This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Farid Zakary.

Today on the show, I've interviewed my fair share of world leaders, but the one whose brain I would most like to pick right now is Kim Jong-un.

Since I will probably never have a chance, I will tell you how I think he would answer all the questions swirling about his true intentions.

Also, Russian war games, German elections, the fate of the Iran nuclear deal and the upcoming UN General Assembly.

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Longer we delay, the more I worry that we might not be able to recover.

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I'm sometimes asked what world figure I would most want to interview. Well, for me, the answer is obvious. Kim Jong-un.

The general impression around the world continues to be that the North Korean leader is crazy, provocative and unpredictable.

But I wonder, he might well be strategic, smart and utterly rational. Since I'm unlikely to get that interview, I've decided to imagine it instead.

I would first ask, Marshall Kim, why do you keep building and testing nuclear weapons, even though they result in massive, crippling economic sanctions for your country?

I imagine he might answer like this. My nation faces a fundamental challenge, survival. The regime and I personally am more threatened than ever before. My forefathers had it easy.

The great leader, my grandfather, ruled with the support of the world's other superpower, the Soviet Union. As well as our gigantic neighbor, China.

My father, dear leader, as we call him, still had Beijing's help for the most part. But today, the sole superpower, the United States, has made it clear that it seeks regime change in my country.

Yet we have survived with our ideology and system intact. How? Because we have built a protection for ourselves in the form of nuclear weapons.

So I might follow up with Kim. But China still provides you with crucial supplies of food and fuel. Don't you see them as an ally? What would he say? Well, maybe he would say, China is ruthlessly pragmatic.

It supports us for its own selfish interests. It doesn't want millions of refugees or a unified career on its border. One that would be a larger version of what South Korea is now with American troops and a treaty alliance with Washington.

But I believe that China no longer considers us an ally. After all, it's voted to sanction us in the United Nations Security Council time and again.

The current President Xi Jinping cultivates close relations with South Korea. At the grand celebrations in Beijing two years ago, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, he placed the President of Russia and the President of South Korea at his side.

In North Korea, you know, we pay a lot of attention to ceremonies and what they signal. And then I would wonder, so will you come to the negotiating table? Will you agree to denuclearization in return for the lifting of sanctions?

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