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.

Farid Zakaria, I work at CNN and write a column for the Washington Post and write books.

Zakaria is a foreign policy stud, a political scientist by training, a journalist by vocation, and longtime 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. Uh-oh. 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. Yeah, I'd say it was basically wrong.

A few months ago, Trump made one of his most unpredictable moves yet, and possibly one of the

most consequential to 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?

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