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Fareed Zakaria GPS

America's Next Steps in Iran; The Nuclear Question in Iran; The Geopolitics of the War with Iran; Interview With Center For Geoeconomic Studies, Council On Foreign Relations Director Edward Fishman; Interview With Authors Michael Lynton And Joshua Steiner; Interview With Financial Times Contributing Editor Kim Ghattas. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired March 22, 2026 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:32]

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, coming to you live from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, as the war with Iran spreads, gets more fierce and more complicated, we will look at the latest developments with a man who has made a lifelong study of the Islamic Republic of Iran for the government of Israel.

Also, major energy infrastructure in the Middle East is getting attacked. What will these attacks do to global energy prices, to other commodities? We'll explore.

Then a look at the other front. Lebanon fighting against Hezbollah with the reporter and analyst Kim Ghattas.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

Beneath the daily headline of strikes and counter strikes in the Middle East, we're witnessing something seismic. War is being utterly transformed. In the first week of Tehran's retaliation campaign, drones accounted for about 71 percent of recorded strikes on Gulf States, according to a CSIS analysis. The UAE alone reportedly faced 1,422 detected drones and 246 missiles in just eight days.

We could already glimpse many of these trends in Ukraine, but in Iran, the future of war has definitively come into view. Michael Horowitz of the Council on Foreign Relations says, "We are now in the era of precise mass in war."

For decades, precise, precision warfare meant a handful of Tomahawk missiles, stealth bombers or fighter jets. Now, it can mean a one-way drone built from commercial parts and launched in swarms. What used to require a great industrial nation's capacity can increasingly be assembled, adapted and scaled by much smaller states.

The economics of war are being turned upside down. A Shahed type drone often costs around $35,000. A Patriot interceptor costs about $4 million, which would buy over 100 drones. This is the new arithmetic of conflict. The attacker spends thousands. The defender spends millions. But the revolution is bigger than drones. It's really about a new military architecture. Cheap autonomous systems, A.I. assisted targeting, commercial satellite imagery, resilient communications, integrated sensors and cyber tools, all operating together.

The aim is not merely to strike. It is to compress time, to find a site and hit faster than the enemy can move, hide or recover. In an experiment last year, the Air Force said that machines generated recommendations in under 10 seconds and produced 30 times more options than human only teams.

The old model of military supremacy relied on exquisite systems, magnificent, costly, slow to produce, painful to lose. But they are no longer enough by themselves. The side that wins tomorrow's wars may not be the one with the single best platform. It may be the one that can feel enough good platforms cheaply enough, quickly enough, and networked them intelligently enough.

Lots of good stuff will be small numbers of great stuff.

Ukraine remains the great laboratory of this new age. Out of necessity, it has built a model of adaptation at wartime speed. Ukraine's Sting intercepted drone costs about $2,000, flies up to 280 kilometers per hour, has downed more than 3,000 Shaheds since mid- 2025, per its manufacturer, and is being produced at more than 10,000 a month, according to Reuters. One Ukrainian test pilot said that learning to fly it takes only three or four days for those who can already operate drones.

And then there is the software side. Ukraine has opened access to its battlefield data so allies can train drone A.I., which will boost pattern recognition and target detection capabilities.

[10:05:10]

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov says the country now possesses a unique array of battlefield data that is unmatched anywhere else in the world, including millions of annotated images gathered during tens of thousands of combat flights. In other words, the war's most valuable output may not just be hardware. It may be data.

This is why the implications stretch far beyond Ukraine and the Gulf. Ukraine's top commander says Moscow is now producing 404 Shahed type drones every day, and aims eventually for 1,000 drones a day. By contrast, Lockheed Martin produced about 600 Patriot interceptors in all of 2025 and hopes to scale that to 2,000 by 2027.

Remember, that's 1,000 drones a day versus 2,000 interceptors a year. The contrast tells the story. The problem is no longer simply technological sophistication. It is industrial scale, software integration and the speed with which lessons from the battlefield are turned into mass production.

There are many deeper implications of this revolution in military affairs. With drones out there, the battle is everywhere and soldiers will not get a respite. With human beings far from the battlefront, war might become easier to contemplate, but also easier to deadlock. And with these deadly weapons easy to produce terror groups, drug cartels and criminal gangs can wage the kind of war that was once the domain of organized armies with arsenals.

In 1991, the Gulf War taught the world that advanced technology could make war precise. In 2026, Iran is teaching the world something more consequential. Precision will now be mass produced. The countries that prevail will not simply be those with the finest platforms. There will be those that can combine small numbers of exquisite, expensive weaponry with vast numbers of cheap drones.

Human judgment will over time give way to computer algorithms. That is the future of war. And it's arriving faster than most of us imagined.

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

Last night, President Trump warned that the U.S. will, quote, "hit and obliterate" Iran's power plants unless it fully opens the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. Iran dismissed the ultimatum, with its state media saying, "Tehran would retaliate against any such attack by striking American infrastructure in the region."

I'm joined now by an expert who has studied the Islamic Republic for much of his career. Danny Citrinowicz served as the head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence. He's now a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv based Institute for National Security Studies.

Danny, welcome. I've been reading your X posts, really they are many essays, with great interest and appreciation. So let me ask you, what do you make of this situation now where Donald Trump has essentially escalated but it seems to me he's placed himself in a box because he now -- something, you know, has to happen in 48 hours. And if the Iranians don't do what he's asking, he then has to act. Where does this go?

DANNY CITRINOWICZ, SENIOR RESEARCHER, INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES: Well, first, Fareed, thank you for having me on your show. And greetings from Tel Aviv. Definitely the President Trump tweets highlight the fact that we are approaching a decision point. And for the U.S., unfortunately, we don't have good options, only bad options. President Trump can decide to fulfill the ultimatum and attack the Iranian facilities, the infrastructure.

But then obviously the Iranian are going to retaliate not only against infrastructure in the Gulf States, the electricity one, but also, for example, desalinization factories. So we are approaching a severe expansion of the war, or it can decide not to implement the ultimatum and stop short of this war and declaring win and try to make some sort of an agreement with the current radical Islamic Republic that is much more radical than it was from the get-go, from the beginning of the war.

So actually, we are facing a decision point for the president because Israel will follow the president, the decision, and will have to decide, and as I mentioned, no easy solutions here.

[10:10:06]

ZAKARIA: So you're right, the escalate solution is complicated. And the sort of look for the off ramp is complicated. But on the escalate, it does seem to me that what this will produce is inevitably some Iranian retaliation, which is going to then drive the price of energy even further up. So I don't understand the strategy because if the goal here is to try to open the Strait of Hormuz to lower the price of energy, what you're actually doing has a very substantial chance of raising the price of energy. Am I wrong?

CITRINOWICZ: No, no, you're absolutely right. And I think it highlights the fact that, again, this campaign was based on a flawed understanding regarding Iran. President Trump thought that it's like Venezuela. You can threat, you can kill Khamenei, you can find a Delcy Rodriguez, Iranian Delcy Rodriguez, but at the end of the day, Iran is not Venezuela, and they will retaliate. They won't absorb, they won't capitulate in any way or form.

So this is a problem that we are facing that I think still the administration and President Trump do not understand Iran, and this current regime right now is definitely suffering but is holding on and thinking with the use of the war of attrition from the drones and the missiles, he able actually to find herself in a better situation than he was before the war. So if President Trump will decide to implement what he threats, nothing will get open.

No Hormuz Strait will get open, and Iran is going to retaliate. So again, it's like, in a situation that you should think whether you want to implement your ultimatum and then suffer the consequences and not doing anything, but still Hormuz Straits will be closed for U.S. shipping and tankers.

ZAKARIA: And what about if they take the option of trying to go for an offramp? If the president declares victory, here the problem is the Iranians have to also agree. They get a vote in this. What is your guess? If the president were to say, tomorrow, I've achieved my goals, I've said I was going to degrade their army, it's degraded, we're stopping? What's likely to happen there?

CITRINOWICZ: Well, I can say one thing. It's not going to happen. From the Iranian perspective, we are not going to return back to the days of June when President Trump said we are stopping and they stopped. The Iranian want to change the calculus, the situation, the conditions on the ground. They want to get some sort of guarantees that the U.S. won't strike again.

Same thing goes to Israel. They want to have compensation for their losses and everything related to the fact that they want to kick out the U.S. president from the region. Now, the problem that we have, that this regime is much more radicalized than before. I don't -- I'm not a fan of Ali Khamenei, but he was the balancer of the system itself. Now we have people like Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the IRGC, Ali Abdolhayi, the commander of Khatam al-Anbiya.

And those people are very extreme. So if Trump thinks he can negotiate with them, I think he should rethink itself because eventually they're not going to compromise on anything. So if Trump will stop today, the Iranians, I'm not sure they're going to attack U.S. forces, but definitely they'll continue blocking the Hormuz Strait trade goes without saying.

ZAKARIA: All right. Stay with us, Danny, and you stay with us, please, because I'm going to ask Danny why he says that the result of this conflict is likely to mean a nuclear armed Iran, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:17:54]

ZAKARIA: I'm back with Danny Citrinowicz, who served as head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence. He joins me from Tel Aviv.

Danny, you say that one of the possible, probable outcomes of this conflict will be an Iran that decides to race toward building a nuclear weapon. It's never done that before. It's always stopped short. It's always stayed kind of one or two feet before that red line. Why do you think they'll now make a dash for it?

CITRINOWICZ: Yes. In order to understand that, let's a little bit do a recap on the Iranian nuclear strategy. Until 2003, Iran wanted to build a nuclear bomb. 2003, Khamenei, the father, forgo that option and actually tried to bring Iran to a threshold state on enrichment without crossing the Rubicon. He was very afraid of that. That is why he issued a fatwa or religious order, saying that you cannot develop a nuclear bomb.

When he's dead, the fatwa is dead, meaning that what we have now is young, radicalized leader, name of Mojtaba, the son, want to avenge the death of his father, his mother, his wife, his daughter. And he has behind him he's controlled by the IRGC, the most extreme element in Iran. And they see right now that they need something else in order to build a deterrence, not missile, not everything related to Hezbollah or Shiite militia, no proxies will defend Iran in the future.

They need to have the ultimate card, and with the 440 kilos for 60 percent that is buried in Isfahan or elsewhere, they have the ability to do so, at least reaching the fissile material of 90 percent. So I'm saying that the war that actually meant to prevent Iran from crossing the threshold actually might be the war that actually will push Iran beyond the threshold towards a nuclear bomb.

ZAKARIA: Danny, let me ask you this. There are reports that President Trump was given some briefings, for example, by the Defense Intelligence Agency, that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed. And apparently he seems to have either not cared or not prepared adequately.

[10:20:02]

But Israel has been preparing for this conflict for a long time. Israel knows specific tactical intelligence perfectly. But how is it that Israel seems to have misread the regime, misread the response? If Bibi Netanyahu did tell Donald Trump that this regime will collapse, you know, that you will have people welcoming you on the streets, how did Israel -- did Israel get this wrong? What explains Netanyahu's eagerness and his calculation that this regime would collapse within a day or two?

CITRINOWICZ: I think the problem wasn't operationally. I think the IDF and Central Command working amazing together, have operational achievement that we shouldn't underestimate that. But the problem was strategically. I think Netanyahu and Trump really thought that if you decapitate Khamenei, the regime will collapse. They didn't think what will happen next. So this is why we don't have offramps. We don't have a strategic way out of this escalation.

So I think it goes back to the float understanding regarding Iran. And I must add one other thing regarding that. Intelligence wise, you can know where the leaders are. You can know where their deputies are, but sometimes you can see the trees, but you cannot see the forest, meaning that even if Israel has an amazing operational intelligence on Iran, I don't think strategically we understand how the Islamic Republic is actually working. And this has led to our problematic situation right now in the war itself.

ZAKARIA: And so what do you think is the most likely outcome, Danny, at this point? Is it an escalation or is it Trump taking an offramp?

CITRINOWICZ: I think that we are -- we probably will know in the next 48 hours. If President Trump will decide to attack the infrastructure in Iran, it's going to get ugly in a way things are going to escalate. And I don't think -- I find it very hard to see the end of it because things will be very bad in terms of the influence on the economical market, on the oil prices and things like that. Because once Trump will hit that, then gloves are off, no red lines and everything will escalate.

If he'll decide to hold off, and rethinking about that, maybe there is a way for offramp, maybe through some third people or countries that actually will mediate between Iran and USA, for example Oman or Qatar, maybe some sort of political offramp. I think we are getting close to this decision. But if President Trump will decide to hit the infrastructure, there is no way back from this decision.

ZAKARIA: Danny Citrinowicz, thank you so much, sir. Really, really helpful.

The U.S. has tried carrots and sticks with Iran in order to tamp down the skyrocketing price of oil. Will any of this work? I'll explore that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [10:27:23]

ZAKARIA: The White House is growing increasingly alarmed at the skyrocketing price of oil, especially in an election year. Trump's threat to obliterate Iran's power plants if the country doesn't open up the Strait of Hormuz can be seen as a sign of that concern. Another indication of the rising panic, the decision by the U.S. on Friday to pause sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that are already at sea. A clear attempt to bring down oil prices.

Joining me now is Edward Fishman, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former State Department official, and author of the excellent book "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare."

It feels like we are literally watching a chapter from your book play itself out. So explain to us, this is the most bizarre thing. The United States is waging war against Iran. It is trying to deprive it of all the resources it can get. And now it has essentially issued a waiver to all the sanctions, which would give Iran 10 times as much money as the Obama nuclear deal gave Iran. Why is it doing this?

EDWARD FISHMAN, AUTHOR, "CHOKEPOINTS": It really is a remarkable development, and it shows that Iran's strategy, which has been to retaliate by waging war on the global economy, by showing the world that it can control the Strait of Hormuz and can push up oil prices over $100 a barrel or even more, that it can actually get the Trump administration to do wild things, right? Two weeks ago, we saw them ease sanctions on Russia and now on Iran.

The thing I worry about this, Fareed, Iran now has gotten more sanctions relief from closing the Strait of Hormuz for a couple of weeks than it got for all of the nuclear concessions it made under the Iran nuclear deal. And if you think about the incentive that gives to Iran, it's only going to incentivize them to attack more energy infrastructure, to disrupt shipping even more, to do everything it can to push oil prices up more, to get more concessions from the United States.

ZAKARIA: You point out that, I mean, we may be just at the beginning of an oil price spiral, because if you look at, somebody pointed this out to me, if you look at Brent crude, that's sort of the paper speculation of people trading. But if you look at what oil is actually selling for, the barrels of oil in Asia, they're selling currently at $160 a barrel.

Prices could keep going north, right?

FISHMAN: Oh, definitely. I mean, in some ways, it's surprising that oil prices haven't gone up more. We're around $110 a barrel right now. But you've seen, you know, people who are running businesses like the CEO of United Airlines saying they're already preparing for $175 a barrel, which would be by far the all-time record, which was set in 2008, which was $147 a barrel. I think in some ways, the markets have been anticipating TACO, you know, Trump always chickens out. That basically because the markets have been going haywire Trump would back down and try to declare victory.

[10:30:00]

The problem was that acronym was created for tariffs. And with tariffs, Trump can unilaterally suspend tariffs just with the stroke of a pen. Say these tariffs are off for the next 180 days. With this war the reason oil prices are high is because the Strait of Hormuz is blocked --

ZAKARIA: By Iran, right.

FISHMAN: Who's blocking the Strait of Hormuz? It's Iran. It's not the United States.

ZAKARIA: So, the other huge beneficiary of this, in fact, probably the number one beneficiary of this is Russia, right?

FISHMAN: I would agree with that, yes. I mean, Russia was under very significant strain from oil sanctions. Last year in October, Trump imposed sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil. They're the two biggest oil companies in Russia. He also imposed a ton of pressure on India, in particular, to try to get India to reduce its purchases of Russian oil. And this was working.

By February, so just last month, Russia's oil revenues were the lowest that they had been since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. And their oil was actually selling at a $30.00 discount to Brent. So, for instance, if Saudi oil was selling for $65.00 a barrel, Russian oil was selling for $35.00 a barrel. The same molecular oil but $30.00 less.

As soon as Trump eased those sanctions it's now -- Russian oil is now selling at a premium to Brent, $5.00 more. So, they're actually making around $150 million to $200 million more each day. So if you think about that in the context of the Ukraine war, where it really is, which side can sort of outlast the other, this gives Putin a tremendous amount of runway is only going to prolong the war in Ukraine. So it's a huge, huge negative consequence of Trump's decision to attack Iran.

ZAKARIA: As I say, it feels like we're just living the chapters in your book. Because the other thing I've been struck by is it's not just oil, it's natural gas which -- with oil there are other ways you can get around, pipeline in Saudi Arabia. Natural gas this is it. This is the way you get natural gas out to the world. So, much of Asia and Europe rely on that.

It's apparently stuff like helium, like sulfur, which you need to build computer chips. It's the agricultural products that will go into the Gulf states. They are big importers. So now there's, you know, global markets of agriculture getting screwed. It feels like this -- you know, this is like a butterfly effect times 100.

FISHMAN: That's right. And look, the reason I called my book "Chokepoints" is because chokepoints are parts of global economy where one country has a dominant position, and there are few, if any, substitutes. The reason they exist is because of globalization. If we didn't have a global economy, we wouldn't have these single points of failure.

What we've seen with the Strait of Hormuz, we all know 20 percent of oil, 20 percent of liquefied natural gas goes through that chokepoint every day. But as you say, one third of the world's helium, which you actually need for things -- more than party balloons, you need them to actually produce semiconductors. These chips that we're relying for artificial intelligence, one third of the world's fertilizer.

So, we could be dealing with food crisis. If this crisis doesn't end soon in Iran, it does show that despite the fact that we have moved into a period of more economic fragmentation, we're at the beginning stages of that, and we still live in a deeply, deeply integrated global economy.

ZAKARIA: Which we are going up for a war of choice that nobody can really still explain to me why we got into. Next on GPS, we turn from Iran to another front in this Middle Eastern conflict, Lebanon, where Israel's bombing campaign has displaced more than a million people in three weeks. I'll be back with the Beirut based journalist Kim Ghattas.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:38:24]

ZAKARIA: In 2014, Michael Lynton, then the CEO of Sony Pictures, faced widespread criticism after greenlighting a controversial comedy film about a plan to assassinate North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LIZZY CAPLAN AS AGENT LACEY: You two are going to be in a room alone with Kim.

JAMES FRANCO AS DAVE SKYLAR: We got the interview.

CAPLAN: The CIA would love it if you could take him out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: His decision resulted in a massive hack on Sony's systems by a group with suspected ties to North Korea. One of the worst cyber- attacks in corporate history.

Two decades earlier, in 1994, Joshua Steiner, then chief of staff to the treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, found himself the subject of intense scrutiny when his personal diary became the central focus of investigations into the Whitewater scandal. What do these two stories have in common? Well, they were both career defining mistakes, and both mistake makers are ready to talk about their errors.

Michael Lynton and Joshua Steiner have written a fascinating new book, "From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You." They join me now.

Michael, to me, the most revealing part about the book in some ways is you owning up to why you greenlit a movie that you had, you know, would -- normally you would have gone through a whole process.

MICHAEL LYNTON, CHAIRMAN, SNAP: Right.

ZAKARIA: But you greenlit this off the cuff spur of the moment. And knowing you, that's very unlike you.

[10:40:00]

Why did you do it?

LYNTON: Well, so that's really what this book is about. It's about mistakes. And it was Josh's idea originally when he came to me and said, you have a mistake -- you made and you haven't really discussed it with me. Josh had a mistake as well. And the distinction was between that and a failure where people come together and they make a serious decision that doesn't work. Mistakes you do in the moment and they're very emotionally charged. And that was the case here.

Normally, in making a movie or rather deciding to make a movie, you'd have everybody around the table finance, marketing, and you'd have a very thoughtful discussion. In this case, we were in a competitive situation with another studio, and so we agreed that after the read through, we would make the decision in the moment. I was the last person who was not on the fence about it. And I was so enthusiastic to be part of that crowd that I jumped in without enough deliberation and said yes to it.

ZAKARIA: In your case, I'm not sure it was a mistake in the sense that, you know, you wrote a diary -- to briefly summarize you wrote a diary about what was going on in Washington. It got subpoenaed, and the Republican opposition used, you know, literally lines and phrases within it to claim that the Clinton administration had been, you know, not telling the truth about Whitewater. It's also very arcane.

But my point is, what happened to you, it seems to me, is you had this diary. Because of the intensely polarized situation you were in, it got thrown into the more of that polarization. What was your mistake?

JOSHUA STEINER, PARTNER, SSW PARTNERS: I think there were at least several embedded there so we could spend a lot of the show talking about it. But let me just pull out a couple.

You know, for generations, people have kept diaries and politics and they're super helpful to, you know, historians and other politicians to learn from those mistakes. But they understand the context in which they're writing. And so, the diary that I kept was the same form of diary that I kept when I was backpacking through Asia and when I was a young man. And that's just not appropriate when you're writing about things which are as politically charged or potentially under investigation like Whitewater.

So, a diary. OK. What I wrote in it? Not so great. So, context matters. And so I think the problem with my diary, OK, to keep one, the wrong kind to keep in Washington.

ZAKARIA: The most famous -- I mean, your episode was one that for young politically minded people was -- you know, was seismic. Like we all watched it. And there's this moment where you sort of have to say to the senator that you lied to your diary.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEINER: I made no effort to be inaccurate, Senator. But I want to be clear that I was not attempting to be precise or construct an exact narrative.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Was that the hardest moment?

STEINER: It certainly wasn't a comfortable moment. And you can see even now, as I pause and think back and my minds running through all the uncomfortable moments. So, there were plenty of them.

I think one of the things we learned, however, from this was that every mistake is a three-act play. There's what happens before the mistake. And that was me not really understanding the context in which I was operating.

There's the decision you make at the time to keep a diary, not so great. And then the third act is really important. And one of the things we really stress is if you don't look at the third act, that's a whole new mistake.

So, I grew up in New England where the expression was repressed for success. Right? And so after this whole thing happened, after the seismic event, I just tried to park it away and bury it, and it was buried under deep levels of shame and embarrassment. And I never talked about it.

And one of the great things about working on this project with Michael was just to get it all out there. I mean, in a way, this is an intense form of exposure therapy. So, we're very grateful to you.

ZAKARIA: The end of the book is basically --

LYNTON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- how not to make mistakes.

LYNTON: There are some examples of that. Yes.

ZAKARIA: Which seems -- it seems to me a very, very useful thing for everybody to know. So, how does one not make mistakes?

LYNTON: I mean, there's a series of suggestions and -- some formal, some not, but you know, some of them are quite obvious. One of them is just take a pause.

You know, we always have this notion that we have to do it in the moment. But there is this old rubric where when you write an angry letter or now write an email, don't send it in the moment, wait and see how you feel later. So, that's one version of it.

Another version of it is try and talk to somebody else before you make that decision, because you get very much in your own head and to have somebody else to reach out to.

ZAKARIA: Well, if you don't want to make mistakes, not nearly as big as angering Kim Jong Un, read this book. It really is super.

Next on GPS, we'll bring you the interview we promised you about Israel's other war with Hezbollah. Kim Ghattas coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:49:31]

ZAKARIA: Just two days after the U.S. and Israel started their war with Iran, the Lebanon based Iran backed militia Hezbollah began firing missiles into Israel reportedly in retaliation for Israel's killing of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. This opened or reopened a second front of war for Israel which has since launched a massive bombing campaign targeting Hezbollah and even sending in limited numbers of ground troops into Lebanon. Israel has issued evacuation orders affecting large swaths of Lebanon and at least 1,000 people have been killed in that country.

[10:50:07]

Joining me now is Kim Ghattas, a Beirut based journalist and contributing editor for "The Financial Times." Kim, we hear these numbers, a million people displaced. And we see the pictures. You were just there. You've just left. What is life like now in Lebanon for its people?

KIM GHATTAS, DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, COLUMBIA'S INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL POLITICS: Fareed, thanks for having me. I left because I have to be in the U.S. to teach at university, but my heart is very much in Beirut, which is going through a second war with Israel in just under two years. That's a lot to bear for a country where the finances, the economy have collapsed, where there are now a million refugees internally displaced, that's a quarter of the population, where the state is stuck between Israel which is heavily bombing southern Lebanon, destroying villages, destroying infrastructure, destroying bridges.

They just blew up another bridge an hour ago in an effort, it seems, to disconnect the south from the rest of the country, and stuck also between Israel, as I said, and Hezbollah, which is participating in a war very much driven by Iran, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a group that is -- at the same time as it's fighting Israel, threatening the government because the government has offered to negotiate with Israel to try to bring this to a ceasefire.

So, that's a lot for a small country. And it is heartbreaking to see people sleeping on the street, on the floor, in schools. The state doesn't have much capacity to help and support, and there isn't much aid coming to the country.

ZAKARIA: And what is the attitude of people to this Israeli campaign? I mean, I understand that there is some anger at Hezbollah for dragging Lebanon into this. But I can't imagine that when Israel is bombing them from the skies they're looking up and saying, thank you to Israel. What's the -- what's -- what is the nature of the emotional reaction of most people?

GHATTAS: I think across the country there is a lot of despair. This is the sixth Israeli military campaign against Lebanon since 1978. And there seems to be a lack of understanding in Israel that what they call mowing the grass is not going to resolve the problem and bring security to Israel and to its northern border. At the same time there is, as I said, anger against Israel for continuously starting these military campaigns against Lebanon. There is also certainly anger at Hezbollah amongst many, many Lebanese, including even in the Shia community.

But as you said, Fareed, there is not going to be an uprising or a popular movement against Hezbollah while Israel is bombing the country. I do think that it is very courageous, even if it's still somewhat divisive of the Lebanese government, to step up and say, we do not want to be a playground, a battleground for Iran and Israel.

They have taken steps that are seen perhaps as too little, too late by Israel and the United States, but they are historic. And what they've done is they've declared Hezbollah's military and security activities to be outside of the law. They've asked the Revolutionary Guards of Iran to leave the country, and they have offered these negotiations.

The terms are still unclear, but it is a historic first, which the Trump administration should absolutely seize to try to see if they can have some kind of diplomatic success in the Middle East as we see the rest of the region diving deeper into this conflict.

ZAKARIA: And what do you think happens to Hezbollah with this, you know, massive campaign against it? I do notice, you know, Israel launched this massive war against Hamas provoked by the October 7th massacre, of course, and destroyed all its leadership.

But now when you look at Gaza and you look at where most Palestinians live in Gaza, they're ruled by another Hamas, you know, leadership. You cut you kill 100 of the leaders and then, you know, a new hundred grow. Is that what's going to happen with Hezbollah in Lebanon?

GHATTAS: Fareed, in November 2024, when a ceasefire was reached after two months of war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel's assessment was that the group was decapitated out of action. And what we saw is that they are still very much capable of hurting Israel and launching rockets, because there is no way out of this without a long term ceasefire or armistice or some other kind of agreement between Lebanon and Israel.

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What Israel is doing right now is going to breathe new life into Hezbollah, give it renewed raison d'etre, especially if Israel occupies parts of southern Lebanon. Or as we're hearing in some parts of Israeli media and political circles, this idea that they could, you know, set up settlements in southern Lebanon. I don't think they understand the geography.

So, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu says he has dreamt of this regional war for 40 years. It is not going to bring security, neither to the region nor to Israel. And there is only one way forward which is to try to have these military successes, if that's what they want. But then you must follow up with diplomatic and strategic thinking.

ZAKARIA: Kim Ghattas, always a pleasure. Thank you for all -- to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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