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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Examining Growing Anti-Semitism; Fighting ISIS Through Legal Means; Is China Poised to Take The Leadership Role On The World Stage From the US?; A Look at The Implications of Slashing Budgets for Fight Against Global Climate Change. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired March 19, 2017 - 10:00   ET

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

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

We'll begin today's show with a crazy week in world affairs. The White House accused Great Britain of spying on Trump Tower.

Rex Tillerson said US policy towards North Korea has failed for 20 years.

And Angela Merkel met with President Trump, a man who once accused her of ruining Germany. How did that go?

Then, President Trump this week slashed budgets for agencies trying to tackle the global warming crisis.

I'll ask President Obama's Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an MIT physicist, what he thinks of the energy challenges we now face.

Also, Amal Clooney is taking on ISIS, trying to fight the terrorists the best way she knows how, not with a gun or a bomb, but with a legal brief.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMAL CLOONEY, BARRISTER: This is global threat. It needs a global response. And part of that response must be a judicial one. It cannot only on the battlefield.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Clooney and her client join me to explain the horrors of ISIS' crimes and how justice can be served.

Finally, 75 years of world history told through CIA maps, from the Eastern Front to Cuban missile, central Moscow to central Baghdad.

But, first, here's my take. We do not yet have the official agenda for next month's meeting at Mar-A-Lago between Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping, but it might well be remembered as the beginning of a handover of power from the United States to China.

After 75 years of American leadership on the world stage, Trump seems determined for America to retreat, opening a space that will eagerly be filled by the Communist Party of China.

Trump railed against China on the campaign trail, bellowing that it was raping the United States. He vowed to label it a currency manipulator on his first day in office. But in his actual first interaction with Beijing, he caved.

Weeks after his election, Trump had speculated that he might upgrade relations with Taiwan. In response, President Xi froze all contacts between Beijing and Washington on all issues, demanding that Trump reverse himself, which is exactly what happened.

The Trump administration's vision for America's disengagement from the world is a godsend for China. Look at Trump's proposed budget, which would cut spending on American soft power, diplomacy and foreign aid, funds for international organizations by 28%.

Beijing, by contrast, has quadrupled the budget of its foreign ministry in the last decade. Just tallying some of Beijing's key development and aid commitments, George Washington University's David Shambaugh estimates, that total adds up to $1.4 trillion compared to the Marshall Plan, which in today's dollars would cost about $100 billion.

China's growing diplomatic strength matters. An Asian head of government recently explained to me that, at every regional conference, Washington sends a couple of diplomats whereas Beijing sends dozens. The Chinese are there at every committee meeting and you are not, he said. The result, he explained, is that Beijing is increasingly setting the Asian agenda.

The Trump administration wants to skimp on US funding for the UN. This is music to China's ears. Beijing has been trying to gain influence in that global body for years. It has increased its funding for the UN across-the-board and would likely be delighted to pick up the slack as America withdraws.

Of course, in return for this, China will gain increased influence from key appointments to major shifts in policy throughout the UN system.

The first major act of the Trump administration was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a treaty that would have opened up long closed economies like Japan and Vietnam, but also would've created a block that could stand up to China's increasing domination of trade and economics in Asia.

with Washington's withdrawal, even staunchly pro-American allies like Australia are now hedging their bets. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has raised the possibility of China joining the TPP, essentially turning a group that was meant to be a deterrent against China into an arm of Chinese influence. One more gain for Beijing.

The Trump administration does want a bigger military, but that has never been how China has sought to compete with US power. Chinese leaders have pointed out to me that this was the Soviet strategy during the Cold War, one that failed miserably. Their implication was let Washington waste resources on the Pentagon, Beijing would focus on economics, technology and soft power.

[10:05:07] Donald Trump's new National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster once remarked that trying to fight America symmetrically, tank for tank, was stupid. The smart strategy, he thought, would be an asymmetrical one. The Chinese seem to understand this.

For more, go to CNN.com/Fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

The White House had quite a week on the world stage. So, let's get right to the discussion. Richard Haas is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order. And Antony Blinken was the Deputy Secretary of State under President Obama, now a CNN global affairs analyst.

Richard, let me ask you. You've been in these kinds of meetings before. Angela Merkel and Donald Trump seem to have sort of kissed and made up. But Trump had mercilessly attacked her last year for her policy of letting refugees in. Do you think that the things are all better now or do those tensions linger?

RICHARD HAAS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: I wouldn't say the tensions have all gone away. They've clearly got a very different fundamental view of trade. Unless, I missed it, Fareed, the president didn't mention the words European Union in his remarks. It's, obviously, central to Germanys foreign policy.

They didn't really talk about Russia, little bit about Ukraine. So, we don't know how much of a meeting of their minds there was and whether this president, for example, is going to go ahead and continue the strengthening of NATO. So, I actually think there's a lot of questions out there.

The one thing I like was perhaps overlap - this issue of worker training, the German apprenticeship programs. This might be an interesting way to finesse not just the trade debate, but the larger debate about how do we make sure that workers can cope with the pressures of robotics and artificial intelligence and driverless vehicles.

This is actually something Germany and the United States could take the lead on and perhaps this could be a centerpiece of the G20, which, as you know, the Germans host this year.

ZAKARIA: Tony, what did strike me about Donald Trump was that focus on worker training apprenticeship, but the odd thing, of course, is that Germany has all those programs and has maintained its manufacturing capacity not because it has practiced any kind of protectionism - in fact, it's very open to trade - but because it has very intrusive government policies, high tax, high regulation, what we would call socialized medicine in this country, which provides workers with a kind of base, an insurance that allows them to move forward.

ANTONY BLINKEN, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST AND FORMER DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes, Fareed. I think it's exactly right. But, look, if you put their personalities and profiles and policies into a computer, they would be about the last pair that matchmaker.com would spit out. They couldn't be more different. And Richard alluded to some of this.

But when it comes to the most basic things, you now have Chancellor Merkel who seems to be the last champion of the liberal international order, the rule of law, transparency, the institutions that back it, the values that back it, and President Trump, unfortunately, who seems to be more in favor of something approximating a liberal democracy.

So, this meeting was bound to try to put a positive gloss on things. But these are two very different people with two very different approaches.

ZAKARIA: Richard, when you think about where a meeting like this goes from here, shouldn't Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, have been there. I'm a little puzzled by the - just the sort of staffing of this kind of - these kind of - these things to ensure that there would then be follow-up and the policies that are talked about by the two heads of government actually happen.

HAAS: Someone said that about 80 percent to 90 percent of life is implementation. So, what happens after these meanings is often more important than what happens in it. And often, the sides turn out to actually agree on things they never quite manage to agree on during the meeting itself.

I don't quite understand - I'll be honest, Fareed - why Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State, is traveling. It's very hard for him to represent administration policy towards Asia because there really isn't much in the way of policy towards Asia.

There still isn't an inter-agency process. I would think he would be wiser to essentially stay home, focus on getting his building staffed up, which is essentially empty, protect the resources for the State Department, diplomacy, foreign aid in the budget, which have been decimated, and really develop his personal relationship with this president.

At the end of the day, a Secretary of State is only as effective as his relationship with the president. And, clearly, here, I wouldn't say there's a divide so much as there just isn't that kind of closeness.

[10:10:05] ZAKARIA: Tony, if he had to go somewhere, though, Asia was the right place and North Korea probably the right topic, right?

BLINKEN: Yes. I think that's exactly right. It is - if he's going to travel and not be at this meeting, this is the right place at the right time. And there is a looming crisis in Asia, represented by North Korea's relentless attempts to get a nuclear weapon that they can put on a missile capable of reaching the United States.

Administrations, going back to the 1990s, have tried to curb their nuclear ambitions without success. But over the last year, this effort to get a missile that can hit us with a nuclear warhead has accelerated and they are getting closer to the day when that capability is put in the hands of a leader who acts, at the very least, impulsively and maybe even irrationally and is not bound by the rules of deterrence.

So, the question is, what to do about it? And here, bringing the South Korean and Japanese allies together with China on some kind of united plan is exactly what needs to be done. Hopefully, that's what the secretary is working on.

ZAKARIA: I have to ask both of you finally. This crazy situation with the accusations from the White House toward the British government, the United States' closest ally since 1941, in which Sean Spicer said that essentially - or implied that British intelligence was spying on Trump Tower.

The Brits then come forward and say this is nonsense. What they are referring to is nonsense are the words of the White House press secretary. Tony Blinken, can you ever remember anything like this happening?

BLINKEN: I can't. I think the word the Brits used was rubbish. But here's what I think happened, Fareed. Unfortunately, President Trump seems to have become the leading consumer and purveyor of fake news. And so, he reads this nonsense in Breitbart and other publications about the alleged wiretaps by President Obama and he reacts and puts it on his Twitter feed.

And then, they find out, of course, that it's wrong, never happened. But they're incapable apparently of acknowledging a mistake, and so the typical modus operandi is to just double down.

But having falsely accused the president to now rope in our closest ally and impugn it at the same time is really turning this into not just a domestic problem, but an international one. And ultimately, what's so troubling about this is that it undermines the credibility of the president and of the United States. Who is going to listen to him or believe him when he continues to put out these false allegations?

ZAKARIA: Richard, the part that strikes me as also being a kind of sad degradation is all these people from Sean Spicer to presumably McMaster - the national security advisor - Tillerson, they all have to in some way pretend that these are all serious allegations or accusations.

Charles Krauthammer, the conservative commentator on Fox said, there isn't a person in Washington who believes that Obama wiretapped Trump. But they all have to pretend because the president said it that there's some credibility to this that perhaps some investigation will show something.

HAAS: Well, you're right, Fareed. It diminishes the president, it diminishes those around him. No good can come of it. As Tony correctly pointed out, it ends up devaluing the most important currency a president has, which is his word, which is his credibility. It also ends up hurting our relationships with some of our most important partners. We already had the rough conversation with Australia. We talked about Germany before. Now, the British. We've gotten off terribly with Mexico.

And these are the relationships that in many ways are the foundation of what the United States does in the world. If we're not careful, we're going to turn America first into America only and we simply can't succeed in this kind of a global world without being able to leverage our relationships with our traditional friends.

ZAKARIA: And all the ones you mentioned, of course, are our closest allies. Richard Haas, Tony Blinken, pleasure to have you both on.

HAAS: Thanks, Fareed.

BLINKEN: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, snow or sleet, hot or cold, floods or droughts, scientists do agree human activity is changing the climate. But the Trump administration isn't so sure. I'll talk about the White House and climate change with Ernest Moniz, president Obama's energy secretary.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:18:42] ZAKARIA: Late this week, President Trump released his 2018 budget. If Congress passes the budget as delivered, it would be a stunning reversal in the direction of policy during the Obama administration. The budget would cut the EPA's funding by 31%, including ending funding for Obama's clean power plan.

Trump's proposal would take big chunks out of climate-related programs of NOAA and NASA, USAID and state according to "The Washington Post." It would also cut the Energy Department's budget by almost 6%.

"The Post" says that includes eliminating the department's arm that funds innovative energy technologies. The Energy Department is, of course, run by Rick Perry now. In a 2011 presidential primary debate, Perry couldn't even remember the name of the Energy Department when listing the departments he would eliminate, if elected.

My next guest was Perry's predecessor as energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, a distinguished MIT scientist who was instrumental in negotiating both the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement.

When you look at the evidence over the last few years, just - you're a scientist, you've seen these models and these predictions, in the last few years, do you think you - have you become more sure in the feeling that, yes, the data is now confirming all these predictions about climate change and about human activity causing climate change.

[10:20:12] ERNEST MONIZ, FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF ENERGY: The answer is yes, although I want to emphasize it's not me, it's the entire scientific community that has over these last couple of decades gone to stronger and stronger statements about the impacts and the role of human activity to the place where today there's an overwhelming consensus as to human activity being a major driver of the climate changes we are seeing.

It's not as though this is based upon some exotic model with millions of lines of computer code that you need to work through. The fundamentals are very, very basic, been known for a long time. What has was changed in the last half-century is the rate at which we are emitting those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that is driving change at a rate that is much, much more rapid than the natural variations of climate that, of course, have been there for millennia.

ZAKARIA: So, what do you make of - what is your concern about some of the things that the Trump administration has been saying about coal, which is the dirtiest of all energy sources, about Keystone pipelines? How do you react to all these announcements we've been hearing that say we don't care about global warming, we need jobs first, we need to get energy production up?

MONIZ: Well, first of all, let me say that some of the statements being made about the science, I might say, by non-scientists, are really disturbing because, as I said, the evidence is clearly there for taking prudent steps.

I would not argue with the issue that different people in office may decide to take different pathways, different rates of change etc., but not the fundamental science.

ZAKARIA: But the head of the EPA essentially contested the idea that it was human activity that was causing global warming.

MONIZ: And let me say, I was explicitly - or implicitly including him in my statement. These are anti-scientific statements which, in my view, fundamentally cut to the core of democracy in the sense of - if we're not going to have fact-based discussions, it's very, very difficult to have an informed electorate and informed opinions.

ZAKARIA: One of the things President Trump said during the campaign at several points was that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris deal, the climate change treaty. What would that do?

MONIZ: Well, of course, we will wait and see how this actually develops. But, obviously, I think that would be a very bad idea. And let me say why, which is related to what it would do.

Number one. Every country in the world fundamentally has now committed to a low carbon future. There's no going back. One of my friends in industry would say, you can't keep the waves off the beach. We are going to a low-carbon future.

A second point in Paris, the Paris agreement on carbon targets, by definition, was the end of the Paris meeting. We should not forget the beginning of the Paris meeting, at which technology innovation was put at the center of the solution to the climate change challenge. Number three, their predictions, an arm of the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, they are now saying that that technology innovation was going to be feeding into a multi-trillion-dollar market - global market for this technology.

We would be foolish to have taken a lead role in getting the world to move on climate, to put innovation at its core and then walk away from that agenda. We will also suffer economic harm by not taking every advantage we can to be part of this multi-trillion-dollar global market.

ZAKARIA: Do you think Rick Perry is going to discover that the energy department should not be eliminated after all?

MONIZ: Well, he's already said he discovered that in his confirmation hearing. I credit him. He took that off the table right up front in his opening statement. And he said, look, I know a lot more about the department now. It's amazing what they do. He retracted his statement.

And in fact, subsequently now, he's been in office pretty short time, maybe 10 days or so, and he came right out of the box strongly supporting the national laboratory system, the DOE, major role in innovation, the issue of supporting basic research. So, I think he is certainly stating that he wants to be a champion in that regard.

[10:25:08] ZAKARIA: Secretary Moniz, pleasure to have you.

MONIZ: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, toppled tombstones and bogus bomb threats to Jewish organizations, all of these anti-Semitic acts seem to be on the upswing. Why? When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Now for our What in the World segment. Something sinister is going on in the United States right now. It is making America's Jewish community very nervous and it should have alarmed all of us.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Police responding to a Jewish community center after a bomb threat.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: More than 100 headstones destroyed at a historic Jewish cemetery.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the latest in a rash of bomb threats to JCCs across the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: A just published report from ProPublica found 160 acts of anti-Semitic vandalism in the United States between November of last year and February, like spray-painted swastikas and desecrated tombstones.

And then there are the 145 bomb threats against Jewish organizations that ProPublica has counted already in 2017. Why are we suddenly experiencing an increase of anti-Semitism?

If one looks at Europe right now, many immigrants of Arab origins harbor anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic views. But what's new is the rise of right-wing nativist political parties which are growing in popularity. Even 70 years after the Holocaust, in a continent that has few Jews left, many of these groups still harbor anti-Semitic sentiments right below the surface.

Look at Hungary's Jobbik party, the country's third largest, whose leader a few years ago demanded lists of Hungarian Jews who pose a, quote, "national security risk," unquote.

Hungary, one should point out, has fewer than 50,000 Jews left in a population of 10 million.

But America is different, right? Well, yes. The Pew Research Center recently released a report stating that Americans express warm feelings toward Jews, giving them the highest rating of any religious group. And yet the United States also seems to be experiencing an increase in threats directed toward Jews. The question is, where is it coming from?

Mark Oppenheimer, in The Washington Post, says the threats are coming from all directions. On the left there are some college students who attack Israel and, by proxy, dislike Jews. I would add there are unfortunately Arab and Muslim Americans who make that same spurious connection as well. But Oppenheimer continues there is a large group on the right with anti-Semitic views as well, a motley mix of nativists, conspiracy theorists, twisted populists and the paranoid and delusional.

However, before we declare that violence toward Jews is on the rise, Oppenheimer says, we should discern what's new from what we're simply noticing for the first time. The uncomfortable truth is that anti- Semitism has always existed in the United States, as Micha Danzig points out in an article in The Forward.

According to the FBI, since 1996, the vast majority of religion-based hate crime in the United States, 65 percent on average, have been directed toward Jews, more so than any other religious group. But American Jews are more nervous now than at any time in recent memory. Many in the community do see the Trump candidacy and his presidency as fanning the flames of intolerance and opening the door to more anti- Semitic violence, whether intentional or unintentional.

They cite, among other things, Trump's initial refusal to disavow Holocaust denier David Duke, Trump's flirtation with the alt-right movement, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says harbors anti- Semitic sentiments, and Trump's failure to mention Jewish victims in his statement by the president on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to Allison Kaplan Sommer in Haaretz, Trump's reactions have

added up to a narrative that has put the American Jewish community understandably on edge.

At this joint session of Congress at the end of February, Trump finally made some strongly-worded statements condemning anti-Semitic hatred.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP: Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week's shooting in Kansas City, remind us that, while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: So are anti-Semitic incidents on the rise since Donald Trump became president, or are we just paying more attention to them?

We won't know for certain until the FBI releases its definitive 2016 hate crime statistics, which comes in November. But we do know that Jews, as well as many other groups in America, including immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims, are feeling under siege right now.

Next on GPS, Amal Clooney, the international human rights lawyer, will join me to talk about how she is fighting ISIS.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMAL CLOONEY, INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER: I am speaking to you, the Iraqi government, and to you U.N. member states, when I ask why? Why is it that nothing has been done?

Killing ISIS on the battlefield is not enough. We must kill the idea behind ISIS by exposing its brutality and bringing individual criminals to justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: That was international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney confronting the United Nations over what she says is inaction over ISIS's war crimes. She was there representing her client, Nadia Murad. Murad is a Yazidi, a member of a minority group in northern Iraq that has borne the brunt of much of ISIS's brutality.

Murad was kidnapped and raped by ISIS and held for weeks. Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad want legal justice for what they both call in no uncertain terms a genocide. They join me now.

ZAKARIA: Nadia, can you describe what happened to you?

NADIA MURAD, CLIENT OF AMAL CLOONEY (TRANSLATED): I am from the Yazidi minority in Sinjar in Kurdistan. And I lived in one of the Yazidi villages. When ISIS conquered territories in Iraq, we heard about the crimes committed against Christians and other minorities.

But early morning on August 3rd, 2014, they attacked us. Nearly 6,500 women and children from the Yazidi were abducted and about 5,000 people from the community were killed during that day. They separated us from our mothers and our sisters and our brothers. And some of them were killed and other disappeared until now.

I was taken with groups of unmarried girls and they took us all to rape us. They came not just to attack certain people but they came for all Yazidis. The situation was really horrible. They sold girls, girls that were under age, because ISIS considered that permissible under Islamic law.

ZAKARIA: Amal, what made you take this case on? You know, there are so -- I mean, there are -- this is a horrible tragedy, but what do you hope to accomplish?

CLOONEY: What we hope to accomplish is bringing ISIS to justice. So we know that there's a military campaign going on where ISIS is being taken on, on the battlefield. What we want is to see ISIS members also in a courtroom. And at the moment, that hasn't happened. So we haven't seen a single prosecution against ISIS in a court anywhere in the world for the crimes committed against the Yazidis, for any international crimes, and that's...

(CROSSTALK)

CLOONEY: ... to change.

ZAKARIA: And describe the extent of this. Because this is not just the story of one person.

CLOONEY: No, exactly. I mean, what happened to Nadia -- in a single day, she watched six of her brothers be marched off to be executed. Her mother was taken away to be executed. Nadia and the younger girls in her family were taken and distributed among militants, raped by one ISIS member after another, traded, sold and bought by various ISIS militants. And her nephew was one of the young boys who became what they call "a cub of the caliphate," a young boy who was sent to training camps, taught to kill and to be a child soldier.

And what happened to her family happened to thousands of Yazidis, starting in 2014. And it's still going on. There are still 6,000 Yazidis in captivity, including some members of her family.

So these are just simply some of the worst crimes of our generation. And as an international lawyer, I wanted to try and help Nadia and people like her who I now represent, to try and bring ISIS to justice. And one of the ways in which we're trying to do that is to convince the Security Council to set up an investigation and start collecting evidence in Iraq of these crimes.

ZAKARIA: When we come back in a moment, I will ask Amal Clooney how she responds to those who might hear this interview and say, "Look, it's their civil war; let them fight it out; why should the rest of us get involved?" She will explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: And we are back here on "GPS" with the international human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney, and her client, Nadia Murad, who was kidnapped by ISIS, raped by many members of the terror group and held against her will for weeks.

One of the things you must hear is that this is all a chaotic internal war, sectarianism, civil war; why should the West, why should America get involved and pick sides?

And, you know, people have almost a sort of fatigue from hearing about all of this.

CLOONEY: Well, I think, if there's one conflict that America and the Western world is worried about, it's -- it's the one involving ISIS. I mean, ISIS is not a local threat; it's a global threat. We know that they have carried out attacks in over 30 countries and killed thousands of people outside of Iraq and Syria, including, obviously, in the heart of Europe. And there's a threat in the U.S., too.

So my message to the U.N. was this is a global threat; it need a global response. And part of that response must be a judicial one. It cannot be only on the battlefield. You can't defeat ISIS on the battlefield alone because you have to also deal with future recruiting. And I think trials and exposing the brutality of ISIS and trying to make a dent in some of their shiny propaganda by showing that it's not a holy war. And showing what they're really doing to children, to women, is one way to help that.

And I think it would help if ISIS's future recruits or, you know, ISIS 2.0, whatever comes after Mosul and after this military campaign, for people to know that, if they do commit crimes, there's a very good chance they'll go to prison.

At the moment ISIS is leaving a trail of evidence and nobody is collecting it. You know, ISIS militants send Nadia messages on "WhatsApp" on her phone, and they don't hide their phone number.

ISIS has set up a whole bureaucracy involving the slave trade, where they have set up committees; they've set up courts. There are documents; there's DNA. There are mass graves. And nobody's actually collecting this evidence. And if it gets lost, it means we can never have trials and we can never have justice.

ZAKARIA: Why -- why is this not happening?

Because, you know, what I'm struck by is your demand is not that the U.N. raise an army and go and defeat ISIS. You're just asking for investigation, for collection of evidence for prosecution.

CLOONEY: "Why" is the question that I pose to the Iraqi government very directly and to the U.N. member states, because Iraq has actually indicated in many public statements through its foreign minister that it's open to an international investigation. It's actually asked the U.N. to intervene and help to gather this evidence, and it's shown an openness to international trials as well.

The Iraqi ambassador said, for those most senior members of ISIS like Baghdadi and his circle, there needs to be international assistance to bring them to justice.

So they are saying this, and what they actually need to do to make it happen is simply to send a one-page letter to the Security Council saying "Please establish an investigation."

There's already a resolution drafted and ready. The U.K. has taken the lead on drafting this, and if Iraq just sends the letter, then there will be a vote. And from all of my conversations, including with the Russian ambassador and the United States ambassador and others, it seems that there's actually broad support in the council. So this actually should move forward. It's in line with the Iraqi government's interests. Because they're going off to ISIS.

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you, for those who -- who think international law is -- is meaningless, that, you know, these cases won't actually be prosecuted, that people won't actually be tried, what do you see as the value of it, as somebody who has devoted her life to it?

CLOONEY: Look, I see -- I understand the skepticism because some of the most grave conflicts in the world are not being acted upon. And, you know, you see that President Assad is still doing just fine in Syria. You see President Bashir, who was actually the subject of ICC action, hasn't been arrested.

So I understand that there are limitations. At the same time, we do have examples of international justice, and sometimes it takes some time. You know, it took 13 years to arrest Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader. But he's now been convicted of genocide for the actions in Bosnia and he's been convicted and is serving a 40-year sentence in the Hague.

The Khmer Rouge trials are going on now, decades after those crimes. I hope we won't have to wait that long. We shouldn't have to wait that long. The system is supposed to have evolved so that you can have investigations and prosecutions just, you know, when the crimes happen.

But, you know, if we have to be patient, then we will. I think we're not going to give up until we see progress.

ZAKARIA: Nadia, is there something you want to say, finally, to the world?

MURAD: I ask both of them, the Iraqi government and the U.N., to establish an investigation and give all the victims of ISIS the justice they deserve because, really, we want to bring ISIS to justice.

ZAKARIA: Do you wonder why it's taking so long?

MURAD (TRANSLATED): It is taking a long time because the process of genocide cases is usually lengthy, but even though it is taking a long time, we have hope that they will bring ISIS to justice.

(IN ENGLISH): Sometimes I feel, if -- maybe, if I can speak English, maybe the U.N., they can understand what I -- what I -- we want, but I can't.

ZAKARIA: We can hear you no matter what language you speak. Thank you, Nadia.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Over the past few years a sharp increase in oil and gas extraction in the U.S. has helped trigger a decline in oil prices worldwide. The drop in crude prices has caused problems for many oil- exporting countries, which brings me to my question of the week.

What oil-rich country has chewed through 40 percent of its cash reserves in just four years: Angola, Norway, Venezuela or Algeria? Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

This week's book of the week is something different, Adam Piore's "The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human." This is a mind-blowing book about the human body. Adam Piore takes us inside the technological revolution that is fixing up broken limbs and, even more staggeringly, enhancing the power and strength of the human body through engineering, bio-engineering. He's pointing us to a future in which we will all have the ability to be superman or superwoman -- fascinating.

And now for the last look. The CIA recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of its Cartography Center by posting dozens of previously classified maps online. They depict a world at war and tell a visual tale of modern American foreign policy, in 1942 a map of the Eastern front, in the '50s a map of new railroad construction in Communist china, in '62, the locations of surface-to-air missile activity in Cuba, in '79, the ethnic divisions of Afghanistan as the Soviet Union invaded. There's a map of key locations in central Moscow in the 1980s and of ethnic divisions in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s; in 2003, a detailed map of Baghdad which bears the note "Not to be used for targeting."

In some ways these maps show how much the world has changed. Take a look at this 1950 map of colonial power in Africa, for instance. In a world long before Google Earth, the CIA recognized the vital contributions these maps and geography provide.

In fact, on one map, then CIA director Richard Helms penned a handwritten note "To our cartographers, who have always been a star in the agency's crown."

The correct answer to the question of the week is D. Earlier this month Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal announced that the country's foreign reserves now stand at $112 billion, down from a peak of $192 billion in 2013. Hydrocarbons account for over 90 percent of Algeria's exports, and the government depends heavily on oil money to finance its budget. It's worth remembering that Algeria once had a rising tide of Islamic

fundamentalism and militancy. I wonder if an economic crisis could re- awaken some of those forces.

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