Leaders on Ukraine and Russia, Serbia’s President on Political Flux, Bill Gates on AI Risks

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Kelly Clarkson (1:00)

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Fareed Zakaria (1:16)

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 from New York.

Today on a special UN General Assembly edition of GPS, I talked to four key European leaders about how they view a world in flux.

First up, the president of Finland and the prime minister of Norway. Both nations share borders with Russia. How do they see the state of the war in Ukraine? I'll ask them.

Then France's foreign minister on how his country is working to free itself and its European partners from relying on what has become an unreliable partner, the United States of America.

And Serbia's president explains why his country recently gave a man known as the Butcher of Bosnia a hero's funeral.

Finally, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. I ask him what scares him about AI, whether it will increase inequality, and what jobs will human beings still be better at.

But first, here's my take. As the summit this week demonstrated, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are searching for ways to work together, despite the growing rivalry between the two countries. They might take a look at a striking, somewhat unnoticed case of quiet cooperation involving American and Chinese technologies. By now, the world has heard about the hugging face attack, in which in July, open AI agents broke into hugging face and leading American AI platform. What is less well-known is how this attack ended. Hugging face said it tried to use AI to analyze the incident and respond. But the typical American frontier models refused to help because their safety guardrails couldn't distinguish investigating a cyber attack from carrying one out. So hugging face turned to a Chinese model, GLM 5.2, developed by China's ZAI, which helped investigators understand the attack. To summarize, an American AI broke into an American technology company. To figure out what happened, the company ended up using a Chinese AI. Or consider what happened with the price of oil. The US has waged a war with Iran, one of the world's leading oil producers. Experts predicted that the price of oil would skyrocket even higher if the war lasted several months, many suggesting it would hit $150 a barrel. But that didn't happen. Why? The single biggest cause is probably that China, for its own reasons, chose to reduce its imports of oil by a staggering 4 million barrels a day, approximately. If not for that Chinese action, gas prices in the US would be far higher than they are today. In his excellent new book Darwin's Lock, Joshua Cooper Ramo points out that when developing his theory of evolution, Charles Darwin struggled to explain phenomena like altruism or self-sacrifice using purely competitive zero-sum logic. He came to realize that in a merciless environment, species often lock into cooperative arrangements and not as an act of kindness, but because mutual support is the only viable path to fitness. Something like that characterizes the US-China relationship. These two countries have spent four decades growing within the same economic and technological ecosystem. Supply chains, capital, research, manufacturing and markets became intertwined. This is true not just for America, but most countries in the world which have deep ties with China. In Washington and in parts of Beijing, people talk about a new cold war between America and China. But the analogy is misplaced. America and the Soviet Union were largely unconnected economically, technologically, culturally. But China and the US are deeply intertwined. And these ties can be severed only at great cost to both sides and the global economy.