676. Has America Lost the Plot?

**Stephen Dubner** (0:00)
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Let me just say this up front. Predicting the future is hard. We once made an episode called The Folly of Prediction, episode number 41, if you want to hunt it down. The findings were clear. Most of us are much worse than we think at making predictions, and we're also much more confident than we ought to be. But that doesn't stop us from trying. Look at the huge success of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. We are always dying to know what might happen next. I am not immune from this desire. You probably aren't either. The one particular temptation is geopolitics. It is so complex and dynamic and important that it's hard to hold yourself back even if you know that your prediction is at best an educated guess. So you might as well get your geopolitical predictions from someone who is extremely educated in these matters. Someone like this.

**Fareed Zakaria** (2:07)
Fareed Zakaria, I work at CNN and write a column for The Washington Post and write books.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:13)
Zakaria is a foreign policy stud, a political scientist by training, a journalist by vocation, and a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is why we are having him on the show today for a third time. His last appearance was just after Donald Trump had been re-elected to the presidency, but before Trump took office. You did make some predictions the last time you came on the show.

**Fareed Zakaria** (2:37)
Uh-oh.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:39)
The second Trump administration, you said, it's not going to be as bad as people think. This is a country with a lot of checks and balances. You have institutions, you have bureaucracies, you have laws, you have rules. These all can't just be willy-nilly dispensed with.

**Fareed Zakaria** (2:51)
Yeah, that's how it was basically wrong.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:53)
A few months ago, Trump made one of his most unpredictable moves yet, and possibly one of the most consequential, too, a joint military strike on Iran with Israel. Fareed Zakaria did not think this was a good idea. As he wrote at the time, bomb and hope is not a strategy.
So what is the strategy? Today, on Freakonomics Radio, we asked Zakaria to look at some of his past predictions, and we forced him to make some new ones about how the war with Iran will end, about whether the US political system is due for an overhaul, and whether globalization is really dying.

**Fareed Zakaria** (3:32)
I think that the reports of the death of globalization are vastly exaggerated.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:38)
We also asked Zakaria to tell us something important that he has changed his mind about, because in a world that defies expectations, it's good to have an open mind.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:00)
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:16)
This conversation with Fareed Zakaria was recorded on May 20th. At the time, negotiations between the US and Iran were very much in flux, and depending on when you're hearing this, they may still be.
There's also a lot of flux in DC as well. I started the conversation by asking Zakaria how the second Trump presidency has compared to his earlier expectations.

**Fareed Zakaria** (4:40)
Dramatically different, mainly because the first term and the second term have been so different. We can see in retrospect that Trump didn't expect to win the first time around, got into office in a hurry, was somewhat nervous about the idea of governing, and in a way delegated authority to a series of people.
All these people, it turns out, act as great constraints on Trump. Gary Cohn tells us that twice, I think Trump wanted to do what he did with Liberation Day tariffs, and Cohn persuaded him not to. Jim Mattis has pointed out that Trump said he wanted to attack Iran, and Mattis said that's a really dumb idea, and explained why.