and follow us on

twitter and face book, and go to itunes.com/fareed if you ever miss a show or a special. this week's book of the week is a good one. "this explains everything" deep, beautiful, and elegant series of how the world works, the publisher of the edge.org asked some of the world's best minds for their favorite explanations of anything. the result is a collection that reads like the best tech talks ever. it's an absolute pleasure to read. now for the last look. good science sometimes takes a long time. it was 11 years after nasa was founded that we landed on the moon. the human genome project took 13 years. it's been almost 50 years s sin the hague's bojean particle was proposed and it still hasn't been conclusively proven. but australia is on the verge of a breakthrough of sorts.

86 years ago, a professor of the university of queensland initiated this pitch drop experiment, wanting to show that some things that look solid could actually be a little fluid. picture you see is a drivative of tar and it's so solid you can crack it with a hammer, but it can also drip and drop. over the past 86 years, eight drops have fallen. and the current custodian of the experiment thinks the ninth drop is coming soon. they have set up a web cam so you can watch. go to our website for a link to this historic moment. it's only a little less exciting than watching grass grow, but there is an upside to watching. nobody has ever seen a drop actually fall. you could be the first. the correct answer to our gps challenge question is c, the h7n9 strain of the bird flu virus