Fareed Zakaria GPS – CNN 03-29-15 – Investa Asset Management LLC

Salient to Investors:

Fareed Zakaria said:

The pattern of Yemen’s descent into chaos is likely to repeat, possibly in more significant countries like Egypt. That pattern is repressive, secular regimes backed by the West become illegitimate, become more repressive to survive, and whose opposition becomes more extreme, religious and violent.
Learning how to read deeply, write compelling prose, and analyze well are essential skills in order to thrive in the world. The rapid trend away from majors like English and history and philosophy to skill-based ones closer to engineering or computer science is terribly short-sighted. How to think, read, study, write and are much more useful in the long run.
The genius of the American system is giving people the broad liberal education that allows people to start new companies, switch careers. The coding learned 10 years ago is obsolete today.
US education has never tested well against other countries – in the middle of the pack in 1964 and still in the middle of the pack. Yet the US has dominated innovation, research, new industries over the past five decades.
Israel is reported to have more NASDAQ listed companies than any country other than the US and China yet also does very badly on international tests, and worse than the US.
Israel and the US share non-hierarchical educational systems where you can challenge the professor, follow your passion, ask questions. Many high-tech people including Zuckerberg and Bezos put a lot in a liberal arts education.

Richard Haass at the Council on Foreign Relations said:

We are in for 30 years of religious war in the Middle East, if not more, with the US having to play a modest role managing at the margins.
Saudi Arabia is vulnerable because it is only a matter of time before it is challenged by the Islamic State.
Iraq is breaking into 3 separate countries – Iranian Shia, Kurdish, and Sunni Arab.
We cannot afford to live in a world where Iran has nuclear weapons and several other countries in the region follow suit.

Joseph Cirincione at Ploughshares Fund said:

Japan is a threshold power and can build a nuclear bomb within months.
US strikes on Iran would have to be weeks of hundreds of sorties, and cause a major war in the Middle East that would make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq look like warm-up acts.
We cannot live in a world where Iran has nuclear weapons and several other countries in the region follow suit.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali said

Islam is in crisis and is decidedly not a religion of peace – it needs a reformation on the scale that Christianity had in the 16th century.
70 percent of all fatalities in all conflicts involving Muslims are Muslims.
The strategy of let’s not call IS Islamic started in the Muslim world 3 to 5 decades ago and hasn’t worked.
To persuade Muslims to give up the 5 core concepts within Islam that are holding them back, the US should ideologically confront Islam with its ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as it has done in the past. Theological reformation has to come from within.

at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1503/29/fzgps.01.html