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, the United States seems to be negotiating with Russia and pressuring Ukraine. How will Europe, now Ukraine's main benefactor, respond? I'll talk to Poland's deputy prime minister, Radek Sikorski.
Then on to important upcoming elections. First up, could Democrats take the US House and Senate? I'll ask the master statistician Nate Silver what he sees when he looks at the numbers.
Then Israel's parliamentary elections on Tuesday could take down Benjamin Netanyahu. What difference might a new leader make for Israel, but also the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank? I'll speak with an expert from Israel.
Finally, Malcolm Gladwell. He has looked at America's gun problem in a way only he can. It's crazy. And he has some interesting solutions.
But first, here's my take. Elon Musk picked the wrong moment to lecture Indians. Frustrated that Starlink had not been cleared to launch in that country, he accused the government of protecting Mukesh Ambani, whose telecom network Jio will launch its own satellite service. Musk cast himself as the champion of ordinary Indians against one of the country's richest men.
It backfired. India's government dismissed his accusation as baseless. An influential nationalist group close to the ruling party went further, demanding that Starlink be kept out of India altogether, citing national security. Media and online reactions were similarly hostile to Starlink.
Musk did not understand that in India, as in much of the world, trust in America is collapsing. Indians have watched as Donald Trump has discarded 25 years of bipartisan outreach to New Delhi in favor of cozying up to Pakistan and its de facto dictator, Field Marshal Asim Munir.
They have watched Trump essentially abandon Ukraine, where the military version of Starlink has been suspiciously restricted, thus crippling Ukraine's military response to Russian aggression. Were India to find itself in another crisis with Pakistan, would it want its armed forces to be utterly dependent on a US satellite system controlled by Trump and Musk?
After World War II, the United States pulled off something close to a geopolitical miracle. Japan and Germany became the second and third most powerful economies on Earth, yet neither sought nuclear weapons nor the ability to defend itself alone. They aligned their security policy with Washington and entrusted their ultimate defense to American soldiers and American nuclear weapons.
Think how strange that arrangement was. Great powers throughout history have acquired armies to counter the top dog. Yet America's allies agreed to depend on it for their survival. They did so not because America was invariably wise or generous, but because the entire international system thus created benefited the US too. American power was formidable, but American trust was priceless.
That trust is disappearing. A Pew Research Center survey conducted this year found that in 26 of 35 countries, China was viewed more favorably than the United States.
Look at Canada. Mark Carney has visited Beijing to rebuild commercial ties and move to bind Canada more closely to Europe, including through European defense financing. His efforts to loosen the dependence on America have earned his government sky-high approval ratings.
Even as many Western governments face populations deeply unhappy with their rule, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other American partners have suffered Iranian attacks in a war Washington initiated. Trump has not helped Saudi Arabia or Qatar directly despite his recent commitments to both, suggesting he would do just that.
Some analysts there have begun asking whether hosting American military bases makes them safer or puts them in danger. In August, Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact with Turkey and the nuclear-armed Pakistan.
In South Korea, the share of people who have favorable views of the US has fallen from 77% in 2024 to 45% this year. In Japan, the number has fallen from 70% in 2024 to just half. These societies still fear China and North Korea and still depend on the US. That is precisely the point. They need Washington, but no longer know whether they can trust it.
In Europe, Trump has repeatedly questioned whether he would defend NATO allies. Europeans have responded by boosting military spending, strengthening their own weapons industries, and seeking greater strategic independence. France and Germany have even created a joint group to discuss nuclear deterrence and France's arsenal. They insist that this is meant to reinforce NATO, not replace it. But the very discussion tells us how much has changed.
Trump's defenders say he's simply forcing wealthy allies to pay for their own defense, something previous presidents also demanded. Fair enough. But there is an enormous difference between asking your allies to shoulder more responsibility and telling them that your promise to defend them might be worthless.
The ultimate danger lies in nuclear weapons. In 1963, John F. Kennedy warned that the world might have 15 or 20 nuclear powers by 1975. More than eight decades after Hiroshima, however, there are only nine. Arms control treaties mattered, but more crucial was the American nuclear umbrella, which spared countries such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea the need to develop their own bombs.
That restraint is already weakening. An August survey found that 65% of South Koreans support acquiring nuclear weapons. A recent Washington Post report indicated that Saudi Arabia hasn't ruled out pursuing them. As trust in America weakens further, other wealthy nations will make the same calculation, and then we will move into a world of dozens of nuclear nations with all the uncertainty and danger that that brings.
Donald Trump believes he's making America's allies pay their own bills. He may end up making them build their own bombs. Go to fareedzakaria.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week, and let's get started.
The week began with President Trump telling reporters, "Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine." The day before, he vilified Ukraine's president on social media, saying Zelensky doesn't want to end this war and probably never did. As for Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, he met with both President Zelensky and President Putin this week and called President Putin a humanitarian.
To try to help us understand all of this, let us get the view from Ukraine's neighbor to the northwest, Poland. I am joined by that country's deputy prime minister, Radek Sikorski. Welcome. Radek, tell us what your reaction was when you watched what seems to be a fairly significant shift in the United States, which is now openly saying that Russia is doing more for peace than Ukraine.
Well, in Poland and Europe in general, we consistently think that to end the war you need to put more pressure on the aggressor, which is to say Vladimir Putin, and not on the victim of aggression. Because of course you can end every war by capitulating, but the conditions of ending the war matter, and Ukraine has to end this conflict with defensible borders and the kind of country to which people will want to return.
Does Europe have a strategy, a viable strategy, if the United States goes down this path, which seems to be less intelligence sharing, occasional curbing of the Starlink Star Shield? Is there a path for Europe? If you're not getting some of the weapons that you paid for from Washington, they're delaying the sale of them.
Remember that the United States has not been funding Ukraine since January last year. We fought the entire bill for sustaining the Ukrainian state and for weapons deliveries and for weapons production in Ukraine's vibrant defense industry. It also turns out that the frozen Russian assets are a card, and we have 22 packages of sanctions on Russia.
The biggest of which is that Russia has lost its most lucrative market for oil and gas, which is Europe itself. If you watched the UN Security Council a couple of weeks ago, Sergei Lavrov's rant against Europe suggested to me that they are beginning to realize that Europe is a factor both financially and in terms of security, and we demand a voice in how this ends.
People wonder whether Russia has aspirations beyond Ukraine, and many say they don't, and President Putin has sometimes said that. But you have pointed out that Russia is already waging a hybrid war of sorts against Poland and other European countries. Describe what you mean.
Well, hybrid war is attacks just below the threshold of an actual armed invasion, but it's kinetic, okay? And people are dying. We've had assassinations in Poland, in Britain, in Germany, elsewhere. We've had arson. We've had an attempted blowing up of a train on a high embankment, which wasn't derailed only thanks to the incompetence of the terrorists. We've had armed drones traversing Lithuania and being used at Leipzig airport.
We are a target daily of cyber attacks on our hospitals, on our financial system, on our energy system. We have incursions of drones. We had a Russian cruise missile exploding in Poland, which is to say with a warhead, plus the usual espionage and mapping of critical infrastructure on the sea. This is constant, and we know which particular unit of the GRU is doing it, and we know that they are planning to escalate.
Shouldn't Europe respond more forcefully to these what appear to be kind of Russian probes?
We don't do the kinds of things that the Russians do. You know, we don't have departments of wet affairs, as they call them, which is to say assassination squads. We don't send drones or terrorists into Russia because we are peaceful democracies. We would like ourselves and Ukraine to be just left alone, and for Russia to fulfill its security guarantees to Ukraine given both in the Budapest memorandum and in the bilateral border treaty. We think that our best response to Russian provocations is more help for Ukraine.
Radek Sikorski, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, sir.
Next on GPS, we are just over a week away from the US elections. Will Democrats take control of both houses of Congress? I will talk to the great election forecaster Nate Silver.
Early voting is underway across the United States in this year's midterm elections. There's a growing sense Democrats will not only retake the House, but could win the Senate, too. Is that overconfidence or is it backed by reliable polling? Joining me is the statistician and election forecaster Nate Silver, who has a Substack called Silver Bulletin. Nate, pleasure to have you on, and you've been very vocal on the issue.
Your model at this point says the Democrats have about a 75, 76% chance of winning the Senate and a 95% chance of winning the House. But what you say is that the data actually should point everyone in that direction, and everyone is being hesitant because they have been burned in the past. Explain that.
Yeah. Look, if you take a step back and think about what are the background conditions in this election, you have gas at $4.30 a gallon. You have a president with a 37% approval rating. You have a long history of the president's party doing poorly at midterms, including in 2018 when under President Trump, the GOP lost 41 seats in the House. You've seen high turnout in Democratic primaries all year. We can talk about the early voting data, too.
The hard place versus the rock, I guess, is that to win the Senate, Democrats have to win in some states that President Trump carried by double digits in 2024. So that's why in the House the polling would have to be very wrong, more wrong than 2016, for Democrats to fail to win the House. But the Senate, everyone's trying to guess, will this wave be big enough to inundate red states like Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Alaska.
But the reason people are being hesitant, because you're right, when you look at the polls these are narrow margins, sometimes within the margin of error, but the Democrats are leading in the states they would need to take the Senate. But what makes everyone worried is in '16 and '20 and '24, polls underestimated Trump's support, and you say they should have adjusted. But shouldn't they have adjusted after '16? Like obviously there is some almost inherent problem in the way the polling is done where you end up with a bunch of shy Trump voters who don't reveal their preferences. Is that fair?
I don't think it's fair to assume they'll be shy Kim Paxton voters or shy Roger Marshall voters. Republicans did not beat their polling in 2018 or 2022. The midterm polling was quite unbiased. And in the most recent statewide elections in 2025, Democrats did much better than their polling in New Jersey and Virginia, beating their polling averages by 5 to 9 points.
So the question is whether pollsters are making an extrapolation from a high turnout election when Trump himself is on the ballot to a medium turnout election where he's not. You know, I think the early voting data so far suggests that Democrats are turning out irregular voters. Republicans haven't yet. The young men that voted for Trump in 2024 probably haven't voted in this election yet. They may by November 3rd.
But it seems like if you're going to fit based on recent precedent, that you ought to give at least as much weight to the midterms where you had some problems in state-by-state polling, but you didn't have this systematic presidential year polling bias.
You looked at the issue of gerrymandering and you said it probably, again based on the current polling, gives the Republicans a very small advantage. There is also a possibility that if there is this stronger than expected Democratic wave, you could end up with the gerrymandering actually backfiring and hurting Republicans. Explain why.
So in Florida, Governor DeSantis drew a map that was kind of designed for a presidential type election year where, you know, we know now in presidential years that Republicans win Florida by 7, 8, 10, 12 points. If you were to have a blue climate where Florida is only slightly Republican, then a lot of safe R seats become lean R seats and the lean Rs become toss-ups.
Meanwhile, in Texas, Republicans, the whole reason why Trump urged Texans to redistrict was because they felt they had locked in permanent gains among working-class Hispanic voters in South Texas and West Texas. There are signs in the polls that those are reversing, too. And if that's true, then the gerrymander is neutered in Texas for the most part.
I should say Supreme Court decisions weakening the Voting Rights Act in states like Tennessee and Alabama and Louisiana, that is worth three or four seats for the GOP, but these seats weren't really designed to withstand a D plus 9 or D plus 10 climate or something like that, which is where we are now.
And when you look at this election, is it fair to say if somebody were to say to you, point to the two big numbers that you should look at? One would be the generic ballot where the Democrats are leading by a lot, you know, 9, 10, 11 depending on what you look at. And the other is the president's approval rating. And CNN's own Harry Enten has found it is the lowest approval rating for any president before a midterm election, worse than Harry Truman in '46, worse than Bush in '06. And in both cases, of course, that party lost both the House and the Senate.
Yeah. And look, the third number I'd look at is gas prices. So what if you had another tick up in gas prices before election day? That would, you know, anytime you pass a gas station, it's an advertisement for Democrats, basically.
Nate Silver, thank you. It makes us all so much smarter. Appreciate it.
