this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. today on the show, will the coronavirus outbreak get worse soon? the top global health

organization says even it doesn't know. >> it's way to early to try to predict the beginning, the middle, or the end of this epidemic. >> how prepared is america if it spreads here? and what does it mean for china under xi? i have an expert panel to talk about it all. also the middle east today is stuck in a new cold war between saudi arabia and iran. will that cold war turn hot? i'll talk to veteran middle east reporter kim kardis who has a new book out about it. while all eyes were on iowa, the white house expanded trump's travel ban to six more nations. this is america's loss. and i will explain to you why. but first, here is my take. the prospect of bernie sanders becoming the democratic nominee

has startled many people who worry that his brand of democratic socialism won't sell and would pave the way for a second trump term. this might well be true, but surely the more important question is not whether his programs would be popular but whether in fact they're good programs. it's time to stop grading bernie sanders on a curve and start asking what the country would look like if he were to become president. let's consider the topic that he argues is the single greatest challenge facing america and a global emergency -- climate change. sanders wants to commit the united states to achieving 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030. this is a laudable though ambitious goal. the question is how will he go about meeting it. u.s. carbon emissions fell almost 15% from 2005 to 2016. according to carbon brief, the

single largest cause for that was the switch from coal-fired power plants to natural gas ones, 33% of the reduction. the adoption of solar power, by contrast, accounted for just 3%. nevertheless, bernie sanders is opposed to natural gas. he opposes all new fracking and he seeks to ban it nationwide within five years. he also intends to shut down rapidly all gas plants. now, wind and solar account for less than 5% of u.s. energy consumption. so his plan would require an exponential jump in renewables in just a few years. and even if that happened, it would be extremely difficult to replace gas as a source for electricity. you see, solar and wind are intermittent sources so they require a backup source in order to provide electricity to homes, offices, and factories 24/7.

sanders has a solution: storage. if we had the means to store electricity on a massive scale, such as in batteries, there would be no longer need for backup power. but we are not even close to having the kind of storage capacity we would need to make this work. one example, the clean air task force calculated that just for california to reach 100% electricity from renewables, it would need 36.3 million megawatt hours of energy storage. the whole state currently has just 150,000 megawatt hours of storage. now, there is another path to clean energy, a source that has zero carbon emissions and provides a continuous flow of electricity: nuclear power. it generates 20% of electricity in the u.s. and a majority of france and sweden, two countries with carbon emission rates among the lowest per person in the

industrialized world. but bernie sanders opposes nuclear power. in fact he plans to shut down all america's nuclear power plants within ten years. fears about nuclear power are largely based on emotional reactions to a few high profile accidents that have taken place over the last few decades. such anxiety ignores the millions of people who die each year due to fossil fuels. according to one study, nuclear energy is 250 times safer than oil and over 300 times safer than coal. let me be clear. natural glass and enough power have drawbacks and costs. there is no perfect energy solution on hand today. but i believe that we do in fact face a global emergency, and we need every means possible to reduce carbon emissions now. the sanders green energy plan is magical thinking. it presumes that we can reduce emissions in an electricity and

transport to zero in ten years while shutting down the always-available sources of power that collectively provide nearly 60% of america's electricity today. and that makes me wonder. is the real problem that bernie sanders will lose or that he might win? for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my "washington post" column this week. and let's get started. ♪ president xi jinping said on friday that the coronavirus outbreak is a big test for china. that may be a big understatement so far. the big question is, will china pass the test?

my test, beijing bureau chief, financial analyst, and an infection disease specialty at emory university school of medici medicine. anna, let me start with you. what does it feel like on the ground there this week compared to last week compared to the week before? >> yeah, well, it feels quite strange this weekend, all the previous weeks as well, there hasn't been that noticeable a difference. it's incredible to see this country of almost 1.4 billion people essentially shut its doors. when i've been traveling around the country and this week around beijing, you see that shops, restaurants, everything is closed, there's hardly any traffic on the streets. 70,000 movie theaters are still closed despite this call for everybody to go back to work this week in areas that have not been particularly badly hit by

the virus. so it's still very much a country on shutdown, a country that's trying to -- struggling to contain this virus from spreading. >> anna, can i ask you about that movie theater point, because the government has asked people to go back to work everywhere, as far as i understand, other than hubei province. what does it tell us about china that the government doesn't seem to have the power to reopen movie theaters? this is the strange market leninism of china, is it not? >> the rules are a little bit blurry in some places. public gatherings are still banned to movie theaters fall into that. tiananmen square is empty. any places where people banned are supposed to be banned. we see it in all parts of the country, factories are supposed to be reopening but migrant workers are stuck in their home towns in the countryside, they haven't been able to get back to

work. so there are many hurdles to trying to kind of resume some sense of normality here. the government is extremely concerned about the economic impact of this virus, and is almost trying to will the country out of this outbreak. >> doctor, from what you can tell, is it sensible for the chinese government to start trying to get people to get back to work in normalcy, or should there be this sensitive national quarantine? >> it's hard to tell because we don't know how transmissible this disease is. it's unclear if closing down the shops and everything that they've been doing, if that's really preventing this from getting larger, or if it's actually not making any difference, if it was already going to sort of end on its own. >> but when you look at the number of cases abroad, and things like that, you know,

compared to sars, compared to other things, are there tentative conclusions you can draw? >> i think it's hard at this time. we are very early, much like we were in the pandemic h1n1 of 2009 where we're trying to really understand what the mortality rate of this is, what the transmissibility rate is. we know the other two severe coronaviruses that have happened in this decade, sars and mers, this has outstripped the number of cases that we've had. we're over 60,000 cases. for mers there is a total of only 3,000 cases confirmed. so right now i think we're still in the high transmission of this outbreak. and i think it's important for us to make sure this doesn't continue to spreadrana, what is how the chinese government will handle the concern that they have that this will cause a major economic hit? >> i think they're going to throw as much economic stimulus

at this, monetary and fiscal, as we've ever seen. i wouldn't be surprised, if you don't see this stemmed quickly, i wouldn't be surprised if you see an even bigger amount of stimulus than we did in the post-2008 financial crisis. there is a lot of fear and there's fear in the global economy too. i think the key point there is that china is now the single biggest portion of global growth, right? so if you go back to sars and that epidemic, it was a much smaller part of the global economy. now you have the chinese consumer and chinese supply chains really crucial to overall global growth. i think there's a lot of pressure from many places to stem this. >> but people point out that the chinese already have this problem of having accumulating a lot of debt in the process of stimulating the economy post the financial crisis. >> yes, and it brings up the question, america is not the only place that hasn't gotten its economic act together fundamentally since the crisis. nothing has really changed. the u.s. is still built on debt, china is very much built on debt

particularly at the provincial level, yet beijing is telling the provincial level, spend whatever you need. next on "gps," the potential impact of the coronavirus on america and the rest of the world, when we come back. >> announcer: "fareed zakaria gps" is brought to you by dangote." at fidelity, you'll work with an advisor

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anna, can you imagine a western country being able to do the kind of -- to take the kind of measures that the chinese government has? can you imagine new york or los angeles being shut down the way chinese cities are being shut down? >> absolutely not. there are tevens of millions of people in china now who are confined to their homes, one person allowed out every second or third day to buy groceries, and that's it. people are stuck in their homes for several weeks now, across hubei province, the epicenter of the virus, but also other provinces have been badly hit. people have kind of begrudgingly -- they're frustrated, they're border, but they begrudgingly say, this is what has to be done to stop the virus from spreading and some people i've spoken to who have been in lockdown have said, what can we do, this is what needs to be done. but certainly i think that the

chinese government, the lesson that they will probably take away from this whole outbreak is that their draconian measures, their surveillance system, facial recognition cameras, all of that was the right thing to do, and it's because of this technology that they've been able to monitor people's movements, to find out where they are, to call them in. so i'm sure in some ways the communist party will feel vindicated for keeping such close tabs on the population. >> dr. kraft, do you think the united states from a public health point of rview is prepard for an outbreak? >> we've been preparing since this was announced or since this was a concern in china. we at the individual health care level, and coordinating federally and in our state health departments, we've seen a ramp-up unlike any the other. this is quite different and quite quicker than it was in the

2009 pandemic, h1n1. we've seen even locally here in georgia, our department of public health has been very intertwined with all the people we've been monitoring and testing with them. and so i think that we have certainly tried our best to be as proactive and as engaged and really working together based on some of the principles we've learned through pandemic h1n1, through ebola five years ago and other things that have come sporadically through the united states. >> you've written a lot of really fascinating stuff on the u.s. economy and its own weaknesses anyway. describe where you think the u.s. economy is. could this be -- the slowdown of growth in china, it's a huge trading partner for the u.s., could this be the thing that brings american growth down? >> i think it's possible. there are two big factors in the global economy right now. one, as ever, are central banks. they're keeping interest rates

low. how much more money can they pump in? we know that's why markets have stayed up in the united states, animal spirits growth here at home. in china, you're seeing the effect of the chinese consumer already having a hit on retail companies, luxury products, companies like apple or even qualcomm that are part of the big tech supply chain that are so important in china. that's where i think you'll see an interesting reaction of decoupling. the u.s. and europe were sort of moving to their own poles potentially with different supply chains. i think you'll see u.s. companies looking very carefully at their supply chains in china, how quickly can they move things, what can be moved. we're really going to see the rubber hitting the road in that debate. >> and do you think as a result of all this overall growth, everyone is thinking about this because we're in election season, could you see growing slow down in the u.s.?

>> there's two scenarios. one, if the virus continues for many more months and isn't stemmed, then yeah, i think you'll see certainly maybe a half percentage point being shaved off the u.s. if you start to get below 2% then you start to get into if not a recession, something that feels like a recession. what happens in november, if that's the case? there's a flip side which is that if the virus were contained very quickly you could actually see by november an uptick in demand because there's going to be a lot of pent-up demand, inventories, people will be restocking. the jury is out on how this will affect the u.s. particularly in the election cycle. >> fascinating, makes the election all the more a cliffhanger. thank you to all of you for the conversation. next on "gps," an important development in recent weeks. the trump administration extended its travel ban to six more countries. i will explain you to why it is particularly bad policy with respect to one country in particular, when we come back.

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now for our "what in the world" segment. late last month president trump expanded his travel ban to six more countries effective later this week. one of the countries is nigeria.

officials justify the ban on the basis of national security concerns. as "the washington post" reported, they say that each country has gaps in its security protocols surrounding travel that expose the united states to terror threats. but that argument doesn't really make sense. as the cato institute found, no one born in nigeria, myanmar, tanzania, or eritrea have been responsible for a single terrorist-related death on american soil. if america were worried about lax security, they were ban all visas from this country but it's only targeting permanent immigrant visas, leaving temporary visas from those countries untouched, which suggests that something else is going on here. last year, when trump unveiled a new immigration plan, white house aides told "the washington post" that trump wanted high skilled, well-educated,

english-speaking immigrants who could assimilate easily and give back to the country. that's an understandable wish list for any world leader. but if that's what trump wants, he should know that nigerian immigrants, who make up the largest group of sub-saharan immigrants in the united states as of 2017, check all those boxes. they are some of the most educated immigrants in america. according to the migration policy institute, 59% of nigerian immigrants in the u.s. hold at least a bachelor's degree, nearly double the proportion of americans born in the u.s. also more than the proportion for immigrants from south korea, china, britain, and germany. nigerian immigrants tend to work high skills jobs. 54% of them are in largely white collar positions in management, business, science and the arts, compared to just 39% of people born in the u.s. that means of course they have

significant spending power. according to a new report by the new american economy research fund, in 2018, nigerian immigrants in the united states made more than $14 billion and paid more than $4 billion in taxes. and the nigerian diaspora around the world sent back almost $24 billion in remittances in 2018, contributing to a nigerian economy that is more dynamic than many people, including maybe trump himself, realize. nigeria was once thought to be just an oil economy. but today, services account for more than 50% of its gdp. technology is now 10%, according to the center for global development. a growing middle class is increasingly educated and aspirational. nigeria is america's second largest african trading partner. and the u.s. wants to double existing trade and investment in africa. as the former ambassador to nigeria, john campbell, that goal, taken alongside the ban,

amounts to, quote, policy incoherence, unquote. in terms of politics, however, it has an obvious dark logic. trump has often made it plain, he doesn't like immigrants from poor countries filled with brown and black people. as "the new york times" reported in 2017, he complained to aides that nigerian migrants would never go back to their huts. the next year, "the washington post" first reported that in a meeting with lawmakers he said he wanted more immigrants from norway and fewer from haiti and african nations or, as he famously dubbed them, shithole countries. the travel ban reminds us, i suppose, that donald john trump is back on the campaign trail. next on "gps," saudi arabia versus iran. the immense religious and regional rivalry has informed this part of the world for 40

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is always part of the plan. on thursday, the united states senate did something very unusual. it went against the wishes of president trump when it passed a by the partisan war powers resolution on iran. the resolution comes in the aftermath of the killing of the iranian general soleimani and attempts to curtail the president's power to attack iran without the approval of congress. trump's interest in military intervention in iran goes back at least to 1980 when he told an interviewer that the united states should have invaded the islamic republic during the hostage crisis. on the other hand he's cozy with saudi arabia. riyadh was, interestingly enough, trump's first foreign stop as president. i want to talk about all of this with kim ghattas, a veteran middle east reporter and the author of a new book about the cold war between iran and saudi arabia called "black wave."

kim, a pleasure to have you on. there was a personal angle to this book. >> there was a personal angle. i was trying to answer the question of what happened to us. unlike what most people think today, particularly in the west, the middle east wasn't always this torn. we've always had upheaval but not to this extent. people have mis kconceptions abt the region. they think ran and iraq were always enemies, that's not true, they were twin pillars of u.s. policy in the region, they were friendly competitors. the other mistake is to think that sunnis and shias have always had sectarian violence between them. that is also not true. the theological divide is real but over the course of history sunnis and shias have probably killed each other less than catholics and protestants.

finally, the cultural intolerance that seems to dominate and makes the headlines is also not the norm in the region. the question of what happened to us is what drove me to write this book, it's the opening of the book. i think the question of what happened to us is important, because i talk not just about the geopolitics but about cultural shifts, about the norms that shift, about the values that shift. the question of what happened to us resonates beyond the middle east today. >> why due cao you call it "bla wave"? >> it gets at the cultural shift. i look at the veiling of women that became much more widespread as iran and saudi arabia tried to export their version of much more fundamentalist, literalist, puritanical islam. you had the rise of the veil in egypt in a way that had not been present before, the black abayah. >> explain what "black wave"

comes from. >> the cinema director, an egyptian, first used the term in the '90s as he was complaining that egyptian women were adopting the face veil and the black abayah. it is the rise of a trend that is dark, that is joyless, and that you can trace back to that year, 1979, when these two countries started to use all the tools at their disposal, including religion, to try to rally the masses to their side. and they also heightened sectarian differences and turned them into sectarian divisions and violence. >> so explain what happens in 1979. why is this a pivotal year? >> it's the year when saudi zealots take hold of the mosquing mosque ing in mecca and lay siege to it for

two weeks and then were put to death. it's the first modern day jihad in our times, an effort backed by the united states. >> just explain one piece, i think, needs elaboration. the zealots were attacking the saudi monarchy for being too lax and liberal. >> absolutely, they looked at what had happened to the shah who had been overthrown for his efforts with the west. they decided they needed to keep the clerics on their side. they started proselytizing that and pushing it beyond their borders just as the iranians were book. >> i agree with you entirely on the arc you describe, it's political and done for exactly the kind of reasons you're

describing. but it has changed the culture. you go to the middle east and women are wearing the abayah everywhere. it is a black wave, particularly in places like egypt and the gulf. how do you reverse course? how does that happen? >> i think it is already receding. i think the black wave is receding, because the young generation wants a different future, because religion doesn't have the same appeal anymore. if you look at the polls it will show that you more than 50% of young people in the arab world want religion to have less of a role in their country, in their life, in their politics. the characters i profile in this book are conservative muslims, they're devout, but they represent a majority. what we see on the streets of baghdad, algeria, sudan, the young generation is saying,

we're done with sectarian politics, we don't want to be hostages to all systems of belief, we don't want to be hostages to 1979. i have great hope that the black wave is receding, which is why unfortunately the saudis and iranians are resorting to nationalism to keep the masses mobilized. i think we need to build things bottom up. i think the people are the answer, their hopes are the answer. the rivalry between saudi arabia and iran will i think continue to mutate and continue for now. >> kim ghattas, a pleasure to have you on. up next, from franklin roosevelt to donald trump. a fascinating study on morality and immorality in the oval office.

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a book that you're ready to share with the world? get published now, call for your free publisher kit today! it's an eternal question for scholars of foreign policy. what is the main driver behind big decisions? is national interest all that

matters when a president decides to, say, go to war or enforce sanctions or sign a trade deal? on the flip side, how much does morality play a role in such decisions? do presidents worry about how many people will die, starve, or lose their jobs? should they? the great foreign policy scholar joseph nye was inspired to look at what presidents thought. they made such provisions and wrote a thoughtful book about it called "do morals matter." we're joined by joe nye. welcome. >> nice to be with you. >> so give us an example. we think of american presidents following the national interest, doing what they needed to do. when did morality, you know, change a big decision? >> a great example is harry truman. remember, truman dropped the bomb on hiroshima, nagasaki, and said he didn't lose any sleep over it. people don't realize he also had a third bomb and refused to drop

it because he didn't want to kill more women and children. five years later, when we were losing the war in korea, douglas macarthur said, i want the right to drop 25 to 40 bombs on chinese cities. and truman said no. and he said no because of moral concerns. now, imagine that he had decided yes, and nuclear weapons became normal weapons. the world would look very different today. that's case where morals mattered. >> in many cases, there were presidents who were sort of trying to navigate between doing what they thought was the strategically important thing but still worried about morality, right? >> that's right. it's rare that you could have a decision which is purely moral or sometimes presidents will try to think of something which is in between, which is where most of the things are. henry kissinger once said the hardest choices are really those

which are between 51 and 49. if it were clearly back and white, either/or, it might be easier, but when they're close calls, it's tough. >> when we look at donald trump, he says he's really unconcerned with morality. is he an outlier? >> well, he's more amoral than any of the other presidents on the list. when he responded to the assassination by the saudis of jamal khashoggi in the saudi consulate in istanbul, he said, morale, get over it, the world is a dangerous place. and even "the wall street journal," a conservative newspaper, said he should have said more about american values. so i think he is now recognized in that sense. >> is he violating some of the rules of the game? how would you describe the

assassination of qassem soleimani? >> if he had done it by sinking an iranian ship in the gulf, it would have been par for the course, more or less accepted. by assassinating a high official in a third country when you're not at war, you are revoking what gerald ford had done after vietnam, which is say, we're not going to get into the business of assassination. i don't think we really want to drop that norm. what happens, for example, if secretary pompeo goes to baghdad and somebody shoots him? we would have no right to explain, when we shot soleimani. it's a question that they're good or bad people. it's a question that we gave up assassination after the vietnam war, after gerald ford signed an executive order. i'm not sure that trump thought through what it means when you drop that moral principle. >> i think that point you're making, that we're kind of

violating norms that would help the united states as well, seems critical when you look at trump. there are a lot of things he does, it seems, that have short term kind of tactical advantage. >> that's right. the trouble with president trump is he sees everything as a transaction, like a real estate deal, one short term issue. if you're playing a game where you're going to be back and forth with other partners for a long time, that leads you to take decisions which are not narrowly transactional but are long term decisions. george schultz, who was ronald reagan's secretary of state, called it treating foreign policy like a gardener, cultivating for the long term. you don't see that tauchl wiat president trump. >> who is the president that surprised you the most? when you've seriously studied this particular issue, who was the president who surprised you? >> george h.w. bush, the first president bush, because had

worked in 1988, the dukakis campaign, to prevent him being president, obviously without much success, but then when i came to write this book as an analytic problem, i said, you know, this guy comes out on top. and i think his contextual intelligence that he knew a lot about the issues and his emotional intelligence, he was able to manage his own emotions. he famously said, i'm not going to dance on the berlin wall because it will make it difficult for gorbachev to negotiate. that was an extraordinary set of skills which meant he presided over the end of the cold war with germany inside nato and not a shot being fired. that was quite an extraordinary performance. >> do you worry that we have lost that kind of balance? the politics are so polarized. the president is now coming in and saying they have to come in and undo everything the previous

president did, which you're describing as a more subtle kind of navigation. >> that's right, as we polarize politically and we have presidents who are so keen on differentiating their product, that they have to repeal something that the predecessor did, that's very bad for us. take climate change. the president, trump's withdrawal from the paris accords which obama had negotiated is going to hurt us in the long run. but when his staff came to him and said, we can do this in an easier way, he said, no, i made a campaign promise. that's poisonous. >> we'll leave it at that. joe nye, pleasure to have you on. >> it's a pleasure to be with you. >> thank you, sir. we'll be back. does your broker offer more than just free trades?

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between fires, disease, and rumors of war, watching the news these days can sometimes feel like the coming of the end times. well, offgoounsgood news -- i d have good news in that regard, but what infestation has afflicted large swaths of east africa? the mood of our times is pessimistic. we're living not in the sunny days of innovation, growth, and optimism, but in the weary age of consolidation and monopoly and stagnation. i'm not sure i agree, but i'm sure i benefitted from reading this strikingly well-written

book that ranges widely and intelligently over politics, economics, and culture, and captures something very essential about america today. my answer to the "gps" challenge this week is "a." vast clouds of insects have devastated crops and pastures in the worst invasion of desert locusts that east africa has seen in decades. a swarm covering one square kilometer can eat the same amount of food as 35,000 humans in 24 hours. and the pests can fly upwards of 90 miles every day. one swarm in kenya was 25 miles long, according to the fao. the united nations estimates some 19 million people in the region were already at risk of food insecurity which will only be exacerbated as harvests fail and herds starve due to the

loca locusts. no matter how many airplanes exterminate the insects, the areas are perfect breeding grounds for new swarms. the u.s. is testing drones to battle the locusts but their small size and short battery life are obstacles. climate change is causing the buildup of moisture in the region. when rain falls, desert locusts congregate and breed, hatching numbers 20 times larger than the previous generation, only to find unusually plentiful vegetation to snack on thanks to the increased rainfall. once they grow wings they swarm

and scour the areas for more food. it could grow 400 times if untreated by june. the insects caused some $2.5 billion in lost harvests and took nearly $600 million to bring under control. the fao says that a money could fund preventive efforts for 120 years. but for some reason locusts have received less than half the $76 million it requested to fight today's swarms. thank you for being part of the program this week. i will see you next week. hey, grab your coffee, come on in, i'm brian stelter and this is "reliable sources," our look at the story behind the story. let's get right to it. this hour, president trump bringing back hope, a.k.a. hope hicks. i'll speak to two authors who have insight into all the d.c.