clear calorie labels and reminders to think balance. because we know mom wants what's best. more beverage choices, smaller portions, less sugar. balanceus.org this is gps, the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. we start with the downing of the u.s. drone and america's attack that was called off. two nations called to the brink of war. how did they get there and what would a war between the two look like? and water shortages are plaguing cities from chanai to cape town. does the answer involving towing massive icebergs? i will take you through this

wild idea. first, here's my take. the massive protests we've been watching in hong kong highlight something we often tend to forget, the fragility of the chinese political system. china's rise has been something of a miracle. it is quite simply the most successful case of economic development in human history. the country's gdp has grown around 10% a year for 40 years, moving more than 850 million people out of poverty. china has also proved to be the greatest exception to a near iron law of politics. decades of political science research have shown that there is a fairly strong connection between economic growth and democracy. as countries modernize their economies, typically they're also forced to change their societies and eventually their political systems to make them more open, accountable and democratic.

now, there are outliers such as oil rich countries which gain their wealth without any need to modernize. but china is the real outlier. china got richer but stayed resolutely nondemocratic. in fact, in recent years, the political system has become more repressive. censorship has increased and the president has dispensed with term limits for himself. what explains china's almost unique path to wealth without democracy? u.n. argues in foreign affairs that over the last decades china has actually been developing an awe toss krasy. reforms have made the country's vast administrative bureaucracy, once a stagnant behemoth, more transparent and accountable. this should be considered a type of political reform. they point to china's highly

merit karatic system where officials move up through rigorous exams, evaluations and objective results like economic growth. this exceedingly competitive system ensures quality and responsiveness, its defenders say. consolers dpu that such a political model rest on the trust and faith in a mandarin governing class that is a key feature of societies. yet, one has to wonder, good bureaucracy is not the same thing as democracy which centers on the ability to both choose your leaders and throw them out of power. as for con fushs societies, whenever we hear cultural arguments, let's not forget hong kong and tie waiwataiwan. the united states is now quarrelling with china on several fronts. in these struggles americans often make the mistake of thinking that their adversary is ten feet tall.

first, it's not clear that china is an adversary, certainly not in the cold war sense, but rather a competitor. more important, while china has great strengths, it also has weaknesses. consider president xi jinping's situation. growth in china has slowed substantially. it is being bolstered because local governments and state-owned companies are borrowing vast sums of money. the country confronts a future with fewer workers, the consequence of its one child policy, itself a classic example of the dangers of a dictatorship and planned economy. perhaps above all, china has a political system that faces real pressure. in a global age of populism and anti-elitism, china is still ruled by a cod dree of distant elites. the communist party of china maintains power through the promise of growth and the application of force. it uses an elaborate system of censorship and sophisticated

espionage on its own people. it faces a population that's not genetically or cultural different from those in taiwan or hong kong where millions are making clear they don't just want good government or clever bureaucrats but democracy. so the trade war with america might turn out to be one of xi's smaller problems. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my "washington post" column this week. and let's get started. ♪ president trump said the united states was, quote, cocked and loaded, unquote, on thursday night to attack three different sites in iran. but, trump went on, when he was informed that 150 people might die, he stopped the strike ten minutes before it was to happen. that is about as close to the brink of hostilities as you can get. so i think it's important to talk about what a war between

iran and america would look like. well, that was an article elon goldenberg wrote for foreign affairs. he is the director of the middle east security program at the center for a new american security and he joins us now. welcome. >> thanks for having me. >> in your article you try to explain what this kind of war would look like. explain to us, lay out what you see the most likely scenario for both the american strike but as importantly, the iranian response. >> sure. you start with a very limited american strike and what the president's advisers would say to him is, look, we are just going to respond and hit the target that hit us and this will go just like syria did in 2017 and 2018 when president trump decided to launch very limited strikes against bashar al assad in syria in response to chemical weapons attacks. the difference is iran is not syria.

iran is much more capable than syria. it has missiles it can launch at the gulf. it has missiles it can hit our ships with. it has various proxies in iraq and syria and the middle east and can launch terror attacks against the u.s. ambassador and other facilities. iran might decide we don't want to get into a major conflict with the united states or it might decide to retaliate and respond, in which case we could be off to the races. i think that is the real danger. >> what would the united states do in the event of some kind of iranian response along the fronts you're describing? as you said, they have multiple -- they have leverage and interests and capacities in multiple areas, but the u.s. also has bases all over the persian gulf. so what would it look like if the u.s. were to try to respond to iranian efforts to kind of increase tensions or ratchet up violence from lebanon to yemen

to syria to iraq? >> sure. what iran would do first is iran would try to hit the u.s. with one of these types of options but try to stay away from going to an all out conflict and we would respond. in iran launches a terrorist attack we might hit a terrorist training camp. if iran hits more gulf, for example, if iran launches missiles at our ships, we might start hitting the various sites that they would launch and quickly you get into this tit for tat. then i think the military comes to the president and says, look, we have options here where we could go a lot higher and we can just take all of this out and all these various iranian military capabilities. that's where you might end up which would now not look like syria 2017-18. it would look much more like iraq 1991 where the united states would launch a limited

war that would last a few weeks to try to sink all of iran's navy. let's be clear, iran would exact a major cost in such a conflict. you would have missiles falling on abu dhabi, on dubai, riyadh. you would have he is bo's polzb launching rockets. and so really at that point the conflict starts to dramatically escalate. i think the bottom line is it would be very bad for the united states and for its regional partners. it would be worse for iran who would have much of its military decimated but would maintain, i think, a lot of these abilities to launch proxy attacks at various facilities so you can have terrorist attacks going on for years of different kinds, and you would have also to have the united states stay in the region after a conflict like

this for years on end. the whole notion of pivoting to asia or focusing in a great power competition would be over because we would have a very angry, still very capable country three times the size of iraq in the middle of a very strategic region that we would have to contain for years on end. >> the iranians seem to recognize what you're describing which is that in any kind of escalation probably while it has all kinds of negative consequences for the u.s., it has worse consequences for iran. so what they have done, it seems to me, they feel like they're backed in a corner. the trump administration is trying to squeeze them, and so they have launched a series of deniable escalations. they've gotten the houthis to attack saudi arabia. they've done some of these plausibly deniable attacks themselves. what they're banking on is that this is not enough of a provocation for the trump administration to go all out to war against iran.

>> yeah, i think that's right. but i also think -- i'm getting increasingly worried that they don't exactly understand our escalation ladder and we don't exactly understand theirs. >> thanks, fascinating stuff. to read the piece in foreign affairs, go to my twitter feed for a link. i am of course @fareedzakaria. next on gps, how did america and iran get to the brink? i have a great debate when we return. ♪ ♪ applebee's new loaded chicken fajitas. now only $10.99. it's kind of unfair that safe drivers have to

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john bolton has never been shy about his hostility toward iran. that's been true in all of his roles in public and private life, no different since he has been national security adviser, a post he's been in for a little over a year now. last september he warned iran that there would be hell to pay if it continued to lie and cheat and deceit. he went on to warn tehran, we'll come after you. just last month he said in a statement that the u.s. was sending a clear and unmistakable message to the iranian regime that any attack on the united states interests or on those of our allies would be met with unrelenting force. so is john bolton responsible for the ratcheting up of hostilities, and if so, is this approach the appropriate one. joining me now, mark garrett was a middle east specialist at the cia. and peter bynard is a

contributor to cuny's school of journalism and an old friend of the show. it goes beyond john bolton. in a sense what's happened is the trump administration has deliberately backed iran into a corner. it pulled out of the deal. it stopped issuing any waivers so now iran is sort of facing an economic death sentence almost. do you think that it has been baiting iran in a sense, trying to get it to respond in some way? . y yes, not only do i think that but the europeans think that. we pulled out of the iranian nuclear deal which the iranians were complying with. we violated that deal brazenly and then not only reimposed sanctions but demanded that other countries do not do business with iran as well to basically destroy the iranian economy which is producing

immense suffering among ordinary people in iran who are oppressed not only by their own government but the fact that they can't buy medici medicine. low and behold, this has happened and the trump administration is shocked. >> i'm guessing you have a different narrative as to what is going on. >> yeah. i mean, one, certainly when president trump sdiedecided to from the jcpoa the iranians were going to get upset. they liked that agreement for a variety of reasons. it was quite a good one from their perspective. so i'm not surprised that they've gotten cranky. certainly the president has decided to engage in a massive pressure campaign against them. it's not just john bolton driving that. i think there's pretty strong agreement between bolton and mike pompeo on that.

the famous 12-point speech was co-written by the two of them. >> but to what end? it feels almost like a reflex more than a strategy. is the goal regime change? is the goal to get them back to the negotiating table? >> i think there is a strategy but i think it's fair to say that it's conflicted. the president obviously wants to have new negotiations. i think it's fair to say that john botten believes that would be a mistake. i think pompeo probably is more in the direction of john bolton, that he doesn't really believe that diplomacy is going to work with the lislamic republic but e is the secretary of state and certainly has said publicly that he's in favor of negotiations. in the meantime, i think they're just going to adopt sort of a containment minus approach.

that is they're going to deny the islamic republic billions of dollars of hard currency. they aren't going to really push back against it regionally, but for the time being they are going to block a land route in syria until the president changes his mind and withdraws those troops. so there is a coherent approach there but there are contradictions within it that i don't think they're debilitating but certainly annoying. >> it does feel like it's sort of like maximum pressure and then watch and see what might happen and the dangers of miscalculation, escalation, but all of it, peter, is premised on the idea that iran is this uniquely dangerous country in the middle east. i want to ask you, is that fundamentally true? >> no, i don't think so. i think iran has a brutal regime. i wish they had a better regime. i think the saudis who are their main regional antagonists that we are arming and encouraging to take a more aggressive policy

recently hacked to death an american journalist. so these are rough regimes in a rough part of the world playing a game of power politics. i see no moral distinction between the iranians and the saudis and what we should be doing is trying to de-escalate and trying to have leverage with both sides so we can prevent this cold war from turning into a hot war. we have no idea, and john bolton has no idea what would happen if we started a war. this man, john bolton, has been calling explicitly for war with iran for more than a decade and he's never answered basic questions about what would happen the day after. for goodness sake, in the shadow of the iraq war, how can we tolerate an american government that was so cavalierly moving to the brink of a conflict given what we know about the cost of the last one. >> that does seem to be a reasonable question which is all this pressure easily could lead

to a spiral that gets us into a conflict. as i say, it's not clear what the end goal is but isn't the iraq war a cautionary tale? >> well, let me just say one thing first. i think it is a bit much to make a moral equivalence between the islamic republic and saudi arabia. i'm no fan of saudi arabia or the crown prince but iran has aided and abetted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in syria. >> you don't think saudi actions in yemen are similar? >> no, i do not. i do think the -- i think it's fair to say that one always has to be conscious of when the guns start firing you need to have some idea of your enemy, you need to have a good idea of what his capacity is and what his limitations are and you need to know what your own are.

but this is basic 101. i mean, if you're going to engage in any type of containment approach, however limited it may be, that by definition means that you're willing to risk conflict. if you're going to walk away from the jcpoa and tell the iranians, no, we're not going to permit you to gain a nuclear weapon within a decade, that means you're going to risk a conflict. this is sort of basic. the problem with trump is that he seems to at times want it both ways. that is that his rhetoric suggests that he might be willing to risk conflict. at the same time, his actions suggest that actually he's quite dovish, that he is in some ways obama 2.0 and he's not nearly as bellicose as he seems and he may end up being just a twitter tiger. >> one has to wonder whether the world will look at this and see a pattern after a while. this is the by who's bluffed much of his life and appears to

be doing exactly that. we have to leave it there. i'm sure we'll get back to this. thank you both. next on "gps" india's sixth biggest city is dry, almost totally out of drinking water. cape town has had similar problems for a while now. one man has a remarkable solution. it involves towing an iceberg. that story when we come back. get ready for the insurance-themed experience

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now for our what in the world segment. it's that time of the year, temperatures are rising in much of the world and for many the heat aggravates an all too frequent problem, water shortages. the climate crisis is part of the problem but so are simple numbers. as environmentalists will tell you water supply is constant but population, therefore the demand for water, keeps growing. and it is only going to get worse. by 2050, the population is expected to swell to nearly 10 billion. so how do we get more water? there's a wild idea detailed recently in a fascinating story in bloomberg business week. what if we toed massive icebergs off the coast of antarctica to

less icy shores. the idea comes from nicholas sloan, a cape town-based marine salvager. remember, cape town desperately needs water. it had a dramatic water crisis last year when its taps nearly ran dry. iceberg towing may sound crazy but sloan has assembed a team of experts who believe incorporating icebergs into the city's water supply can be done, and they're not the first to pursue it. for decades iceberg towing has been floated as a potential solution to water problems from southern california to the gulf. many of the previous efforts have been met with skepticism, even derision, but that has not deterred sloan. they want to sail to a point near gulf island, 1rfrom there identify the perfect iceberg. it would be more than 3,000 feet long and 800 feet deep, weighing 125 million tons.

then two tugboats would lasso the iceberg with a two-mile-long net made from an exceptionally strong rope. super tankers would pull the rope guided by the tugboats and helped by currents to the cape. about 90 days later the iceberg would hit ground 20 nautical miles off the coast of cape town where it could be harvested for water. sloan said he's secured financing for the maiden voyage which would cost more than $200 million but he still needs the government to give him the green light. if sloan did eventually succeed, which is by no means certain, he says the iceberg would provide parched cape town with 130 million liters of water a day for a full year. that may seem like a lot, but according to sloan's calculations, it is just 20% of cape town's annual water needs. that's right, 125 million ton iceberg would supply just one-fifth of a single city's water. that should make clear the scale

of the problem, and cape town's problems are the world's. the u.n. projects that by 2030 demand for water will exceed availability by 40%. in africa alone, the continent that will drive this century's population explosion, demand will rise by almost 300%. but lassoing icebergs isn't the only solution. look at israel. it has made huge progress with desal nation plants which remove the salt from ocean water. the approach is often dismissed as prohibitly expensive. but it does work. half of israel's water comes from desal nation plants. the country now produces more water than it consumes. leaders are going to have to consider investing millions. whether you're looking at

antarctica or nearer shores, think big, as big as the problem. next, we're one step closer to knowing who will be the next leader of the united kingkingdo. i was in london as the votes were coming in and we'll talk about what it means for britain, brexit and the world. because it takes two... to make a great everyday value. every store. every day. the italian way. hello primo. the way you triumph over adversity. and live your lives. that's why we redesigned humira. we wanted to make the experience better for you. now there's less pain immediately following injection. we've reduced the size of the needle and removed the citrate buffers. and it has the same effectiveness you know and trust. humira citrate-free is here. a little change can make a big difference.

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parties will vote by mail on which of the two they prefer. the winner will become the country's next prime minister. rory stewart had been one of the top candidates, a moderate who wanted britain to stay closer to europe and who wanted to attract younger and more diverse voters. he seemed imminently qualified for the job, a graduate of eaten and oxford, once private tutor to princes william and harry, helped run provinces in iraq during the american occupation and walked across afghanistan, yes, the entire country. but on wednesday he was knocked out of contention. welcome back, rory. >> thank you. >> you've known boris johnson for a long time. he has gotten as far as he has by promising to be the hardest of the hard brexiteers. is he going to betray his hard brexit allies and work out some kind of a compromise, or is they going to move the other direction? >> this is what his supporters

disagree on. half his spofrteupporters say, looked me in the eye, he's going to deliver the hard brexit. others say he looked me in the eye and promised he would never do anything like that. the problem is that on the 31st of october we're going to find out one way or another because he has, it seems, promised that he's leaving on the 31st of october. >> britain is leaving europe? >> sorry, he's going to take britain out, yeah. and the challenge is, again, that he's saying that before the 31st of october he's going to negotiate a radically new deal with europe, and europe has been clear again and again that no such deal is forthcoming. in fact, legally in the extension they granted the united kingdom they said that the agreement they signed with prime minister theresa may cannot be re-opened before the end of october. so one of the arguments i was trying to make is to say, look, if you say to people that you're going to be able to get a radically new deal out of europe by the 31st of october, it's not

true. they've made it clear they won't give such a deal. that means if you're already saying you will leave the european union, then you're signing up for a very damaging, destructive no deal brexit. >> what do you think is animating this populous takeover of the tory party? the tories are very conservative in the small sense of the world. they don't like radical change. this is something that's going to upend britain's economic relationship with its largest trading partner. what do you think? is it culture, economies? you're a student of history and political ideas. what is the story here? >> i think it is about culture and history. i think it is very important to understand that for many people, particularly older people in britain, they have felt angry with the european union for 40 years. so they felt that they had joined simply a free trade agreement. it felt to them as though what they signed up for in the 1970s was something like nafta.

they felt that there's been a push over the last 40 years to make it more like the united states and europe. so it would feel a bit like if you were potentially an american voter who had agreed to join with canada and mexico in a free trait agreeme trade agreement and suddenly you discovered there's a city outside your own country with its own parliament passing laws and telling you what to do. so to them it felt like an independence movement and like any independence movement ultimately people don't care too much about the economics. >> do you think we are entering into a world of greater nationalism, protectionism? >> ironically, in the british context, not protectionist. they're national radical free tradists. they want to open up to singapo singapore. they want deals with the united states. they want deals with china. they're sort of free market fundamentalists. they're not like donald trump. but i think what is like the

united states politics is that i found myself trying to argue for things that nine, ten months ago seemed simply to be obviously true. a no deal brexit would be very damaging to our economy and finding that 70% of conservative party members said no deal brexit would be fine. i thought that somehow by getting out and communicating on social media and talking to people i would be able to win that argument. i would be able to explain to people what i believe to be the truth and i failed, but i'm still failing to win an argument that should be easy to win because every nobel prize winning economist in the world is on my side, the treasury, the edc, everybody is reconfirming my hypothesis saying this is going to be very damaging but i still can't convince people of it and one of the questions is how do you learn to do politician in a way that's radical. i was tryingto be a trump

anti-trump, i was trying to make the argument for moderation and compromise. in britain we've gone from a bell shape where most political opinion centered to a u shape where actually most of the votes are now in the extremes. for somebody like me who's trying to hold the center, that's a pretty uncomfortable position to be in. >> and britain and the rest of the world. it's a pleasure to have you on. >> thank you very much, indeed. up next, china's president xi spent the weekend in north korea. what is behind this strange relationship? we will explain behawhen we com back. sure you do. that's why it's on us. 2. unlimited data. use as much as you want, when you want. 3. no surprises on your bill. taxes and fees included. still think you have a better deal? bring in your discount, and we'll match it. that's right. t-mobile will match your discount.

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it had been 14 years since the last chinese leader traveled to north korea when president xi crossed the border on thursday. kim jong-un laid on the pomp and circumstance to welcome his patron, protector and sponsor. it is an unusual relationship and a very important one. to help us understand it, i have asked a professor of history and politics of modern china at the university of oxford to join me. pleasure to have you on. you know this history so well. these are sort of -- this is an odd couple. these are two -- north korea is china's only form of treaty ally

and it seems like that relationship comes from a very different time when mao and kim il-sung, the founder of north korea, were sort of these two rogues, the two revolutionary radicals in the world trying to fo foe meant instability everywhere. >> the odd couple, oscar and felix, were close friends but also quarrelled with each other and that's not a bad analogy between what's happening with china and north korea. the bond is very strong because it was forged in war. essentially kim il-sung who you've mentioned is the founding father of north korea and the chinese leader who conquered china in 1949 both had their revolutionary careers forged in the war against the japanese in the 1930s and '40s. that's the asian side of world war ii. and that experience of being relatively young, or at least middle aged communists who were fighting against an external

enemy not only bonded them together as communists but also as nationalists to make sure their borders would never be breached and those ideas stayed very strong over the decades. >> the crucial question is can xi jinping tell his north korean counterpart, make a deal with the americans on the nuclear issue, and would he want to do it? does he have the power and does he have the interest? >> when i've talked about this to chinese policy makers over the years, they like to roll their eyes and say we tell the north koreans what to do and they pay no attention to us but i've thought that's sometimes a convenient excuse, the fact that china has a lot of leverage over north korea. when sanctions were recently imposed a couple of years ago, the amount of chinese imports going into north korea, at least on official figures, went down by 88%. so they really have control over a major economic lever. but that having been said, north korea is a very proud society, does not like to be pushed around in terms of what it does.

in the first few years of the current kim, kim jong-un's period in power, actually he was not invited to beijing. there was a major military parade in 2015 in tiananmen square and what an insult it would seem that the south korean president was invited to be in the parade, the north korean president was not. so the relationship has had to come back low lows. >> is it possible that he will try to link his reputation with the trade deal and say to the north koreans if you stop pestering me on the trade deal, i can deliver on north korea. >> i think he will. the fact is there is possiblily a grand bargain to be made between the various crisis currently operating in that part of the world. one is the u.s.-china trade war that continues to rumble on but also the fact that the north

korean nuclear problem which was much more in the headlines a year or so ago has not gone away. the question that's being asked i suspect both in beijing and pyongyang is how much consistency is there on the u.s. side and would they be willing to negotiate that kind of grand bargain. if there was a bargain that guaranteed the security of north korea, meaning of course that china maintained a friendly socialist country on its border in the northeast, that might be a bargain that can be struck. the americans have a role as well as the chinese. >> what do you think xi jinping makes of the trump administration and donald trump? >> all the reports that we have from the inside of china is that there have been a lot of very non-plussed people at the top in beijing. i think the starting point was that actually this is a guy like any other american president, a little bit more brash, more exuberant, but actually will give him a feast in the forbidden city, will make him feel like imperial royalty and

will get what we want on trade. the fact that the trump administration has first of all pushed so hard on the trade issue and second made it, as you will know, fareed, made it the only bipartisan issue in washington d.c., i think it seriously worried negotiators on the chinese side and at the moment they are spending a lot of time, a, working out how to strengthen the domestic economy in case it goes on for a long time, and second, working out what the next move is. >> fascinating insight. pleasure to have you on. >> pleasure to be here, fareed. thank you. >> we will be back. don't forget, if you miss a show, go to cnn.com/fareed for a link to my itunes podcast. i don't keep track of regrets.

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biodegradable or reusable alternatives. our plastic problem makes worse a key global divider, as wealthier nations ship their waste abroad to poorer ones. after china banned plastic imports in 2018, the western world turned to asia's other developing nations but now other countries are following china's lead to keep from becoming the west's new wasteland. vietnam plans to ban plastic imports entirely and malaysia is returning hundreds of plastic waste to its home countries. in may after years of back and forth, canada finally agreed to retrieve its mislabeled trash from a port in the philippines. there are growing actions being taken, we need to take many more or else the mark of our modern civilization that will live on for centuries to come will be its everlasting, indestructible mountains of plastic trash. the answer to my gps challenge

question this week is b, india. according to the annual freedom report india had over 100 shutdowns in 2018, most notably when a mob killed two people after a false video warned against child kidnappers. such blackouts were up 27% from the prior year. if you guessed china, the home of the great firewall actually rarely uses the blunt instrument of a shutdown, relying on a complex system of censorship and monitoring to earn its spot as top internet restricter in the world. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week and i will see you next week. to turn their unsold rooms into amazing deals. delegates, how do you vote? (cheering) ♪ yes, y-y-y-yes, yes... that is freaky. (applause) (kickstart my heart by motley crue)) (truck honks)

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hello, everyone, thank you for joining me this sunday. i'm fredricka whitfield. a tense standoff between the united states and iran. new sanctions against tehran are set to go into effect tomorrow. president trump says they're in response to iran shooting down an unmanned multimillion dollar drone and believes the sanctions will join iran to the bargaining table. president trump initially ordered a retaliation strike but then called it off just minutes before it was set to lap. here is how he is characterizing the united states response. >> you know we've done very