This is GPS, the global public square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and

around the world. I'm Farid Zakaria coming to you from New York.

Today on the program, Panic in the markets has the banks need rescuing again.

I'll ask one of the people who was at the center of the storm the last time around

the former CEO Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfine about whether the system is stable

and is your bank account safe. Also, how did it come to this? Did we learn the

wrong lessons the last time? I'll talk to Julian Tedt of the Financial Times.

Then don't mess with the French people's retirement plans. That's the lesson from weeks

of strikes and protests that chaos in parliament as the government pushed through their policy

anyway. Which brought the outrage right back to the streets.

But first, here's my take. On his trip to Saudi Arabia last year, President Biden made

an emphatic declaration about US policy in the Middle East. He said, we will not walk

away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran. Last week's rapproche

more between Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered by China, suggests that this is precisely

what has happened. The reestablishment of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is not

in itself a seismic event. They broke off relations only seven years ago. But last week's

revelation exposes a deep-seated flaw in American foreign policy, one that has gotten worse

in recent years. In 1995, the journalist and scholar Joseph

Jaffe wrote an essay that described two paths for American grand strategy after the Cold

War. He called them Bismarck or Britain. The first was to emulate Britain in its traditional

approach to geopolitics by building alliances against any rising powers that seem hegemonic,

but otherwise to stay uninvolved. Jaffe argued that this balance of power strategy would

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