Return to Transcripts main page

Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump's Shock and Awe; How Democrat Should Take on Trump; Russia's War in Ukraine Marks Four Years. Interview With Johns Hopkins School Of Advanced International Studies Senior Fellow Anne Applebaum; Interview With The New Yorker Staff Writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired February 15, 2026 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:00]

TERESA HELM, EPSTEIN SURVIVOR: It's in a local community. So carry out your investigations. You can't stray away from power and money. You have to target the ones that need to be targeted, no matter who they are or what they're doing for anyone else. And so that is what we need to start with there. And the media, I would say --

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Yes.

HELM: You know, no one wants to --

TAPPER: We're out of time, Theresa. I'm sorry.

HELM: OK.

TAPPER: I'm really -- three seconds. Thanks for sharing your stories with us. And thank you for spending your Sunday morning with us. "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS" starts now.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, capturing a world leader in the middle of the night, threatening to invade Greenland.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Greenland.

ZAKARIA: Sending federal agents by the hundreds into Democratic cities. These are all recent actions by the Trump administration that pushed the limits of executive power and seem aimed at overwhelming the opposition. But is the Trump administration also overwhelming itself?

That is what Ezra Klein of "The New York Times" says. We will discuss where this might lead.

Then, President Zelenskyy says Russia and the Trump administration are discussing deals worth $12 trillion. Yes, that's trillion with a T. A staggering sum. It's apparently part of the effort to end the war.

I'll ask the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum what is going on.

And in a Super Bowl ad ChatGPT seemed to be the butt of a joke made by its lesser known competitor, Claude. So just what is Claude?

I'll talk to a "New Yorker" writer who spent months embedded with the team that made it. He says even they aren't sure how to answer that question.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

What do two striking political facts tell us about the mood of the world today? In Japan, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has just won the largest parliamentary majority in the history of the long dominant Liberal Democratic Party. In Britain, Keir Starmer, who swept into office a year and a half ago, has sunk to the lowest popularity ratings ever recorded for a British prime minister.

On the surface, the story seem unrelated. One leader rides a landslide, another struggles to stay afloat. But taken together they reveal something deeper about the current political moment. Voters prefer rebellion to restoration.

Consider Britain first. After the tumultuous premierships of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Years marked by Brexit aftershocks, ethics scandals, fiscal panic and revolving door leadership, Starmer offered something different. He was the keep calm and carry on candidate. He promised seriousness, stability and competence. He would rebuild institutions, appoint capable ministers, and restore Britain's standing abroad.

He would handle America's volatile politics with quiet firmness. No drama, no ideological fireworks, just adult supervision. And by conventional measures he delivered. Market stabilized, cabinet government returned, policy was sober and incremental.

Yet the public mood did not follow. Dissatisfaction lingered. Within months, Starmer's net favorability ratings plunged into deeply negative territory.

The promise of seasoned competence took a blow when one of Labour's most prominent figures, Peter Mandelson, long seen as the ultimate insider, faced renewed scrutiny over his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein. For many voters, that episode reinforced the suspicion that restoration meant the return of the same interconnected elites they had already rejected.

The deeper problem for Britain is structural. Immigration has been the rocket fuel of populism across the West. Britain recorded net migration of nearly 950,000 in the year ending in March 2023, an astonishing figure for a country that had voted for Brexit partly to take back control of its borders. Cosmopolitan elites appeared in many voters' eyes to have mismanaged the issue. That sense of betrayal has not faded.

Add to that Europe's long flirtation with austerity. After the 2008 financial crisis, Britain like much of Europe embraced fiscal restraint, spending was squeezed, public investments cut, and real wages stagnated for much of a decade. GDP per capita lagged far behind the U.S., which opted for much larger stimulus packages during the recession.

[10:05:07]

The result was a slow burn malaise that eroded trust in the political class. Now look at Japan. Takaichi ran not on managerial calm, but on confrontation. She spoke in fiery tones about immigration even though Japan's foreign born population hovers around 3 percent, a fraction of Britain's. She warned of cultural erosion and social strain. She took a harder rhetorical line on China. She promised disruption in economic policy after decades of cautious incrementalism.

The electorate rewarded her with the largest majority the LDP has ever received. Part of the appeal is symbolic. Japan remains by global standards a patriarchal society. A woman leading the government is itself a rupture. The image signals change even if the party machinery beneath remains intact. In an era hungry for novelty, symbolism carries power.

There are real differences between Britain and Japan. Japan never experienced immigration on the scale that destabilized Western politics, nor did it embrace austerity in the European style. It did suffer from economic stagnation in recent decades that caused unease. But the causes and effects were different from the austerity induced stagnation that fueled Western anger.

These structural contrasts matter, but they may matter less today than atmosphere. Across advanced democracies, incumbents struggled at unusually high rates in 2024, a big year for global elections. Voters are restless. They are less interested in policy detail than in emotional validation. Restoration speaks to the head. Rebellion speaks to the gut. In this moment, the gut is winning.

Japan's prime minister has shifted the vibe. Despite her party's longtime dominance, she projects motion, disruption and defiance. Starmer projects steadiness and repair. In calmer times that contrast might favor Britain. In this moment, it does not.

Politics runs in cycles. The appetite for rupture may fade once its costs become clear. But for now, in countries as different as Britain and Japan, the mood is unmistakable. In an age of anxiety, voters prefer rebellion to restoration. As the Democrats look forward to the midterms, they should keep this in mind.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

This week, Donald Trump's border czar announced that the administration would be winding down its operation that has seen 3,000 ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis, arresting thousands and fatally shooting two American citizens. The images of brutality by masked federal agents during the surge were shocking.

What's behind the retreat and what does it say about the current administration?

Joining me now to discuss is "New York Times" opinion columnist Ezra Klein, who wrote an excellent recent column titled "Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself."

So, Ezra, we're all looking at the sort of dynamic of the second Trump administration which seems very different from the first. And you point out that there is a kind of blizzard of very provocative actions going on.

What do you think the strategy here is? And is it working.?

EZRA KLEIN, HOST, "THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW" PODCAST: From the beginning of the second Trump administration, there has been this idea of muzzle velocity that comes from a Steve Bannon interview from 2019, where he says, look, all we have to do is move so fast and do so many things that our opposition be that, the Democrats be that, the media be that, civil society can never find its footing.

And that's really what they have tried to do. They are constantly on the move. Every day is a completely new story I feel like right now covering this. You have weeks where we have three stories that should have taken months to cover and understand and process in another administration.

The problem with muzzle velocity, though, and this is something I wrote at the beginning of Trump's second term, is that you overwhelm yourself. You're not just overwhelming everybody else. The White House has limited bandwidth and unlike the rest of us they don't just have to pay attention to things, they actually have to manage events. They have to be in control of them. They have to shape them. They have to drive them.

And what they have is no real traditional policy process. They have a lot of different arms acting without anybody really knowing what's going on, without people conducting proper oversight. And a lot of it is blowing up in their face and in the country's face. Sometimes, as in Minnesota, with tragic consequences. Sometimes, as with the tariffs, are just raising prices, destroying their own numbers on affordability, but not actually achieving anything.

[10:10:03]

There's a lot happening, but when you kind of step back from the illusion of control and the illusion of velocity, you realize that they're having to back off on a lot of things. They're creating a lot of scandals and problems for themselves. Donald Trump is unpopular. Republicans are losing elections all across the country.

This is not an administration where their strategy of management and prioritization and execution is succeeding.

ZAKARIA: So you put it very well, Ezra. So the puzzle then is, as these numbers are going down, why do they persist? They do scale back a little. And I have a theory I want to ask you if you agree with, which is Trump seems to have decided that his resurrection after January 6th, after losing to Biden, came about because he stuck with his base.

Trump seems to think this is his secret power, that he stays with the base and the base never leaves him, and that's why he seems to be doing all these things that, as you point out, are getting very unpopular. I mean, he's way underwater in almost every issue, including immigration. So to me, the puzzle is, why is the guy who is normally very attentive to two things, stock markets and polls, still doing stuff that is very unpopular? And could it be what I'm talking about?

KLEIN: Let me meet your theory with another speculative theory. I have a theory that the Trump administration is the opposite of the Biden administration. Joe Biden, by, you know, late in his presidency particularly, was no longer a capable communicator, and his inability to lead the conversation, to communicate in public, to do the public leadership the president needs to do, creating the impression that no one was actually in charge at the White House.

But my reporting on the Biden White House is that there was a quite traditional policy process that the president was ultimately presiding over. I think the Trump administration is the opposite of that. I think Trump is such an aggressive, constant and capable public communicator, whatever you think of that public communication, that he gives an impression of being in control, that Biden was not able to give.

But his White House does not have a clear policy process. I don't think that he is presiding over things in the same way that other presidents typically have. And as such, I think that a lot is happening that is not running really through the preferences of even Donald Trump.

Trump's second term is full of highly ideological loyalists who are extremely good at manipulating Donald Trump himself through flattery, extremely good at manipulating Donald Trump himself by telling him what he wants to hear. People actually running things like Stephen Miller are hardcore ideologues who have the president's trust and know how to talk to him.

But what they really want to do is not remain on the right side of public opinion. They're not sensitive to the whim and will of the public in the way that Trump the showman is. They have a hardcore ideological agenda, often very extreme agenda, and they are pushing that agenda.

If Trump now says no to them, they will stop, but they're very good at making it so he doesn't say no to them. And so Trump is like the ceremonial head of this administration. I'm not saying he's never involved but the degree to which we see him on our television, I think is in some sense inversely related to the actual level of control and participation he has in his White House. ZAKARIA: But why do you think he -- Trump, he is very sensitive to

something like the stock market, right? He must be looking at these polls. Why do you think he isn't changing course?

KLEIN: I don't think he is that sensitive to the stock market. I don't disagree with you that he is sensitive to at least parts of his base, but how good the information he's getting is, which polls he is seeing and being fed, there is a fair amount of reporting that one reason he got very involved around Minneapolis was that he happened to not be in Mar-a-Lago that weekend because he was in D.C. for the premiere of the Melania documentary.

And so he was talking to different people than he would normally talk to, and getting a different sense of what was happening than he might normally get. I think it is easy to assume that Trump's habits are, and particularly the structure around him, is giving him a full sense of what's going on. But I'm not sure that's an assumption we should be making. I think a lot of people are feeding him bad information.

That is not to say, I want to be very clear about this, that Donald Trump does not support what his own administration is doing or that if he was getting good information, he'd be making good decisions. So I don't think either of those things are true. But I don't think that he is so on top of things that he is in a day-to-day way paying minute attention to what's going on. I think he's got a lot of advisers telling him everything is going great.

This is the most successful administration in history. You're on top of the world. I think to some degree he believes the people flattering him.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, how can the Democrats take advantage of Trump's unpopularity?

[10:15:02]

I'll ask Ezra that, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Ezra Klein of "The New York Times."

So, Ezra, then let's talk about the Democrats because this does seem like it's not going so well for Republicans, particularly looking at the midterm elections. But the Democrats do have the capacity to still blow this.

How should the Democratic Party play what appear to be Trump's growing weaknesses?

KLEIN: Look, Democrats have a couple of different problems right now. One, which is it going to be in the near term? There's a lot of things Donald Trump is not doing very effectively.

[10:20:01] What he is doing effectively is raising money because he has turned his administration into a pay-to-play operation and is getting huge amounts of cash from donors, from people who want his administration's favor, from anybody with business and in any way touches a decision the federal government makes. Trump has been very, very clear that the way you get favorable decisions is you donate to his various initiatives.

And so the Republicans are raising a ton of money, much, much more than the Democrats right now. So that's going to be one advantage they have going into the midterms. The Democratic Party's brand is also just quite bad. That remains an unpopular party. I think in a new CNN poll or poll I saw on CNN, you have a record number of Americans saying it's too liberal, which surprised me because the party is not doing anything particularly liberal at this moment, but their leadership is not proving that capable of changing the narrative around them.

So they're going to have to run very, very effective candidates and particularly in places like Alaska, where they have a very good candidate, Kansas, Iowa, et cetera. that fit those states and give them the chance of winning back the Senate. The one saving grace for the Democratic Party right now is that the midterms are very likely to be an aggressive referendum on Donald Trump.

And so for what we are seeing in basically every election that happened in 2025 and early intimations of 2026 is that when there is an opportunity for people to come out to vote, Trump's base is not really coming out. And the people who are affronted, offended, frightened by what he is doing are coming out.

So the Democratic Party can have a lot of problems. But Donald Trump, to the extent the election is about him, might solve a number of those problems for them.

ZAKARIA: But what about the dilemma that you see? I mean, you say that the poll says most Americans think the Democrats are too liberal. I think this comes out of, you know, people hear things like abolish ICE. Now these are being said by particular individual Democrats but it does feel like what ends up happening is the energy of the Democratic Party is on the left, is on a kind of populist left, defund the police, abolish ICE.

The place, the path to electability is in the mainstream but there isn't excitement and energy there. What to do about that?

KLEIN: I'm not exactly sure that's true. I mean, I don't think the Democratic Party is talking about defunding the police. I do understand the people that both abolish ICE make sense to a lot of people. I mean ICE is completely out of control. And I've also seen the polling suggesting that's not popular.

I think this does come down to candidates. One thing I am seeing across the country right now is there is a huge amount of energy behind individual candidates who for one reason or another are catching people's imagination, even if they are not all that liberal. Right? So James Talarico, the -- you know, who's running for Senate in the Democratic primary in Texas right now, is a good example of this. Mary Peltola in Alaska is maybe an example of this.

Rob Sand, who's running for governor in Iowa and is like a moderate Democrat who thinks we should not have a two-party system, is an example of that. He had a huge fundraising haul at the beginning here.

So the Democratic Party, until it has new national leadership, is not going to be able to dramatically change its national brand. That's going to be a big problem for candidates who are running in states where that brand is quite poor. But that puts all the more pressure on finding candidates who fit those states.

And so the perception of the Democratic brand can be an anchor for these candidates or if they're willing to run against it and have high profile defections and pick fights with it, it could be an advantage for them because it gives them something to run against or run against the Republicans on the right or the -- and they're running against the Democratic Party brand, or at least the parts of it that their constituents don't like on the left.

Now that's tough. It's tricky. It's politics. People don't do as often anymore as they once did. But it is by no means impossible. And certainly the National Democratic Party should be giving a lot of help to the kinds of and putting a lot of energy into finding the kind of recruits who can do that successfully. If Democrats are going to win, they're going to need to win in places that have voted for Donald Trump.

That's going to mean not running like a Democrat in a place that votes heavily against Donald Trump.

ZAKARIA: Ezra Klein, thank you. Fascinating conversation.

KLEIN: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: As we approach the four-year anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, are U.S. led peace talks turning into business deals? I'll ask Anne Applebaum of "The Atlantic" when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:56]

ZAKARIA: Next week will mark the four-year anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. And the war continues on the front lines and in Ukraine's population centers. That's where Russia has ramped up its attacks on civilians and infrastructure forcing hundreds of thousands to face extreme cold with very little heat and light.

Meanwhile, peace talks continue, but strikingly Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are not the ones doing the negotiating. Instead, it's mainly Trump's businessman pal Steve Witkoff and Putin's moneyman Kirill Dmitriev. Anne Applebaum is here to shed some light on all of this for us. She

is, of course, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and staff writer for "The Atlantic."

Anne, first tell us, what is this relentless attack on civilians about? It does seem like this is the big shift in Putin's strategy over the last six or eight months.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: So Putin is not winning on the frontline. He takes a little bit of territory here and there. He loses a little bit here and there, but he's not able to break the Ukrainian front line and instead has decided to destroy the Ukrainian power and energy infrastructure.

I think with the goal both of demoralizing Ukrainians and also to demonstrate to his own people, to the Russians, to the Russian military, that he hasn't given up his major goal and his major goal I'm afraid throughout all of this, and despite all the negotiations, his goal remains the conquest of Ukraine, the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia, the destruction of Ukraine as a nation and as a state.

ZAKARIA: And what do you make of Ukrainian morale? Because one does hear that they are now -- there are voices saying, we need to accept a deal. You know, they say Zelenskyy is talking about a referendum. Well, what do you think is the mood among Ukrainians?

APPLEBAUM: I mean, look for -- if you're living in Kyiv and it's minus 20 below zero and you don't have heat or electricity, you really, really want the war to be over. So, I can understand that Ukrainians are looking for some kind of trade off. And, actually, Zelenskyy has been saying for many months that he was ready to do that.

The issue is is that they can't end the war in such a way that it will restart immediately, or that it will allow the Russians to, as I said, achieve their main goal, which is still the destruction of the country. Remember that Ukrainians are when they -- when they fight, they're fighting for not just territory or land. They're fighting for their right to exist.

They know that Russian occupation means that, you know, police come in, they take over the cities, they kidnap mayors. They create concentration camps. And they can't allow that to happen to their country. So although they, I'm sure, desperately want the war to be over, they don't want to create a situation that will then be worse.

ZAKARIA: And what about these negotiations between Witkoff and Putin's money man? You hear some fantastic tales. Zelenskyy says that the Russians are offering a $12 trillion economic package. I don't even understand what that means, because Russia's GDP is $2.5 trillion so this would be an economic package to America. That is five times the total economy of Russia.

APPLEBAUM: No, it's an absurd amount of money. And some of the deals that we've heard about that have been leaked from the conversations between Witkoff and Dmitriev are also pretty absurd. You know, look, the United States had been investing in Russia for many years, you know, starting back in the 1990s.

So, we know what's available in Russia. We know what kind of deals are available and all kinds of businessmen who have been -- who've worked in Russia over the past decade have been saying, you know, don't be swindled, you know, they can't provide what they're offering, no deal in Russia is as good as you think it is.

But unfortunately, Steve Witkoff is not somebody who has any experience with Russia or obviously any experience with diplomacy. And I do fear that he has an idea that there will be some kind of U.S.- Russia pact, that he might benefit, or his son might benefit, or Trump's family might benefit, or that people around them will benefit.

I mean, it's a -- it's a really disturbing prospect or should be for all Americans, the idea that American foreign policy is being conducted by people who are not acting in the interest of the United States or of our allies or of world peace, but are really acting in the private interests of the people doing the negotiation.

And of course, Putin knows that Trump is vulnerable to that kind of offer and that kind of deal. And that's why he's -- and that's why he's continuing to make those suggestions. I just hope that there are enough people in the White House who will be realistic enough to know to refuse it.

ZAKARIA: You've reported on Moscow for 25 years now. You were one of the first western reporters to be there in the 90s, when all of that kind of crazy capitalism and the oligarchs were going on. What is your sense of the deals that Witkoff might be being offered by Putin?

APPLEBAUM: You know, Steve Witkoff and others in the Trump entourage are behaving very much like Russians. I mean, these are -- you know, this is a manner of behavior that the Russians learned, that they learned that if you can capture the state, if you can use the state for your own private interests you can become very wealthy.

ZAKARIA: Anne Applebaum, pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us.

APPLEBAUM: Thanks for having me.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, A.I. is getting smarter by the day, but do we know how A.I. thinks. The answer may surprise you, that's up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:39:42]

ZAKARIA: Last week, Anthropic's latest update to its cornerstone chatbot, Claude, sent major waves through the tech world and Wall Street. This A.I. model stunned with its improved ability to code, organize files and draft legal documents sending fear into many about the future of work as we know it and sending software stocks much lower.

[10:40:04] It's not just Claude. ChatGPT released a new much more efficient model the same day. As A.I. becomes an ever larger part of life, how much do we know about why these models think and behave in the way they do?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a staff writer at "The New Yorker." He spent months visiting Anthropic's headquarters to try to get to the bottom of that. Gideon, welcome.

First, explain to us do the people at Anthropic, and I'm using them as a sample, of course, do they understand just how wide ranging, you know, the kind of powers that they are creating are? Do they think, you know, they've gotten to where they can go or is there -- you know, is this just the beginning?

GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Well, one of the things that they very frequently like to say is that this is the worst that it will ever be. So even if it stops now like we have to take -- try to take stock of what it can and can't do. And they certainly have some ideas about how it works and what its capabilities are. But there's a lot about it that they and we broadly still really don't understand.

ZAKARIA: So, explain that. You know, there are these -- A.I. chatbots can now do extraordinary things. I mean, when I use them I'm struck by how much they have improved in the last two years and how the ones that you're using now, particularly the paid versions, are really extraordinary. What do you mean when you say that the people designing them don't understand why they work the way they work?

LEWIS-KRAUS: Well, because they're not like traditional programs that say if X happens, do Y. They're not explicit instructions that way. What they do is that they seek out patterns in huge volumes of data, and then they make inferences based on the regularities that they observe.

So, they're sort of like -- it's not too extreme to say that they're a little bit like children who are learning to generalize about the world, and they make generalizations based on everything that they have inhaled, which is virtually all written material on the internet. And then they are able to extemporize and create text or code or follow the patterns that they have observed in their training data.

And we don't always know exactly what that's going to mean. It means that they can finish sentences, but it also means that they have a particular nuanced sense of genre that they can continue narratives. And a lot of what they're doing is just is -- you give them a prompt and they are continuing as if they are an actor in a play.

ZAKARIA: So, when you talk to these people, you talk about how they are now trying to figure out Claude the chatbot's soul, not its brain, but its soul. What does that mean?

LEWIS-KRAUS: Well, I think that they mean soul pretty loosely. And what they at least internally refer to informally as the soul document. Once they cleaned it up and released it to the public, they called it the constitution. I think they were a little anxious about the potential misreading of the word soul, What they mean is its character, its fundamental orientation. The kinds of generalizations it has made about virtue because they have helped -- you know, what they have done is they've taken what's called a base model, which is just an undisciplined engine for the creation of new language.

And they have said we want you to behave in a particular way, that what you are good at is finishing sentences, that we give you the beginning of a sentence and you can finish it. And there are certain sentences that we're very happy for you to finish. And there are other sentences that for various reasons, we would prefer that you not finish. You know, sentences that are about potential biohazards, for example.

And so in the process of helping teach Claude their model which sentences are would be nice if it finished and which sentences it would be better if it would refuse. Over time it develops characteristics like human virtues and they will say or rather, they instruct it to adopt characteristics like human virtues because they are capable of generalizing. That is what they're good at.

They are good at finding patterns. And they will say, we want you to finish sentences in a way that conforms to our expectations of what an honest sentence would be, what a harmless sentence would be, and it continues from there.

So, it's not just a matter of, you know, kind of playing whack-a-mole, where every time it finishes a sentence in a way that we don't like, we wrap it across the knuckles. And every time it finishes a sentence we approve of, we pat it on the head. It's taking a step back and really doing something that's closer to kind of human pedagogy.

ZAKARIA: So you've spent about six months very closely watching, reporting, embedded almost in this -- in this company. Did it leave you more scared about the power of A.I., or did it leave you optimistic?

LEWIS-KRAUS: Well, this is -- I've been thinking about this a lot and I really had -- I returned each time to New York with a different feeling.

[10:45:03]

That I think the first time that I came back to New York, maybe last May, I came back with feelings of absolute terror. And then after a subsequent trip, I came back feeling some sense of the exhilaration that they feel being sort of at the cliff face of this stuff. And, you know, each -- I oscillated between despair and excitement and anxiety and confusion.

And one of the things that I wanted to get across in this article was that it's perfectly fine to have all of these different feelings. And part of what I wanted to do in this story was say to people like, this is even -- the people building this stuff have this range of emotions, and it's fine for us to have this too. We don't have to just figure out like one point of view to have about it.

ZAKARIA: Gideon, pleasure to have you on. Thank you.

Next on GPS, as many western governments toughen their immigration policies, one country is pursuing a far more relaxed approach. Can you guess where? I'll tell you all about it when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:38]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. Across the west, many governments are responding to voter anxiety over immigration with tougher measures. In the U.S., the Trump administration has kept up its immigration rates, often with deadly consequences. And in Europe governments from the U.K. to Italy have tightened asylum rules and expanded deportations.

But there is one notable outlier, Spain, which is moving the other way. Last month, the center-left government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced plans to grant legal status to up to half a million undocumented migrants. The move covers people who arrived before the end of last year, can prove five months of residency and have no criminal record. It gives them a residency permit that is conditionally renewable every year, but not immediate citizenship.

In most countries, this would be an explosive proposition. But in Spain, it's hardly new. Since the 1980s, the country has approved large scale legalization campaigns under both left and right wing governments. In The New York Times, political scientist Omar Encarnacion writes that Spain has historically resisted anti- immigration backlash because its national identity is fragmented. Strong regional identities in places like Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia make it harder for right wing politicians to rally the entire country against immigration through nationalist appeals.

The strongest case for Sanchez's new plan is economic. Last year, Spain's GDP grew by 2.8 percent, far outpacing France, Italy and Germany. Goldman Sachs has said that the boom has come from the strength of manufacturing, services like tourism, and crucially immigration. Foreign workers fueled a lot of the growth.

The OECD reports that they filled an astonishing 44 percent of new jobs last year. They've also been key in addressing shortages in low skilled sectors like hospitality, agriculture, construction, and care work. These young new workers matter hugely in the country that is, like many others in the west falling off a demographic cliff.

Spain's birth rate has fallen for decades and is now among the lowest in the world far below the replacement level of 2.1. This has created an elderly society that strains public services like health care and Social Security. But immigrants have helped to fill this gap and have been almost entirely responsible for Spain's population growth over the last few decades.

Immigrants won't solve the demographic decline, but they will at least postpone it. While many European nations struggle with absorbing migrants Spain has excelled. Why? It comes down to culture. More than 40 percent of migrant arrivals are Latin Americans who share the same language, often the same Catholic faith, and other cultural ties with Spaniards.

Jose Ignacio Torreblanca of the European Council on Foreign relations, notes that many Latin American migrants view Spain with pride as their motherland, thanks to long colonial ties, and have socially conservative views. This reduces the salience of an identity based backlash from the right.

But there are limits to Spain's liberal approach. As it grants legal status to migrants already inside its borders, it has also essentially outsourced migration control to security forces in other countries, like Morocco and Mauritania. This has pushed migrants to take more dangerous routes into Europe like the Atlantic crossing from west Africa to Spain's Canary Islands, where thousands drown every year, and it has created a two tiered immigration system. Latin Americans arriving in Spain by plane can find a path to legality. Africans trying to arrive by boat are more likely to face closed doors.

At home, Sanchez's approach on immigration has its political risks. His socialist party governs with a fragile coalition. Meanwhile, the relatively new far right party Vox, which is increasingly popular among young men, spreads narratives about what is called an Islamist invasion.

[10:55:00]

When the cost of housing rises and unemployment persists cultural anxiety can drown out even the most pragmatic economic arguments. Still, Spain's government has made a concerted bet that bringing people in from the shadows of the economy and into formal labor markets will pay off.

As Sanchez put it last week. We, as Western nations, must choose between becoming closed and impoverished societies or open and prosperous ones. Growth or retreat. Those are the two options before us.

The United States, another aging society, seems to have chosen its own path and lost track of the crucial argument that controlled legal immigration is an economic good. Spain's experience shows there is another way.

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)