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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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September 7, 2025

On Today’s Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:

China underscored its growing global strength this week, with a huge military parade and a summit of foreign leaders that drew some leaders of countries—like India and Egypt—that have been friendlier to the US in recent decades. Fareed says the surprising development here is their turn away from the US and toward China. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, hostile rhetoric and ideological demands have alienated some important US friends; Fareed argues this is perhaps the greatest own goal in modern foreign policy.
 
After that: Are Trump’s actions bringing China, Russia and North Korea closer together? Fareed asks historian and The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who has been closely following the growing ties between autocratic states for years.
 
As Israel presses on with its war against Hamas in Gaza, is there any hope for the two-state solution? Fareed asks former US negotiator Rob Malley, co-author of the new book “Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine,” and the author and analyst Dan Senor.
 
Then, Fareed speaks with neurosurgeon and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta about his new book on chronic pain, “It Doesn’t Have to Hurt,” and hears his take on the Trump administration’s upending of the medical establishment.

Tune in to CNN tonight at 9 p.m. ET for the premiere of the new special report Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: It Doesn’t Have to Hurt.
 
Summer break is over, and educators around the world are facing new challenges from a rapidly evolving technology: artificial intelligence. Fareed talks with Derek Thompson, Substack writer and co-author of the bestselling book “Abundance,” about the potential crisis AI poses for schools and universities—and the possible solution.

Awaiting an ‘AI Doomsday Machine’

AI is getting closer to the battlefield.
 
To date, fully automated swarms of drones remain the province of science fiction, but in a Foreign Affairs essay last month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Defense Dept. official Greg Grant, now of the Center for a New American Security, wrote that AI’s prospective usefulness in war is undeniable. As drones fill the skies above Ukraine’s line of contact with Russia’s invading army, Schmidt and Grant reflected on the potential for AI to revolutionize targeting. With Russian missiles and drones attacking Ukrainian cities, they suggested that for Ukraine, the future gold standard of AI-enabled air defense might be automated drones intercepting attacks on their own. “Defense companies are also racing to create AI that can coordinate attacks by multiple drones in an automated drone swarm—the holy grail of drone operations,” they wrote.
 
In a Politico Magazine essay, journalist Michael Hirsh writes that AI warfare might arrive sooner than we think.
 
Demand, it seems, is driving us in that direction. Hirsh writes: “[S]ome AI scientists believe the Pentagon has already started down a slippery slope by rushing to deploy the latest generations of AI as a key part of America’s defenses around the world. … Despite the Pentagon’s official policy that humans will always be in control, the demands of modern warfare—the need for lightning-fast decision-making, coordinating complex swarms of drones, crunching vast amounts of intelligence data and competing against AI-driven systems built by China and Russia—mean that the military is increasingly likely to become dependent on AI. That could prove true even, ultimately, when it comes to the most existential of all decisions: whether to launch nuclear weapons. … ‘I’ve heard combatant commanders say, “Hey, I want someone who can take all the results from a war game and, when I’m in a [crisis] scenario, tell me what the solution is based on what the AI interpretation is,”’ says [Stanford University Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative Director Jacquelyn] Schneider, a self-described ‘geriatric millennial’ and mother of two who, along with many of her university colleagues, is worried about how fast the shift to AI is happening. In the heat of a crisis, under pressure to move fast, her fear is that it will be easier for those commanders to accept an AI suggestion than to challenge it.”

Abundance or Upheaval?

The current political moment is dominated by some odd, cross-cutting trends. One is the left’s struggle in its clash with right-leaning populism. Another is climate change and the havoc many fear it will bring, which has produced both anxiety and activism.
 
In a New York Review of Books essay, Trevor Jackson juxtaposes two visions of left-leaning politics in the coming decades. “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, focuses on the first problem. Its answer: the left should take a page from conservatives’ playbook, slashing red tape and making it easier for America to build things like houses and infrastructure. “Overshoot,” by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, offers a more desperate vision of politics in the climate-change era: that politics have already failed us, and the best we can do against an existential threat is mitigate its worst effects.
 
“[F]or all their differences, both books are concerned about how to constitute a politics in the face of climate change, and both agree that the technological possibility of radical transformation already exists but is held back by politics,” Jackson writes. “Both books also have theories of political change. Abundance closes by quoting the historian Gary Gerstle to the effect that the creation of a new historical era requires (in this order) deep-pocketed donors, think tanks and policy networks, a political party that can reliably win elections, the ability to shape political opinion everywhere from the Supreme Court to broadcast media, and a persuasive moral perspective. … Overshoot, by contrast, argues that ‘any attempt at meaningful mitigation of the crisis would have to waylay the dominant classes with a force and confrontational resolve unlike anything in the common memory or imagination.’”