George Shultz On Hillary Clinton.
ZAKARIA: I spent much of the past week in the San Francisco Bay area where I had a chance to have some extraordinary conversations. We'll bring you more of them in the coming weeks, but now a very special treat from Palo Alto. President Reagan's long-time secretary of state, George Shultz. Before that job, Shultz had an extraordinary run in government from Richard Nixon's secretary of labor to his treasury secretary and more. He also found great success in the private sector. He was dean of the University of Chicago's business school and also president of one of America's biggest private companies, Bechtel. I talked to America's 95-year-old elder statesman at Stanford's Hoover Institution where he is now a distinguished fellow. Very distinguished, indeed.</s>ZAKARIA: Mr. Secretary, pleasure to have you on.</s>GEORGE SHULTZ, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Thank you. Glad to be here.</s>ZAKARIA: When you were secretary of state, you were dealing with a world in which there was an existential threat to the United States. The Soviet Union had thousands and thousands of nuclear missiles on a hair trigger. Do you look at the world today and think it is more unsafe or less unsafe than when you were dealing with politics and diplomacy?</s>SHULTZ: In those days, we had a program and a strategy. We were convinced it would work. Now, what I see is a world awash in change. Almost everywhere you look is instability. And still, there are too many nuclear weapons around. There's also the threat of climate change. In other words, there are things that need to be worked on by more than one country at a time, and countries are having a hard time governing themselves, let alone interacting in a positive way. So I think it's a very dangerous time.</s>ZAKARIA: What would you do about terrorism? When you look at this problem, terrorism largely emanating out of the greater Middle East.</s>SHULTZ: Well, first of all, we have to recognize that for the first time in three centuries, war and religion have been put together. And what that means is it's a different kind of a war. It's not located just in one place with a front. There are places, more than one, and there are tentacles. So you have to have a strategy that deals with this religiously based war. So that's the way you have to address it, I think.</s>ZAKARIA: We are now involved in a counterterrorism sense, in counterterrorism operations in seven, maybe more countries, as far as I can count -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya. How should we approach this issue of counterterrorism? Because we have now been in Afghanistan for 15 years. We've spent a trillion dollars. And yet, creating political order in these societies -- you can beat up the bad guys, but whenever you leave, instability persists, crumbles, the insurgency gains ground. Is there a way out?</s>SHULTZ: First of all, we have to do everything we can to see that we don't have terrorist acts take place in the United States or to U.S. citizens wherever. That means you have to have an intelligence sharing and a special effort to see things coming before they come, as I was saying earlier. And people have to know that that's what you're doing. You're not going to tolerate it. And you can be successful, and we need to recognize that now we have this war where religion and war are joined and we have to figure out how we're going to cope with that. And I think the way to do it is to put together a coalition. We don't do everything ourselves, but we want to work with other people. For example, in the Middle East right now, I think if you put together a coalition of Saudi Arabia, the the Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, maybe Turkey, Israel, I think there's more of a sense of community now. Then enlist some of our European allies, and we can be a leader or an organizer. Doesn't mean you do everything yourself. I think probably the boots on the ground in that area need to be locals.</s>ZAKARIA: But isn't that essentially the Obama strategy?</s>SHULTZ: Well, it is sort of like it, although they seem to be very incremental. I think what you have to do is say, all right, here's our strategy. So what do we need in order to accomplish our goal? Then commit those forces, whatever they may be.</s>ZAKARIA: We'll be back in a moment with more of my interview with George Shultz. I ask him about Donald Trump.