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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Fareed's Take; Trump is a Strange Standard-Bearer for Repuclicans; The question of the Election: Will GOP Voters Be Rational or Tribal?; Monday night's debate revealed Trump Was Neither Republican nor Qualified; The Ever-Changing Policy of Donald Trump; A "Dangerous Pecedent" for the U.S.; The Saudi Terror Connection; Brexit Leader Now on the Trump Train; What in the World: A World at War? Maybe Not; Interview with Former Australian PM Julia Gillard; Interview with Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine; Remembering Shimon Peres. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired October 02, 2016 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FAREED ZAKARIA, GPS HOST: This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world, I am Fareed Zakaria. We will begin today's show with 9/11, Saudi Arabia and justice. The House and Senate voted overwhelmingly this week to over ride a presidential veto.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The bill on reconsideration is passed.

ZAKARIA: Now, 9/11 victims' families can sue the desert kingdom. Does it set a dangerous precedent as President Obama claims?

And can you find a foreign political leader who's all in for Donald Trump? We did. The U.K's Nigel Farage won the Brexit campaign and he believes the same forces will propel Trump to the presidency. You will hear him explain.

Then if Trump does not win, America will have its first female president. What might Hillary Clinton expect in that role? You will hear a cautionary tale from Australia's first female prime mister, Julia Gillard.

Finally, a fond farewell to a great statesman. We will bring you some GPS moments with Shimon Peres.

SHIMON PERES, FORMER PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL: This is an unexpected compliment for me.

ZAKARIA: But first, here's my take. Most people would agree that Donald Trump is a strange standard barrel for Republicans. He spouses few of the party's traditional positions and disavows most of its icons. Almost every important conservative publication opposes him as do most leading conservative pundits.

Of the five previous Republican nominees for president, three will not publicly affirm that they would vote for him. And I would bet that the fourth, John McCain, will not when it gets to the privacy of the polling booth. And yet, amazingly, Trump has received about the same level of support from Republicans as previous GOP nominees, so far at least.

The election might well-hinged on the simple issue, whether Republicans prove to be rational or tribal, I will explain. The last time so many Republican leaders defected was in 1964 and Barry Goldwater was wiped out in a landslide.

But the difference today is that the person doesn't matter, the party does. For months now, many conservative intellectuals have hoped that the campaign would reveal that Trump was neither Republican nor qualified. It has on several occasions; most recently, at Monday's debate.

Public opinion poll showed that Hillary Clinton won by a huge margin. But when Republican and Republican-leaning likely voters were asked in an NBC News poll whether the debate had improved their opinion of Clinton, four percent said yes. When the same group was asked whether it had worsen the impression of Trump, just six percent agreed.

These dynamics have reminded me of Jonathan Haidt's seminal book, 'The Righteous Mind'. Haidt uses exhaustive evidence to explain that our political preferences are not the product of careful analytic reasoning. Instead they spring from a combination of moral intuition, instinct and tribal affiliation with people who we believe share those instincts. We use reason, facts and analysis simply to affirm, to justify our gut decisions.

Now if you think this is only true of other people and not you, consider the example of Peter Thiel, a billionaire, technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and funded Facebook. He's extremely intelligent, well-read with mostly Libertarian views. And he strongly supports Trump for a truly bizarre reason. He asserts that Trump's most significant statement during this campaign revealing his world view was praising the Scottish and Canadian health care systems. One, a nationalized system, the other is single-payer system. Thiel cited this as proof of Trump's remarkable willingness to think (heretically) and challenge Republican dogmas about government.

Now, another interpretation of Trump's remark would be that it was a straight comment thrown off the top of his head, signifying almost nothing. NBC News calculates that he has changed his position 124 times on 20 major issues since the campaign began. And most important, after that offhand reference from backed down from his support for government health care instead only reciting Republican orthodoxy about the evils of ObamaCare.

So a Libertarian has chosen to support a man who's main and utterly consistent public policy positions are anti-free trade and anti- immigration and who has promised to appoint highly socially conservative judges to the supreme court because he is convinced that Trump is actually a closet admirer of Britain's nationalized health care system. I cannot think of a better example of Haidt's thesis that become to a decision first and reason our way to it afterwards.

Paul Ryan has managed similar acrobatics. Ryan has opposed to all Trump's major policy proposals: the wall, mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, unilateral tariffs against China, renegotiating NAFTA, total opposition to the trans-pacific partnership, and he's even publicly condemned many of them. And yet, he explains Trump is his man.

The trend to look for in this election then is whether Trump is losing support among Republicans. That would indicate that politics is turning into something that's about more than tribal loyalty to a sports team. After all, democracy depends on the ability to look at evidence and argument to use reason and judgment and to take seriously our roles as citizens of a great republic. For more, go to cnn.com/Fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week and let's get started.

ZAKARIA: President Obama has been in office for 2,812 days. And that time, he has vetoed exactly 12 bills. This week, congress voted overwhelmingly to override a veto for the first time in his presidency. The law allows the family members of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. The White House called the override the single most embarrassing thing the senate has possibly done in more than 30 years.

In return, congress wondered why the administration would stop victims from seeking justice. Let me bring in CNN's Jeff Toobin and the former CIA director, Michael Hayden to give us some much needed context here.

Jeff, let me ask you, what exactly does this law do and how unprecedented is it?

JEFF TOOBIN, LEGAL ANALYST: Well, the law is designed very specifically so that the 9/11 family members, victims of the terror attack, can sue Saudi Arabia and at least initially begin a lawsuit alleging involvement by the government in the attacks.

There are many strings attached, however, which will very likely limit the ability of these families ever to recover any money but it is a breach in the wall that has traditionally forbidden individuals in one country from suing governments of other countries, the concept known as sovereign immunity, which is an important principle of international law. This is a breach in that tradition. And that's why the Obama administration is so concerned about it.

ZAKARIA: General, what is your sense of the foreign policy impact of something like this?

MICHAEL HAYDEN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Well, one thing, Fareed, I mean the Saudis could respond even retaliate; I don't think they do that. I mean we do have a relationship with them. And I think many of the steps that some people are suggesting that would be quite dramatic would be at least as harmful to the kingdom as it would be to the United States.

But, Fareed, as Jeffrey just pointed out, when you punch a hole in sovereign immunity, that country on this planet that has most to lose with that principle being eroded is the United States. In fact, people in my old agency or in the armed forces who are about the world doing things, I think broadly, appropriately, that doing things that are controversial and things that other nations object to, and now, you've put the world on the path in which the traditional protection, sovereign immunity for those kinds of actions has begun to be eroded.

ZAKARIA: So, Jeff, how would some retaliation like that work? You could imagine some Iraqi group saying the United States has been funding, supporting what they regard as terrorists, you know, some or the order, they don't like, maybe the Syria government, maybe the Kurdish militias and that they would try to attach some American assets to it. Is that kind of thing possible?

TOOBIN: Well, that's the worry that the Obama administration has put forward. I mean there are many obstacles to any of these lawsuits around the world but that's the worry, is that, someone in Pakistan will say that the drone strikes are a violation of Pakistani law so we are going to sue the United States government and attached their assets.

I mean this has also happened before. I mean, there were CIA activity in Italy which led to lawsuits against the United States. Those cases have largely petered out under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. But the risk that the United States sees is that because we are active in so many countries, we are the biggest beneficiary of sovereign immunity and we don't want to see it eroded.

ZAKARIA: Mike, lets just talk for a minute about the issue of Saudi government complicity. This is a very complicated issue, isn't it? Because the Saudi government has funded Wahhabi doctrines and ideologies that clearly have in some ways fuel the rise of groups like Al-Qaeda. But talk about whether the Saudi government has specifically assisted for example Al-Qaeda.

HAYDEN: Fareed, there are two central points here. Number one, I would agree that the kingdom made a deal with the devil back in 1979, after the occupation of the grand mosque. And they simply said there was going to be no one to our religious right within Saudi society and Saudi culture. And I think that's led to some very dark places for broad Saudi foreign and domestic policy.

But on this very narrow specific case, Fareed, a lot of good people from multiple points of view have looked at all the available data and concluded that there is simply no case that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials were involved in any way in 9/11.

ZAKARIA: Jeff, yes.

TOOBIN: Well, if I can just add politically what I think is so interesting and significant about this bill is that, you know, we live in a time of tremendous political polarization. But Democrats and Republicans are united on this issue against the Obama administration and I think it reveals a deep American distrust of Saudi Arabia. And it's not just that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. It goes to the way Saudi Arabia treats women, the way it exports Wahhabism.

What Saudi Arabia is doing to violate human rights in Yemen. I mean this is not an ally that many Americans feel very comfortable with and I think that's the real subtext to why the congress acted the way it did.

ZAKARIA: Gentlemen, thank you very much, very informative. Next GPS, many foreign leaders wonder how Donald Trump has made it this far in the presidential race, even many of them will not say that publicly. But I wanted to talk to one political leader from abroad who is a big Trump supporter. We will hear from the United Kingdom's Nigel Farage when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: 100 days ago, Britain voted to leave the European Union to the astonishment of most people and pollsters. My next guest, Nigel Farage, was the leader of that successful Brexit campaign. And now he says he's ready to help Donald Trump win his campaign as well. Nigel Farage, pleasure to have you on the show.

NIGEL FARAGE, BRITISH POLITICIAN: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Now, Donald Trump is quite unpopular in Britain. The polls I've seen really seems that most people really don't like him. What do you see in him that so many of your countrymen don't?

FARAGE: Well, with fair point to say that Hillary is not too popular in the U.K. either. So, you know, we've got this election in which the British public think, goodness me, is this the best America can do? That's the general review.

I think that Trump is being portrayed in the British press as being misogynistic and almost racist and that's what people haven't liked very much. I would just say this to you that we are exactly 100 days on from the big Brexit vote that happened here in the United Kingdom. And the reason Brexit happened was a very large number of people who would not voted in previous elections or in some cases have never voted in their lives, went out to vote against the establishment. And I think the appeal that Trump has got in America is to say look, we've had this strangle hold for the last couple of decades of big banks, big businesses and big politics who may have done well for themselves but they haven't bettered your lives and that I think is the appeal of Trump.

ZAKARIA: And so every time another prominent newspaper comes out against him, another prominent Republican defects, you think it almost feeds the energy that surrounds his campaign because it's fundamentally our kind of anti-leader's populous appeal?

FARAGE: Very much so. And again, you know, the crossover is the parallels for Brexit. You know, as the data, the referendum, got closer, there were, you know, respected establishment figures lining up to tell us this would be the biggest mistake we ever made in our lives. The economy would fall off a cliff. It will all be a disaster. And people frankly, looks at it and laughed because I think what people are seeing is an establishment that is too cozy is too close.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that there are sort of hidden Trump voters in quite the same way? In Brexit, the polling suggested that the remain side, the people who wanted to stay in the EU, would win. In fact, on the eve of the counting, you seemed to almost conceive because you were reading all the same opinion polls we were and yet it won. Do you think you could imagine the similar Trump surprise?

FARAGE: I think there are two phenomenons here. I think the first is that on telephone polls, particularly, people are nervous to come across as being too conservative -- too socially conservative. So, you know, we've seen even the last few years in Britain, opinion polls getting it wrong because people aren't quite telling the truth on the telephone.

But the another phenomenon here. And frankly, the polling industry in Europe -- I mean frankly, it's almost bankrupt in terms of its reputation. And I wonder whether we're seeing the same phenomenon in America. What I'm talking about is the polling companies find it really hard to find people who are outside of politics and who are now coming into politics. And that's why the opinion polls over Brexit were wrong. Although I do admit, I suffered myself from about (00:05:10).

ZAKARIA: Trump is different from the Brexit phenomenon though it seems to me, a lot of people who argued for Brexit, yourself included, said we are not right wing populous, we are not in that same category. We are pro-free trade. We, you know, we like the diversity of life. We welcome interdependence and globalization. We just don't want Brussels telling us what to do. We want to maintain the sovereignty of the British Parliament. And yet the appeal of Trump seems to me to be about his views on immigration. He's very tough on crime. He promises to appoint justices like Antonin Scalia, who were very socially conservative.

So I guess my question is, how are you so comfortable with someone who really, by most of his policies, is a conventional right wing populous of the kind that the Brexiters told us they were not?

FARAGE: Well, you're quite right. I mean Brexit was actually a very broad church. And fundamentally, it was about self government and democracy, you're absolutely right. This America Election is a much clearer right-left choice than the referendum was or I would say he was this. That Hillary Clinton for me represents the kind of politics that has led us over the last 20 years into an endless series of wars where, frankly, we've made things I think worse, not better. And Clinton politics is about big business and it's about the rich getting richer.

And I think that Trump is part of a phenomenon that is now beginning to sweep the western world, simply people won't change. And I think on November the 8th, that's what this comes down to. Do you want continuity with Clinton? Do you want things to stay as they are or do you want change?

ZAKARIA: You have 30 second to give me or to give Donald Trump advise. You are going to be his guest at the second presidential debate. How can he improve on his performance?

FARAGE: Don't let her get under your skin. Whatever abuse she throws at you, ignore her. Don't defend yourself, there's no point. There isn't time. What you got to do Donald is talk to people, sitting at home in their living rooms. Don't get involved in a cat fight with Hillary.

ZAKARIA: Nigel Farage, pleasure to have you on.

FARAGE: Thank you very much.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, this half of the globe has had its fair share of warfare but this half now has none. The story behind that amazing statistic when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Now, for our 'What in the World' segment. There is terrible strife and suffering in Syria. ISIS is fighting fiercely against Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Sudan and its new neighbor, South Sudan are worrying. But those conflicts and more are all on one side of the map. Turn the globe and you will see something amazing. And entire hemisphere free of armed conflict. And the last piece of that puzzle was filled in just a few days ago.

This week, the Columbian government signed a historic peace deal with the Marxist guerrilla group known as the FARC, the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces on Columbia. With a stroke of a pen, symbolically made out of recycled bullet more than half a century of fighting between this two groups was ended.

The Columbian people are expected to make the peace official today in a referendum ending a conflict that outlasted 10 Columbian presidents, has left some 220,000 people dead and displaced 5 million more.

It is in short a remarkable achievement if it sticks. And even more remarkable as it marks that record accomplishment. Peace in half the world. Now, there are still rebel groups and drug-related violence but 30 years ago, civil wars and hot insurgencies raged across Latin America, from Columbia to Peru, Guatemala to El Salvador.

the Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, and Columbian president, Juan Manuel Santos, co-authored and in "New York Times" in which they noted, "The world's wars are now concentrated almost exclusively in a zone stretching from Nigeria to Pakistan. An area containing only a sixth of world's population. Far from being a world at war as many people believe, we inhabit a world where five out of six people live in regions largely or entirely free of armed conflict."

That region is the anomaly in an otherwise clear trend toward less violence. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program show that there has been a spike in war deaths in recent years, though the numbers actually declined in 2015.

But this up-tick is largely due to the Syrian civil war, a concentrated tragic phenomenon. The larger trend is that armed conflicts have declined by near 40 percent since the Cold War ended, as Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic. Let's even look at terrorism. The Global Terrorism Database shows

that, in 2015, there were 12 percent fewer terrorist attack and total deaths worldwide than in 2014. Now, 2015 was a horrible year for the Western world and one attack is one too many. But Western Europe, for example, experienced more terror attacks between 1970 and 1994, as Quartz has charted. So it turns out that one of our biggest problems may be one of perception, not reality, particularly amongst America.

For instance, 48 percent of Americans worry a great deal about a possible terrorist attack, according to Gallup. Again, the threats are real and they warrant attention. But Harvard's Steven Pinker smartly points to one of Bill Clinton's famous taglines. We should all heed it. The former president is known to say, "Follow the trend lines not the headlines."

Next on "GPS"...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Secretary Clinton?

Yes?

Is that OK?

Good. I want you to be very happy.

(LAUGHTER)

It's very important to me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: What might Hillary Clinton face if she were elected to be the first woman president of the United States?

I will ask the first female prime minister of Australia about her experience. It's an eye-opener, that's for certain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JULIA GILLARD, FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not.

Not now, not ever.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: That was not a normal workplace disagreement. The speaker was Australia's then prime minister, Julia Gillard. The speech was made in that nation's parliament and the target of her ire was the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott.

This was perhaps the most public rejoinder to sexism ever. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GILLARD: I was offended when the leader of the opposition went outside in the front of parliament and stood next to a sign that said "Ditch the witch" -- misogyny, sexism, every day from this leader of the opposition. Every day in every way, across the time the leader of the opposition has sat in that chair and I've sat in this chair, that is all we have heard from him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Since resigning as prime minister in 2013, the speaker you just heard, Julia Gillard, has been speaking up about sexism in politics. And she tells us how she sees Hillary Clinton being treated in the presidential campaign.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Julia Gillard, pleasure to have you on.

GILLARD: Thank you very much.

ZAKARIA: You've always, obviously, been interested in these issues, but they came to a head in a very now-famous moment in your prime ministerial career. And you seemed to speak about sexism with a great deal of emotion. And I think that's why the clip went viral the way it did.

Was there years of pent-up struggle that came through in that moment?

GILLARD: Yes, I think there was. When I first became prime minister, I thought, you know, it's so obvious that I'm the first woman that I didn't have to wander around going, "Oh, I'm the first woman. Did I tell you I'm the first woman?" So I didn't do that. Of course the fact I was the first woman was very well noted.

And when I first encountered some gender treatment as prime minister, I -- I ignored it. I thought, what's going to happen here is everybody will carry on about me being the first woman, from positive and negative perspectives, early in my prime ministership. So the maximum, "You go, girl!" reaction will be in the early days of my my prime ministership. The maximum, you know, sexist, or "Are we ready for this?" will be there in the early days. And then it will work its way out of the system and I'll just get treated like everybody else has always been treated.

What I actually found was, the longer I was prime minister, and like most governments, the longer you're there, you deal with controversial issues, you lose a bit of political skin, you're in harder political times. The longer I was there, the gendered stuff actually increased. It became the go-to weapon in fierce policy debates, a gendered insult.

And so it did get to the stage, on that day when I gave what has come to be known as "the misogyny speech," that, you know, that was the time that I finally said, you know, kind of, enough is enough. And I think it's come to mean, for many women -- you know, it's an

emblem of what they wished they'd said in a moment when there was sexism in their life but they either deliberately walked away and just took it on the chin or they didn't quite know what to say in that moment and they woke up at 3:00 in the morning going, "Oh, I wished I'd said" -- for many of them, I think it's come to represent that moment.

ZAKARIA: Watching this campaign in the United States, do you think Hillary Clinton is being held to a different standard?

GILLARD: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, I think a different standard in all senses. The nature of the insults against her in what has been a very ferocious campaign lacking any form of politeness or civility -- the insults against her are very often gendered insults. The scrutiny on age questions, I think, has played out differently for her. I think people do see women age and come to a different set of conclusions than men aging.

I think that there has been this question for her of likability. One of the key issues her campaign wanted to deal with was the widely held perception that Hillary Clinton isn't likable. I know Hillary Clinton. She's incredibly likable. And I actually think people have come to that conclusion partly through the prism of gender, partly because of this unconscious bias that a woman who's right up there must be, you know, a pretty sort.

So I think that there's lots of levels, a different set of tests being run over Hillary Clinton than over Mr. Trump or, at an earlier stage of the contest, of the other potential candidates.

ZAKARIA: You have spent a lot of time in your post-prime-ministership period focusing on the issue of women's education, girls' education, but motivated, it seems to me, because you really still feel there are significant inequalities. And you pointed out in a political article that, even though you have Angela Merkel; you have Janet Yellen; you have all these very powerful people, it's still remarkable how under- represented women are in the corridors of power.

GILLARD: Absolutely. And I'm very motivated to see that change. When we look around our world today, we can basically number on the fingers of our hands how many senior women leaders we've got. So that's nowhere near sufficient.

Obviously, here in the U.S., we might well see a breakthrough with the election of President Clinton. But if we are going to have a truly equal world, then we do want to be able to look around countries and say that they are led by men and women in roughly equal numbers.

To get there, we've got to increase the number of women who are coming into politics, serving in parliament, serving in positions like secretary of state or Treasury or any of the very senior positions.

And to get there, of course, we've got to do things in our societies and around the world that give girls an equal chance to boys. When I speak publicly on gender, I joke about, you know, how I got a great, quality education but still they taught the girls cooking, sewing and laundry whilst the boys learned woodwork, metalwork and electronics. But my education was a great one. Around the world we see tens of millions, indeed hundreds of millions of girls who either don't get to go to school at all, or they only go for a limited number of years, or their education is of such poor quality that they might as well have never stepped inside the classroom.

And that's a problem we've got to solve if we are going to have women coming through, right around the world, to be considered for leadership.

ZAKARIA: Julia Gillard, pleasure to have you on.

GILLARD: Thank you very much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Up next, climate change, nuclear tests, bikinis and the United Nations. We will talk about them all in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Eight months ago, my next guest had what must have been the triumph of her life. Hilda Heine was elected president of the Marshall Islands and, as such, the first female president of any Pacific island nation. But then she had to face reality. The 29 atolls and five islands that make up her nation might not have much of a future, not if climate continues. Sea rise is slowly washing away what remains of her territory. And what does remain is frequently flooded or ravaged by drought, the strange effects of the volatility caused by climate change.

It's said that, if temperatures rise just 1.5 degrees Celsius, or just under three degrees Fahrenheit, her nation could sink.

So what is to be done?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Dr. Hilda Heine, pleasure to have you on.

DR. HILDA HEINE, PRESIDENT, MARSHALL ISLANDS: Thank you for having me on your show.

ZAKARIA: You must have seen a lot of the projections. What are the -- what are the scenarios you worry about, if this climate change problem doesn't get ameliorated?

HEINE: Well, there are people who say that we might be under water in 20 to 50 years. We don't like to think that that will happen, of course. We want to make sure that our country, our nation, our culture remain, you know, for future generations to -- to enjoy and to appreciate. So we're doing whatever we can do in our power to -- to look for solutions.

ZAKARIA: So what can you do? I mean, you're a small country. You have 72,000 people. Let's be

honest. You're not -- you know, you don't have the kind of economic, military power that would cause people to pay attention to you. What do you do?

HEINE: Well, I'd like to think that we have soft power, and we come to the world using our moral voice. I don't think the international community would want, you know, cultures and nations and people like the Marshallese people to be wiped off the face of the earth. And so, you know, the power of working together that we saw in Paris last year -- I think we have hopes; we have hopes that there will be solutions and that we can live through this.

ZAKARIA: There's another aspect to the Marshall Islands that has always fascinated me. You are -- part of your country is so-called Bikini Atoll, which was the place where atom bombs were tested in the 1950s. In fact, the -- the phrase "bikini" comes, bizarrely, out of the idea that this was very sexy and a new thing to explode atom bombs.

HEINE: Yeah.

ZAKARIA: What are the issues that persist from -- from those tests?

HEINE: Yeah, unfortunately, that's been, you know, an unfortunate legacy, the nuclear legacy for the Marshallese people. Sixty-seven atomic and nuclear -- thermo-nuclear bombs were detonated on Bikini and Enueu (ph). And between 1946 and 1956, over a 10-year period, loss of land, of course; some islands were decimated and are no longer there. People were dislocated or relocated from their lands because the -- the area that the test program was conducted became radiated and contaminated. People cannot live on these lands.

And so there are people who are nuclear nomads within the Marshall Islands. On top of that, health issues. We have one of the highest rates of cancers in the world, all kinds of cancers. And so what we are seeking from the U.S. is justice for the people who are relocated, for the health of the people. We don't feel that justice has been accomplished and so we continue to seek that.

ZAKARIA: Is the United States being responsive?

HEINE: Well, under their -- under the treaty agreement, they think they've settled all the issues which, you know, in our opinion, justice has not been accomplished. So we continue to search and look for ways to gain that justice for our people.

ZAKARIA: If the sea levels just keep rising, you have an escape strategy, in a sense, because your treaty with the United States allows the Marshallese people to come and live in the United States. You already have -- what is it -- 10,000 people living in Arkansas and California. Can you imagine a situation where the whole country just up and leaves and comes to America?

HEINE: Well, I don't want to think about that scenario. I am one of the firm believers that we will remain there because, in the absence of living in the Marshall Islands, in the current location we have, we cannot really have a Marshallese culture and Marshallese way of being, in a different land. The land is very much connected to our culture and to us as a people. So for us, it's very important that we remain here.

ZAKARIA: President Heine, pleasure to have you on.

HEINE: Thank you. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

ZAKARIA: Next on "GPS," a look back at the life, the humanity and the humor of a giant who the world lost this week, Shimon Peres, president, prime minister and pizza delivery man.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: This week President Obama nominated the first U.S. ambassador to Cuba in more than half a century. It brings me to my question. After re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba last year, the U.S. now lacks diplomatic relations with just three countries. They're North Korea, Iran and what?

Is it Syria, Somalia, Lesotho or Bhutan?

Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

This week's book of the week is Joseph Lelyveld's "His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt." With all the conversation about presidential candidates and their health, this timely book is a fascinating reminder of the extraordinary secrecy surrounding FDR's health, especially in his last year and a half in office.

Lelyveld tells the gripping story of a man at the peak of his power, literally running the world, but whose heart was steadily collapsing. You know how it ends, but because of the intelligence and empathy of the author and very good writing, you will not be able to put this book down.

And now for the last look. This week, we lost a giant of the world stage, one of the founding fathers of Israel, Shimon Peres. The world knew him as the former Israeli foreign minister, defense minister, three-time prime minister and president.

What always struck me about him was his intense intellectual curiosity. The last time I saw him, over a dinner last January, at 92, he was discoursing authoritatively on the latest advances in neuroscience and how exciting they were.

I had the privilege of sitting down with Peres on more than one occasion for this program. During our final conversation, I asked him about an amusing video he had made looking at possibilities for his retirement, pizza delivery man, comedian, and even sky diving instructor.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: You were a very good pizza delivery person, I have to tell you. In that part, I thought you particularly showed skill.

SHIMON PERES, FORMER ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: Well, this is an unexpected compliment for me.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: I admired him most for never forgetting that the state of Israel had in its creation a moral meaning, a calling for those who believed in democracy and especially for the Jewish people. Listen to him on the importance of the two-state solution.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PERES: We, the Jewish people, we are not born to govern other people. It stands against everything that we stand for. For me, it's a moral test. We think, the better the Palestinians will have it, it will be better for us. We will be better neighbors.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: It's a cliche, but in this case it's true. He is the last of a kind.

The correct answer to the "GPS" challenge question is D. The United States has no diplomatic relations with Bhutan. Why doesn't the United States have relations with a country that is called the happiest nation on earth? It is Bhutan's choice. As The Atlantic pointed out, the kingdom chooses to have no relations with any of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. In fact, the Bhutan government has embassies in just five cities around the world, Bangkok, Brussels, Dhaka, Kuwait and New Delhi.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.