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 the program, understanding the massive student protests in France. I'll ask The Economist's Paris Bureau Chief, what is behind the unrest? Then what happens next?
Then Kim Ghattas brings us the latest on Iran.
Then I'll talk about the ongoing battle for control of the Arctic with the FT's Rana Foroohar.
Finally, blockers. Those are some of the public servants who were targeted for removal by Elon Musk's DOGE because they were unwanted by the Trump administration. Who are they and what were they doing that made them targets?
Their stories don't get told.
Michael Lewis tells me some fascinating stories.
But first, here's my take. If you listen to some people these days, Washington should start planning victory parades. Quote, "We won, Iran lost, period," says CNN's Scott Jennings. Hugh Hewitt concurs, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page agrees the tide is turning. And they all have a point. The American military is getting oil from America's Gulf allies flowing through the Strait of Hormuz while choking off Iran's exports. This is a remarkable display of military ingenuity.
But it does not make the war a success. Remember how we got here. In June 2025, the US and Israel massively bombed Iran's nuclear facilities, and Donald Trump declared its nuclear program obliterated. Eight months later in February, they went to war again with far bigger ambitions. They attacked Iran's leadership, killing its supreme leader and many senior officials. Trump urged Iranians to overthrow their government. The objective was clear, regime change.
But the Islamic Republic survived, closed ranks around hardline generals, installed a new supreme leader, and unleashed the weapon it had long threatened to use, closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one fifth of the world's oil passes. After more than seven months of war, the United States is now engaged in a vast campaign to force Iran to stop blocking a waterway that was open before the war began.
Washington has mounted this vast operation to restore the status quo and is calling its progress victory. Consider the costs just to get back to where we were. According to the Pentagon, the tab has reached $45 billion, and the CBO estimates that even a low-intensity conflict will cost another $2 billion monthly. At least 19 American soldiers have died.
The US has likely used between half and two thirds of its inventory of certain sophisticated missile defense interceptors. Replacing them could take more than five years, and these are weapons America would need against China. By the end of June, at least six American warships had been diverted from the Pacific to the Middle East.
Since the war began, Brent crude oil prices have averaged around $100 a barrel, roughly 40% higher than before the war. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that the war's cost to the average American household as of July was about $1,000 in higher prices and interest payments. Americans have paid about $130 billion, of which much was for gasoline and diesel alone.
Higher diesel prices have jacked up the cost of trucking, farming, and food. Families heating their homes with oil could face bills 50% higher this winter. The damage abroad is staggering. Gulf states have seen their trust in Washington shattered. In addition, they face soaring shipping costs and collapsing tourism. Dubai's hotel occupancy plunged from nearly 85% in February to 23% in March.
Governments there must spend billions repairing infrastructure and building alternative routes around Hormuz. Energy importing countries, which means most of the world, have struggled paying the bills. During the Vietnam War, the US would regularly detail the massive damage it had done to the enemy, from weapons destroyed to body counts of enemy soldiers dead.
But the test of success is whether that military force makes the adversary cry uncle. So far, Iran has not surrendered. And there are reasons to think that more bombing will not change that reality. The fundamental problem with Donald Trump's approach is that he cannot decide whether he wants to change Iran's policies or its government.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrated the contradiction in September when he said the message to other countries was this is the end of the regime. Yet in the same interview, he insisted the goal was not necessarily to collapse the government, but just to pressure it into negotiations. Addressing the UN last month, Trump wondered whether he should make a deal allowing Iran to rebuild into a greater country or annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, quote unquote. Meanwhile, his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were negotiating with Iranian officials.
Washington was threatening to destroy the government while asking it to negotiate seriously. If Iran's leaders believe Washington intends to destroy them regardless of what they do, why would they make concessions? Their incentive would be to resist, inflict costs, and outlast America.
In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle and his co-authors argue that sanctions and strikes alone will not work. Meanwhile, back in France, students complain that their schools are underfunded, in some cases lacking adequate power supply or even lacking teachers themselves. Others complain that the reform of the national high school exit exam means longer, more intense school days. This is all transpiring while France is facing a rising debt crisis, which will make responding to some of the students' complaints very difficult. It is also transpiring during the run-up for presidential elections in April, in which the right-wing Marine Le Pen is leading the polls.
Joining me now is Sophie Pedder, The Economist's Paris bureau chief. Sophie, how unexpected are these? I mean, protests happen all the time in France. It seems like France has, you know, the president, the Élysée Palace, and then street protests, and those are the two forms of political activity in France. But how much was this kind of a complete bolt from the blue?
I think the way it snowballed was a big surprise because you can often have a protest at one school, and it doesn't actually spread anywhere else. But what happened was very, very fast after the beginning of the school term, most of the students sharing those videos on social media of the blockades that they were putting together, and it spread from the Paris region to big cities across France and then beyond. So, it has been surprising how fast it's spread.
I think it's also been surprising how violent it's been, and how visually distressing for a lot of parents and teachers looking at the schools, seeing police having the entrance halls going up in flames at some of these protests, with the violent clashes that have taken place between the police and the students. So, it has, I think, taken the authorities absolutely by surprise, and it's been particularly difficult to bring under control.
So, what is the answer to the kind of puzzle I posed in the introduction, which is France has the worst budget deficit and debt in Europe. It has a debt that's 120% of GDP. It has the largest amount of state spending, I think, in the whole OECD. And yet you see these videos of schools and they seem dilapidated and underfunded. What's going on?
Well, let me make a couple of points there. I mean, one of them is obviously some schools are in a state of terrible disrepair and there's no question about that. But if you can also visit some of the schools, I've been going to ones that are absolutely brand new and they have been built recently and are very well equipped. So, you know, it's important to put a bit of context on that picture.
On the budget, you're absolutely right. So, this is the real difficulty for France. And what I've been out on the streets talking to a lot of students this week, and one of them made the point to me that she was complaining about the fact that the education budget has been fairly flat while defense spending is the budget that's gone up. And obviously, all countries are under pressure to increase defense spending. That's part of what belonging to NATO means. That's part of what France has had to do in order to meet its NATO obligations.
So, it is a really difficult moment and there is some underfunding. If you look at spending per pupil for secondary, so high school pupils, over the last 10 years, it has not gone up. It's been very flat. And that has meant that there haven't been the resources that there probably should have been or could have been for the high school students.
It feels to me like looking at France's budget and spending, it spends an enormous amount on, you know, pensions and things like that, worker protections, which, you know, one of the reasons that people have been trying to do these pension reforms is if you raise the age of retirement, you solve a lot of that pressure on the budget. But that seems politically impossible, and Macron, who came in as a great reformer, has essentially surrendered and turned into a huge spender, right? So, at this point, Le Pen talks about the budget. Is there any prospect that anyone is going to actually cut some of the spending on, say, pensions so that you can fund the schools better?
Well, I would make a couple of points about that for you. One of them is that, yes, Macron was a big spender during the lockdown, the COVID period, and that was incredibly popular across the political spectrum. So, the problem was that it took him a long time to sort of wind down that spending. So, that was the beginning of the problem.
And the second is that after he dissolved Parliament in 2024 and called snap elections, he shrunk his own majority. He's got a small minority government. It's a hung Parliament, and that means it's almost impossible to even get a budget through. So, you're talking about cuts to budgets is one thing. Just getting a budget through that's acceptable across the political spectrum is incredibly difficult.
And as you said, he had to shelve what was a very important and hard-won fight on the streets. We had weeks and weeks of strikes and protests against his pension reform, which had raised the retirement age, has now been frozen as a way of securing the budget through Parliament. So, it is an incredibly difficult political equation to solve, and we have these very fragmented parliaments that are incredibly difficult to deal with.
So, France is under pressure at a difficult time, and what we haven't talked about is that there's an election coming up, a presidential election in six months, which makes it even more tense and even more sort of polarized politically.
All right, we will, of course, be coming back to you as that election draws closer. So, Sophie, as always, a pleasure.
It's a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you.
Next on GPS, what does one American academic's mysterious murder in the 1980s in Beirut have to tell us about the state of the Middle East today? My next guest has written a fascinating history. The journalist and author Kim Ghattas joins me next.
When you hear about Beirut in recent years, it's usually about death and destruction, the blast that rocked the city in 2020, or the Israeli air strikes against the city more recently. But this has not always been the fate of Lebanon's capital. It was once known as the Paris of the Middle East, a prosperous city, a travel hotspot, a place where the fashionable crowd went to see and be seen.
In 1955, the beginning of Beirut's golden age, a man named Malcolm Kerr was finishing his studies at the American University there. He went on to become the president of that university, a renowned scholar of the Middle East, and a trusted adviser to officials in Washington. But in 1984, nine years after a civil war began in Beirut, and the city was plunged into devastating urban conflict, Kerr was killed by two gunmen outside his office on the university campus.
The journalist Kim Ghattas has written a book about Kerr that also sheds great light on how Lebanon and the broader Middle East have found themselves in such turmoil today. Before we get to Malcolm Kerr, I want to ask you, in a sense, how did Lebanon go from being the Paris of the Middle East to where it is now, particularly in the last 20 or 30 years? Because there was the Shia, Sunni, Christian civil war of the '70s and '80s, but this is something different. And you said to me something just now which was striking and haunting. You said, "Southern Lebanon used to be occupied. It is now being obliterated." Explain what you mean.
Thanks for having me. Yes, Lebanon had a reputation of being the Paris of the Middle East, or Beirut had the reputation of being the Paris of the Middle East, but Lebanon is a small country that I describe as a playground and a boxing ring for the regional powers and international powers. And it has found itself at the heart of the US-Iran confrontation, of the Iran-Israel battle today as we see it unfold in the Middle East.
And Israel is obliterating large parts of South Lebanon. Six percent of the country, rather, has been destroyed. We still have at least 600,000 people displaced. That's a lot for a country of about five million. There's no clear sense of how this ends, and the Lebanese really feel trapped, as they often have, between the US and Israel on one side and Iran on the other.
The question I think on everyone's mind these days is, is Iran under enormous pressure? Is it going to buckle? Is it going to, you know, surrender in some way to American demands? You have an interesting prism because in a sense Iran controls Hezbollah, which is so active in Lebanon. What's your sense?
They are under more pressure in Iran than they've ever been before because it's not just economic, it's not just sanctions, it's not just proxy warfare. It is for the first time in the Islamic Republic's history a direct confrontation with America, with American bombings of the country, with Israel also participating. It's always been a shadow war in which America did not confront Iran directly.
And that combination of pressure, I think, is hard for Iran to sustain for a long time. We know that at the beginning of the war in February, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu thought it would be a quick war, an excursion. Within a week, the regime would fall. That's not what happened, and we're now six months in.
But I do also think that Iran has discovered, rather, that this war is lasting much longer than they anticipated. Because in their playbook, if you attack, if you bomb, America will withdraw, will pull back, will, you know, fold. And they're seeing now that President Trump, not necessarily out of strategy, but perhaps out of ego, is not folding. And I think that's difficult for Tehran to deal with.
Let's get to the book. I love the title, The Best Kind of American. So, explain why Malcolm Kerr, the head of the American University in Beirut, was the best kind of American.
He represented the best of America at that time, in the tradition of educators and missionaries who went to Lebanon, went to the Middle East, loved Lebanon. Malcolm Kerr was born in Beirut to parents who were on the university campus already, who had participated in relief efforts in the Middle East for the Armenians. He spoke Arabic. His children were born, some of his children, three of his kids were born in Lebanon. He met his wife in Lebanon.
And he was really devoted to the Middle East and to this country that he loved so much, which is why he took the mission of being president of the American University of Beirut, even though it was in the middle of a war. And things were changing under his feet and under America's feet, as the Israelis had invaded in 1982.
Within days, Iran had sent revolutionary guards to Syria and on to Lebanon to confront the Israelis in Lebanon. And with the arrival of US Marines in Beirut as well, all in the summer of 1982, it brings you a very volatile situation. And Malcolm Kerr found himself in the middle of that.
In the book, I raise the question that as the Israelis and the Americans and the Iranians all found themselves on Lebanese territory fighting it out, there were some in Beirut who began to think that unfortunately the best kind of American was a dead one.
And why he ended up dying, being assassinated, the whole story behind it, you're going to have to buy the book to understand. But it really is a riveting story and it does shed enormous light on what's going on. But a personal story as well. Kim Ghattas, wonderful book. Thank you for joining us.
Next on GPS, my next guest. President Trump has long touted his ambition to annex Greenland.
Greenland, Greenland, Greenland is a wonderful place.
But last month he appeared to settle on a far more modest goal when he signed a security pact with Greenland and Denmark, the country of which the island is an autonomous territory. The deal will expand America's military presence in Greenland. That's pretty much it.
My next guest argues that the president is in some ways right to focus on what he calls the northern frontier since the Arctic has become an urgent new arena for great power competition. Rana Foroohar is a business columnist at the Financial Times. She's the author of this excellent new book called Sea Change: America's New Great Game in the Arctic. It documents her 10-day trip aboard a US icebreaker in the Arctic Circle and then goes on to discuss the issue. Rana, such a pleasure to have you on again.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
What was it like to be in the Arctic? What is the thing that most struck you, you know, that you took away just personally from it?
