E-mail a friendFareed Zakaria
airdate May 20, 2008
Esquire named Fareed Zakaria "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st century." An expert on global political trends, he's the editor of Newsweek International, for which he also writes a regular column, and recently joined CNN to host a weekly show. He was previously an ABC News analyst and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of international politics and economics. Zakaria is a native of India and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. His books include the newly released The Post-American World.
Author of "The Post-American World," tells Tavis what he feels is America's Achilles heel in global affairs. (3:32)
Fareed Zakaria
Tavis: Fareed Zakaria is an acclaimed journalist who serves as editor of "Newsweek International." He is also a bestselling author whose books include "The Future of Freedom." His latest is once again a "New York Times" bestseller. It's called "The Post-American World." Fareed, as always, nice to see you.
Fareed Zakaria: My pleasure, Tavis.
Tavis: The post-American world in this instance means what?
Zakaria: It means a world in which everyone else is rising - the rise of the rest, I call it. And what it means is that for the first time in living memory, the future is being shaped out there. There are all kinds of places where the most exciting things in architecture, in science, in capitalism, in social work are being done. And what I really want us to understand is it's a whole new world and we need to start paying attention to what's going on out there.
Tavis: If the rest is rising, does that mean that we are falling?
Zakaria: It means that the landscape is changing. There is a scenario in which the rest rises and we continue to do well and thrive. You think about economics, it's generally a situation where the pie can expand, everyone can do well, all the boats rise - you choose your metaphor.
But the problem is, of course, everyone else is running - running fast, and if we want to thrive in this new world, we're really going to have to run fast and perhaps more importantly begin to rethink the way we look at the world, rethink some of our most cherished attitudes about the world.
We're not very good right now about understanding the world outside. We're bordered by two large oceans and two benign neighbors, and we haven't had to spend a lot of time asking ourselves what's out there.
Tavis: You talk about that in the text, and we'll come back to that in just a second, about how we engage the world - to your point, what's to there. I guess my concern is whether or not - what's going to trip us up, speaking of choosing one's own metaphor. Whether or not we're witnessing the falling of the American empire at worse or at best the failing of the American empire, whether or not that's the reality which has more to do with how we handle our business intra the United States of America.
Poverty, racism, in this multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic world. Poverty - we can run the list. Why should I not believe that we're going to implode, having nothing to do with what you've put in this book about the post-American world?
Zakaria: Yeah. Well, I do spend a fair amount of the time in the book talking about our internal issues, and look - the way I put it, Tavis, is I'm very bullish about the American economy. I think it's basically a very strong, flexible, dynamic machine. There are definitely issues of inequality that we haven't solved.
Tavis: You and Bush are the only two saying that these days. (Laughter)
Zakaria: As a fundamental issue. Hear me out.
Tavis: Yeah, I hear you.
Zakaria: I think we're doing, as a society, when you compare us to the rest of the world, we're very dynamic, we're very flexible. Look, we're creating the first universal nation in the world, bringing people from all colors, creeds, backgrounds. And yeah, we don't do it perfectly, but you look around the world, we sure as hell do it a lot better than a lot of people.
The part I worry about a lot is American politics - our government. I think it's broken, I think it's brain dead, and I think a lot of the things we have to address, which are poverty, education, science and technology, our ability to have a rational immigration policy, our ability to have a rational energy policy - all these can be fixed.
This is not rocket science. But you need politicians who have courage, you need a system that provides incentives to compromise and problem-solve rather than polarize and grandstand. There, I'm very, very worried. So I think that our Achilles' heel, and what will cause the failing of the American empire, is that we have a profoundly dysfunctional political system right now.
Tavis: But isn't that the point, though, back to your text, that these are problems that can be solved - that's your phrase - these are challenges that can be solved. But while we're talking about what can be done to save the American empire, while we're talking about what can be done to make this a nation as good as its promise, you argue in the book that the rest are outrunning us.
Zakaria: There's a fascinating example I give in the book about London and New York. London has now become the world's leading financial center, and all of a sudden we're looking around and saying, "Well, what happened? What did we do wrong?"
It's not so much that we did so many things wrong. We just sat around and did the politics as usual. And the British government really got its act together and said to itself, "How do we make London competitive? What are the laws we need to pass, what is the strategic investments we need to make, what is the educational stuff we need to do?"
And they did a clean sweep and re-regulated the financial centers, and they have won that race. And my fear is that that's the metaphor - that we will keep going through this and not realizing that the rest are moving and rising, and the next thing we look - look around, Tavis. The largest publicly traded corporation in the world is in China.
The richest man is in Mexico City most weeks. The tallest building is in Taipei; soon it'll be in Dubai. The largest casinos in the world are now in Macao, China. We've got to sit back and realize this is a new world.
Tavis: It's kind of like we're in constant motion and they're in forward motion.
Zakaria: That's exactly it.
Tavis: It's like running on a treadmill. You're getting something done, so America's kind of like on the treadmill. We're in constant motion. But they're out on the streets running a marathon - they're in forward motion.
Zakaria: That's exactly right. And to the issue you raised about poverty, the biggest problem we face in that regard is we've got about a third of the country that we are not training for anything for this new world. How are we going to thrive in this new world?
I talk a lot about how we've done it in the past and as we move up the value chain you find new areas, new expertise, new knowledge, new industries. What does that mean? It means education and training. We've got about a third of the country that are in dysfunctional schools that can barely - that graduate and they can barely read.
And we aren't doing much about it because those people don't vote, by and large, they don't contribute to political campaigns, they don't write op-eds; they don't appear on talk shows, by and large. And the result is that it's almost like they don't exist. And the political system doesn't respond to that problem, but it's now a competitiveness problem because you need to educate everyone.
Tavis: All right, so the timing of this book cannot be more propitious, given that or in the sense that you said earlier that our Achilles' heel is our politics - the body politic. So we find ourselves in a presidential election. Any reason to believe that our politics in the short run - or the long run, for that matter, given this campaign - can forestall what you talk about in the text?
Zakaria: There's some good signs. Look, on some issues if you think about it, Senator McCain, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, are all rational about immigration. None of them come from the extremes of their party, they're all, broadly speaking, closer to the center, in my opinion, and if you look at their backgrounds.
The problem is the political system now provides very few incentives for compromise. It provides very few incentives for kind of coming together, solve the problem. So that if you look at whether it's immigration for the Republicans, trade for the Democrats, the pull is to your extremes and the pull is to stand fast.
If you look back to even the '80s - this is not so long ago - we'd had a big immigration bill, big bipartisan compromise, big tax bill, bipartisan overhaul of the tax system, two big trade bills, we put Social Security on a sure footing for 30 years. You can't imagine any of those things happening today. Washington has become a place where people grandstand, they stand true, they fundraise as a result of that.
The whole system is designed for - it's great for fundraising; it's terrible for governing. So when President Obama comes in, I think Obama gets a lot of this message and he does understand this new world because he, to a certain extent, is of it. But what's he going to do when faced with these forces? My hope is that we can really change the system in a way that allows people to feel safe solving problems, getting ahead. Because we don't have that much time; the rest are not sleeping.
Tavis: Was that an endorsement of Obama?
Zakaria: I like him. I think there's a lot of hope out there in the air about him, and I hope for the best, but I do like him. I think he's intelligent, and I think Senator McCain, whom I admire a lot for his past, his courage, I don't know if he gets this new world as well.
And I think if I listen to what he says on foreign policy, particularly - he wants to kick Russia out of the G8, he wants to draw new battle lines and almost get into a new Cold War with Russia and China. Strikes me that this is not the time to be doing that. We need cooperation, not conflict.
Tavis: You mentioned the '80s. Let me go back even before the '80s, because we've spent the balance of this conversation talking about the way forward or the road ahead - again, pick your own metaphor. What is the historical context in which this post-American world conversation should be properly situated?
Zakaria: I think what we should realize is that since the end of the Second World War, we have had the extraordinary advantages of having the rest of the world on its back, flat on its back. After World War II, we were 50 percent of global GDP. Then you had the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed.
I think that one thing we forget in this country is we believe as Americans that competition makes you strong. As an athlete, as a person, as a company. For the last 20 years, we have had very little competition, and we have grown fat and lazy and we have really not asked ourselves strategically how should we be thinking about our role in the world? How should we be thinking about preparing for the 21st century?
And I think we're - that era of exceptionalism is over. The world has caught up, and they're running fast.
Tavis: Seems to me that laziness and arrogance are two different things. You put it at the feet of laziness. How much of this reality that we're facing now has to do with American arrogance?
Zakaria: Oh, a lot, and I think it - laziness and arrogance are two different things and perhaps we have done the miracle of combining both with the Bush administration. But I think in a way they're related in the sense that we got smug. We got comfortable, we thought we were sitting pretty at the top of the world, and we weren't noticing the natives, and the natives were getting very good at capitalism and they were getting very good at sensible management of their societies.
Tavis: Before I let you go, the conversation has been up here in the sense that we're talking about government. What this post-American world mean for down here, the everyday people?
Zakaria: I think it means that you are in a world in which people out there can either take your job, if you aren't well-prepared, or buy your stuff if you are well-prepared. It's a world - if you know the world out there, your opportunities to enhance your life, increase your standard of living, will be exponentially greater. I think it's a world in which if you understand it out there, if you know foreign languages, if you travel, if you have some ability to connect with that world, you're going to be doing very well because there are 124 countries in the world today that are growing at over 4 percent a year,
But if you don't, you're going to shut yourself out from the future. And so the imperative, I think, for every American, whether you're a company or a person, is to try to figure out this new post-American world because it's a world in which you can do fine, you can do very well, but you've got to know it's there, and you've got to embrace it.
Tavis: The new book from Fareed Zakaria is called "The Post-American World." Fareed, nice to have you on the program, and thanks for your - thanks for sharing with us.
Zakaria: Tavis, always a pleasure.
Tavis: Pleasure's mine.
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