this is gps, the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria coming to you live from new york. on this week's program i travel to the pentagon for an exit interview with the top military adviser to presidents trump and biden. after almost 45 years of service, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general mark milley will retire at the end of this month. i asked him about russia, ukraine, china, taiwan.

plus his controversial appearance with trump in lafayette park and allegations that the u.s. military has become too woke. >> i would tell you that the military i see is the military that's exceptionally strong. it's powerful. it's ready. then, elon musk, currently the world's richest man. he is also one of the most controversial. critics say he has far too much control over everything from the war in ukraine to the voices that are heard online. the great biographer of our times, walter isaacson got unparalleled access to musk for a brand-new book on the billionaire. he'll tell me what he learned. bifirst, here's my take. the democrats are confronting a crisis that could cripple their chances at the polls at the national, state and local level.

i'm talking about immigration. it's happening not only because republicans are taking advantage of the problem, but also because democrats are unwilling to accept that their policy ideas on the issue are wrong. grossly inadequate to the challenge at hand. a prehedges at the southern border are surging again. texas border towns have long been inundated by the waves of arrivals and now that they're bussed into cities like new york, chicago and washington, d.c., local governments there are facing back breaking expenses to house them. mayor eric adams was exaggerating only lightly when he said the problem would destroy new york city. the biden administration's various efforts have aimed to band-aids on a massive open wound. the secretary of homeland security alejandro mayorkas has repeatedly said the asylum system is broken. if that's true, we need a

drastic, dramatic overhaul of the system and neither he or president biden is proposing anything like that. to understand how to think about this issue, let's go back to basics. after world war ii the united states developed pathways to people who faced extreme persecution because of their race, religion or beliefs to take refuge in america, but there are two realities that are critical to turning this idea liftic impulse into a workable system. first, there are surely tens of millions of people around the world who could plausibly claim that they face persecution and the u.s. cannot possibly take them all in. more importantly, the u.s. cannot be forced to give priority to people who break the law and enter the country illegally and then claim asylum status to legitimize that entry as opposed to those who follow the rules and apply to their home countries and wait their turn, but that is what is happening every day now at the

southern border. second, these asylum cases must be special and distinct from the cases of people all over the world who are trying to emigrate to the united states because they're fleeing poverty, disease or violence. people when fall into this category face a complex and elaborate process that entails several mechanisms for obtaining various kinds of visas and work permits, some which could translate into a green card and eventually citizenship, but instead of going through that arduous, lengthy, legal process, many seem to have decided it would be simpler to pay cartels to help them cross the border illegally, present themselves as asylum seekers and slip into the country while their cases are being adjudicated and according to the homeland security inspector general in one 17-month period between march 2021 and august 2022 the federal government released more than 1 million migrants into the u.s.

and immediately lost track of over 177,000 of them who had failed to give an address or had provided an invalid one. when the system of due process collapses as it has, it is most unfair to those who have legitimate claims to asylum or illegal immigrant status. there is only one solution to this crisis. president biden should either ask congress for authority or use existing executive authority to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. the british government has passed a law to this effect. other western countries will undoubtedly follow. the world has changed. according to the u.n. high commissioner of refugees there are 1 million refugees and asylum seekers globally and we

need courts and systems so that asylum can be granted, but through some orderly national process rather than just leaving it up to officials and countries that are overwhelmed by illegal entrantses at their boards. the migrant crisis is exposing policy weakness at every level, from an administration that is scared to take on its progressive wing and take bold action to states like new york and massachusetts that have right to shelter rules that are utterly unworkable in the face of this onslaught, unless democrats seized control of this issue, the politics of it will end up having the same effect as in other western countries. rocket fuel for the populist right. donald trump's main solution to this problem just didn't work. the very fact that we have millions of migrants entering the country over the past four years proves that however much of his wall he actually built, it hasn't worked, but most americans know that he sees the

current situation as utterly unacceptable and is willing to take extreme measures to end it and they know no such thing about his democratic opponents. go to cnn.com/fareed for a link to my washington post column this week and let's get started. ♪ ♪ mark milley is going out on top. the four-star army general is america's highest ranking military officer as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. in that role, he's the top military adviser to president biden, a job he also performed for president trump. that role has entangled the general in politics in a way that he's decidedly uncomfortable with. his almost 45-year career in the military started when he graduated from princeton university and has taken him through many tours of combat duty.

now he is retiring and returning to civilian life. we sat down on tuesday at the pentagon for a wide-ranging exit interview. >> general milley, pleasure to have you on. >> thanks, fareed. appreciate the opportunity here. >> how long before you retire as ch chairman of the joint chiefs. >> just a couple of weeks. i retire by law on the 30th so it is 18, 19 days or something like that? >> what's the first thing you'll do? >> my wife and i will move out of our quarters at fort meyer and i'll intend to sleep and get rid of the bags under the eyes and be the best grandfather i can be. >> let's jump into it. a lot of people on the ukrainian side when i was in kyiv say we don't understand. we asked for these weapons. say himars and the west, the united states says no, no, no and then finally gives them to us, but it's now eight months or nine months later. would we feel like the same

thing is happening with the tacms or the f-16s. if you're going to give them to us why wouldn't you give them to us fast? >> over a period of time we've given them a considerable amount of military aid, about $40 billion so far and it's $100 billion in total aid if you include monetary and humanitarian aid and that's just the united states. the united states has been extraordinarily generous. >> no, they have, but if you want them to win, why not do it fast? >> the question is the speed. there's mechanical issues there in terms of how fast you can marshall this equipment and how fast you can get it from adjacent countries and how fast they can absorb it. it's not just sprinkle magic dust and this stuff starts showing up. the other thing is need. so at the beginning of this war, the greatest need was for anti-armor weapons to stop the russian offensive and that's what they got and as they

shifted into what the current operation is, and their needs were leopards and gpars and mechanized and armored vehicles of various types and the west was very generous in providing those and you have the training to go along them and the spare parts and munitions and all of that does take a period of time to do. it's not a question of, you know, it just all shows up at once. >> what do you think of the current state of the counteroffensive? do you think the ukrainians are starting to push the russians out of the cities and towns. i think they've been doing it pretty consistently since last summer. the winter was a lot of fighting and not a lot of movement and then this offensive, although slow, and slower than the planners were anticipated and it has been steady and they've made steady progress through these various defensive belts and they've fought hard up in bakhmut and they fought in donetsk and down in the vicinity

of zaporizhzhia and mariupol and all of that. it has been steady fprogress an what i said it was going to be long, hard, bloody because of the nature of the fight and the type of defense that the russians put in and the capabilities of the ukrainians argued for a very, very difficult, long, tough fight, but the ukrainians have been doing that and they have a lot of combat power remaining and the ukrainians are not a spent force and they sufficient weather that allows them to continue to achieve their steady progress. they have not failed. i know there's some commentary out there that somehow this offensive has failed. it has not failed. it's at least a chief partial success and they've gotten through the belts and they have time left and we'll see how it goes, but the ukrainians have had incredible resilience and toughness and they're slowly and steadily working through very difficult russian defenses.

>> so is it a realistic goal that many believe the ukrainians should have is essentially to gain access to the sea of azov or go down to mariupol so that it frees up odesa as the port can then start freely exporting all of the grain from. you believe that's doable? >> we'll see. i wouldn't want to make a prediction on that just yet. we'll see what happens. the -- again, this is well over 200,000 russian troops in russian-occupied ukraine. this offensive, although significant has operational and tactical objectives that are limited in the sense that they do not, even if they are fully achieved they don't completely kicked out all of the russian which is is the broader strategic objective that president zelenskyy had and that will tack a long time to do that, and that will be a

significant effort over a considerable amount of time. >> i don't want to put a time on it because a lot of things can happen in the war that's reaction and counter action and you can see a general collapse and you can see escalation and you can see a lot of different things happen in the future, but i can tell you that it will take a considerable length of time to militarily eject all 200,000 or plus russian troops out of russian-occupied ukraine. that's a very high bar. it's going to take a long time to do it. >> next on gps, the tension in the pacific is palpable and it is focused on taiwan. if china invades the island, what could the u.s. military do? i will ask general milley when we come back.

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that single fact alone speaks volumes about the dangerous tensions between the world's two most powerful countries. in a testimony before the house arms services committee in march general milley said that while war with china isn't imminent or inevitable, the u.s. needs to keep its military stronger than china's so that if deterrence fails, america can win. here's more with general milley. >> you have said that china is on track to have a military that might even be more powerful than the united states. >> that's their objective. >> and you say they are moving in that direction? >> they're trying to move in that direction. >> is it possible that we will look back and -- and think that we overestimated them in the way that i remember estimations of soviet military power that in retrospect were wildly off? i remember the estimates of saddam hussein's military that

in retrospect were wildly off? >> is it possible that because it's a bit of a black box that we tend to think our enemies are taller than they are? >> absolutely. that's very possible and the chinese are not ten feet tall and notice i said that's their plan and that's their desire and their aspiration, and if we stay still, if the united states stays still and the united states military stays still and we don't modernize, then there's a reasonable chance that the chinese would succeed in doing that, but what you see, fareed, is probably the largest shift in economic power and well over a century since the rise of the united states economically in the late 1800s and perhaps multiple centuries and the rise of the west and the fall of rome or something like that, you've seen an enormous shift in global economic power to china beginning with reforms deng xiaoping. so 45 years ago the economics of the world began to shift. so today you've got the

manufacturing capital of the world, you know, without exception is china and in the wake of that shift in economic power, the chinese took that money and have invested in making a world-class military. that's what they're trying to do. they want a military that's very capable in space, in cyber and then the traditional demands of land, sea and air. they developed fourth and fifth generation fighter bombers and copying our designs. they're trying to develop a blue water navy, a subsurface navy and reformed their ground surfaces from the peasant-based army of the 1970s with a modern army with multiple commands and they're on the path to do that and their goal is to exceed the united states military capability in east asia really by the end of this decade and certainly by the middle of next decade and they want the united states to exit east asia militarily and diplomatically. they want us to cease being the arbiter of outcomes in asia, and

they want to be the global challenger of the united states by mid century. they want to meet or exceed the capabilities by mid century, and we're not going to stand still. the united states will continue to modernize and continue to invest and i know it sounds like a bumper sticker and there is value in the phrase peace through strength. so the object i have here is deterrence. you don't want a great power war. we had a great power war in world war i. we had a great power war in world war ii and we haven't had one in 80 years and great powers are what they are and economically and militarily they're capable and we should try our very best to avoid open-armed conflict with china. >> the most likely flash point is taiwan. ror reports say that chris ambrose's book claims that china has done

many, many war games to taiwan and the u.s. has almost never one in those war games. is it possible for the united states to repel a chinese invasion of staytaiwan? >> it's incredibly possible. i'm in my 44 years of service and war gains, a lot of times you're experimenting and you're introducing new capabilities and you have to be careful with quote, unquote war becames and they're not free play and they're designed to achieve certain outcomes. i would tell you a couple of things in an unclassified way about taiwan. first of all, we, the united states, still maintain the taiwan relations act and the communication assurances that go with that and -- and we, the united states, want a peaceful outcome between taiwan and the people's republic of china, and whatever that is between those two peoples, that's the u.s.'

desire, right? as long as it's done peacefully, but militarily, i think china would make a grave, strategic mistake if they attempted to attack and seize the island of taiwan. that's not the only option, by the way, but to attack and seize the island of taiwan is the very, very high bar and the most complex of all operations to do and the chinese military capability is probably not there right this second to do that. president xi in public, unclassified, you know, speeches has challenged the people's liberation army and navy and air force to develop that capability by 2027 is what he said. it used to be the 2030s and he moved it to 2027 and that doesn't mean he has the decision to do it and what that also means is they don't have the capability right this second at least in his mind. next on "gps" the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is

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general milley was the army's chief of staff in 2018 when he made history. he became the first-ever chairman of the joint chiefs whose nomination was announced in a tweet. in a message then-president trump called both milly and his reddes issor joe dunford incredible men. trump would come to turn on his chairman and embroil him in politics. he stayed on when president biden took office. in a recent rose garden address biden said to milley -- >> i trust you completely. completely. >> now more of general milley's exit interview with me. >> chairman, let me ask you about some questions relating to civil-military relations because

you occupy a unique position. you are a uniformed military officer. >> sure. >> but you are also the print p principal adviser to the president. you said after president trump asked you to walk with him on that infamous walk through lafayette park. >> right. >> and held up the bible that you made a mistake, you shouldn't have been there. what was the mistake in your mind? how would you characterize what you did wrong and what lesson you learned? >> i think the key thing is that the united states military must be apolitical or nonpart know is. i walked into a political event and i was in uniform and that shouldn't happen. that's not president trump, that's me. president trump is a politician. he he can do whatever he wants to do, but as a soldier i should never enter into politics and as soon as i recognized it, it

lasted 30, 40 seconds and photos are taken and it lasted a lifetime and i walked away and my security detail walked out to the right and got out of the way, but yeah, that shouldn't have happened and i knew instantly once i realized it was a political event that i shouldn't be there in uniform, and i thought the best thing to do. i was on a pre-planned speech and i inserted part of it to make that as a teaching moment for up and coming officers to make sure they knew that, you know, i had made a mistake, and i regretted that. >> and if you were to do it again -- >> the president asked you to do something. >> i wouldn't have participated. >> you would have said no? >> absolutely. there's no place for a uniform to be in a political event, period. that doesn't mean it doesn't happen now and again. i've been on both sides of the aisle that put me or my predecessors in photographs at various times, et cetera. that stuff happens. it's not necessarily great, but

it happens on occasion. i have been in campaign commercials and we've asked campaigns to please take us out and normally they do. the bottom line is the united states of america is a healthy, independent, democrat dic repubc and we don't want our military in actual u.s. am doestic politics. it is true that war is politics by all means, but that's a different case and woe're talkig about u.s. domestic politics and there is no part of that. >> you say all of that and you do inject yourself into politics and you talk about how the military is not woke and how military officers should be reading carl marx. you've opined on things that for some is not adhering to the strict distinction between civil authority and military authority. >> as a chairman, you are rendering advice and all of our officers operate inside of a political environment.

so injecting yourself into politics is not the same as being informed as the environment that you're operating in. if you're operating or rendering advice to any civilian authorities you do have to be informed and have an understanding of the terrain that you're operating in. so blissful ignorance isn't one of those courses of action and you need to be informed of the society that you defend and the society ney which you operate. a broad education, i think, is critical to any professional officer in any branch. >> is the u.s. military too woke? >> no. not at all. so -- i'm not even sure what that word truly means and what i see is a military that's exceptionally strong, it's powerful and the readiness rates is better now than they've been in years, and what i see on a day-to-day basis and right now, for example, fareed in the last 24 hours we've had about 5,000 sorties of u.s. aircraft of keeping the skies safe.

you've had somewhere between 60 and 100 u.s. naval vessels patrolling the seven seas and you have a quarter million u.s. troops like the army and marine corps around the world maintaining peace and stability. this is a military that's dedicated to maintaining a readiness and our capabilities and our lethality and the thing that we also need to focus on is the modernization for the future character of war that i see fundamentally changing and the military is a lot of things, but woke it's not. so i take exception to that. i think that people say those things for reasons -- for their own reason, but it's not true. it's not accurate and that's not to say, by the way, that there aren't some things out there that are -- are -- could be fit into that category, but i don't think it's a broad brush description of the u.s. military as it exists today. >> finally, are you going write a memoir? >> i'll probably write -- i don't know that i would do a

tellall. frankly, i haven't given a lot of talk to what i do in october. right now we have a lot of things going on and bad things can happen in a very short time in the world and i have to remain focused on the job and that's exactly what i'll do. i'll probably write some things in the future and a tell-all is not something a chairman or general officer will be doing and i'll probably write and make some sort of contribution. right now i'm focused on the job and i have to run the tape all of the way to 1 october. >> general, appreciate you having you on, sir. >> appreciate the opportunity. next on gps, love him or hate him, elon musk is one of the world's most influential people. walter isakson got inside access for his new biography of the multibillionaire. he will explain musk's vision for the future, how he thinks and what makes him tick after the break.

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elon musk is not just the world's richest man. he's one of the world's most influential people. he overseas a sprawling empire of companies that are shaping the future, touching on clean energy, space exploration, communication and now artificial intelligence. he is a brilliant businessman and a visionary. he is also reckless, mercurial, at times juvenile and some say dangerous. the great biographer walter isaacson set out to understand this complex figure. isaac son has written a slew of acclaimed books about different geniuses through history and his new book is titled simply "elon musk." welcome. >> good to be back. >> i want skeptical of the fact that people's childhoods at early ages shapes them, but this one seems extraordinary. he said to you adversity shaped

me and what you described is a pretty marrowing childhood. >> people could still have perfectly wonderful childhoods and still be great innovators and there's correlation between einstein or kissinger and germany and leonardo growing up gay in the village of venci and having the lead to florence and in this case, with elon musk it is such a brutal childhood in south africa. lots of violence and he and his brother kimball would go to an anti-apartheid concert and the doors of the train would open and there would be someone sprawled there with the knife in their hood and they'll step through the pools of blood and they got beaten up so often because he's socially awkward as a kid, but the scars really came from his father who then took the side of the kid who beat elon up and would make elon stand there for, like, an hour and call him stupid.

so there's a light and dark side to musk that is really shaped by the adversity of childhood, as he says. >> and it seems to have produced a kind of punch back hard mentality. >> right. >> his brother describes with his fascination with video games and he says the video games taught him lessons like empathy is not an asset. play life like a game. don't fear losing. so these -- >> don't unplug. he just keeps going to the next level of the game, but even early on, there's something called vel school in south africa and it was a wilderness survival camp they send kids to and the first time he gets there he loses ten pounds and they beat them up and they encourage the kids to fight over the food and the second time he goes he's gotten bigger and he said i learned to purchase people in the nose really hard and they'd still beat me up sometimes, but if i punched them really hard in the nose they'd remember it and that's almost a metaphor for now

which you see him very successful, but he's sometimes eager to punch people in the nose. >> we have to skip through the career because we have to get to what seems to me the most fascinating parts of the book. one of his geniuses, it soems to me is a kind of engineering genius. each though he is a physics major, but you point out with tesla, the key innovation might be that unlike every other car manufacturer in the world he decided tesla was going to make all its components itself. it was not going to have these hundreds of suppliers and that is, in some ways, that has created this complete, almost apple-like closed universe, right? >> exactly. and it's very much one of the transformations he's caused because when tesla was first formed it was making the batteries in japan and it would be going to thailand and he said, no, you have to do it end

to end yourself and we could manufacture the united states again. people were at that .355 outsourced and if you manufacture it and walk the factory line ever day and you make their designers have their desk next to the factory assembly line, then they can iterate hour by hour and see what works. so to me, one of his strengths is not the sexiest thing that makes the tabloid and is the ability to design wantnot just , but the factories and assembly lines that make cars and show how they're connected. >> in a way, he's created the model for a tesla which is really software on wheels and the software gets updated like a phone, constantly. >> yeah. and it allows it to totally change and the big thing that he's aiming for and as usual, he is able to turn the impossible

into the very like, and it's the self-driving car and it's an issue and one of the things he did right is a few months ago and it's near the end of the book is they had hundreds of thousands of lines of code that taught the car how to drive. you see a red light, you stop and see yellow lights -- now they're doing it with machine learning like chatgpt, generative artificial intelligence, and it's filling up the computer with a billion frames of video a day of humans driving. so the car learns to do what a human would do in a situation. and when you look at something like spacex, you know, what do you see as the kind of fundamental genius there? >> a lot of it, but let's start with risk taking and they all blow up. he said everybody who came to america were risk takers whether

they came in the mayflower or the rio grande. we lost the risk takers and we have more referees than risk takers. he's willing to try things and it means that boeing and nasa have not been able to get, say, astronauts in the u.s. into orbit and into the space station, but he's able to do that multiple times. he's sent up 5,000 communication satellites which are the only ones that worked, and it's that ability to iterate and take risks that i think is -- pardon one of the puzzle. >> stay with us. when we come back, i'm going to ask walter isaac son whether, lon musk's success has a lot to do with the government even though he's kind of libertarian himself when we come back.

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and we are back with walter isaacson. talking about elon musk. people now think of musk as something of a conservative because -- and certainly a kind of libertarian around covid. but i'm struck by his biggest businesses are all totally dependent on the government. spacex, biggest customers are nasa and the defense department. tesla, without the loan he got, tesla might not have survived but as a tesla owner, you get a huge tax credit for buying it. and solar, when he did it, solar said he was entirely based on again, the federal tax credits, california tax credits. does he reflect on the oddity of thinking of himself -- >> well he definitely understands the role of government and even in favor of regulation including for a.i. now. he just went to talk to chuck schumer and others in the senate. but this is a distinction i'll try to make here which is boeing

and other contractors have cost plus contracts which means the government pays you and if you're late you get a guaranteed profit and if it goes, if the cost overruns you make more money. what musk did was said it is a fee for service. if you want this satellite up, you pay me this much and i take the risk. and it is a new way of doing business which means the risk capital came from spacex and him not from the government. >> though the tesla loan, he got from the -- >> he did not get an auto bailout in those famous auto bailouts. he got a department of energy loan that was paid back with interest. not trying to defend it because i think you're exactly right. government has to help incentivize certain activity but there are a lot of government

incentives. >> what i want to ask you about the star link case, it is now famous because of your book that he told star link -- the ukrainians, i won't let you use star link in crimea if you start attacking it. you could use it in ukraine, not including kind of the parts that the russians annexed from 2014, you could use the parts they annexed in 2022. the reason he said is because he thinks -- he thought that that would cause world war ii and the russians would respond with nuclear weapons. the ukrainians found ways to attack crimea repeated will i. just last week and the russians have not used nuclear weapons. do you think that -- does elon musk take feedback that is negative, does he realize that he was wrong about that? >> well, he does have this apocalyptic view of the world. and anything at any point could become world war iii and go

nuclear and certain that flight in september when he's deciding not to enable star link and ukrainians don't know it is disabled and ahe thinks it will cause world war iii and they're going to go nuclear. in the end that wasn't exactly true. but i don't know, you're more of an expert than i am. there was a fnontrivial expectation but it does and musk does take feedback. not very well. one of his weaknesses, not enough people telling him no. but you've have mark milley on this show, he talks to general mark milley. he talked to jake sullivan and they decide that control of star link should now be some of it transferred to the u.s. government. so that the u.s. government gets to make the decision on would it be too dangerous to allow it to be used that way. so i watched him over the past few months say, maybe this is

too much power for a private citizen like me. and maybe i don't know whether it is going to cause a nuclear war. let's let the u.s. government do it. >> we just have a minuteme. but the central question is do you have to be an asshole to be a genius? what do you think? >> no. and i hope someone will read it. jennifer dowden of the code break, the nicest person in the world and she helps invent this technology called crisper that allows us to edit our genes. huge technology and the sweet left lab there is and one of your favorites is benjamin franklin because he's so much like you. he brings people together so if you write biography you are not writing about how to be a leader, you're righting about real people, some are kind and gentle and some are rough around the edges and you let the reader decide, okay, i get it.

>> do you know what you're going to do next? you just had this slew of extraordinary books. >> i want to be at the intersection of science and humanity and technology and especially after henry kissinger, i go way back in history after steve jobs, i go back in history. there is a part of me now that wants to go into the way back machine. >> walter isaacson, always such a pleasure. amazing book. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. xed? safelite makes it easy. >> tech vo: you can schedule in just a few clicks. and we'll come to you with a replacement you can trust. >> man: looks great. >> tech: that's service on your time. schedule now. >> singers: ♪ safelite repair, safelite replace. ♪ mashed potato lovers. your day has come. indulge in the rich, creamy classic bob evans mashed potatoes. farm fresh potatoes blended with real milk and butter for that homemade taste. with the delicious taste bob evans is known for. bring home the warm comfort of mashed potatoes today. there are some things that go better... together.

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