Fareed Zakaria Is So Po-Am

Zakaria is not only bullish on the U.S., but also on developing nations. However, he points out that while it’s “easy” to move a country’s per capita income from a few hundred dollars a year to a few thousand, it’s much harder to increase those few thousand into an amount comparable to developed nations. He is enthusiastic about the rise of the global marketplace, but doesn’t think the United States--or the West in general--has anything significant to fear. The huge engineering workforce of India and China has been exaggerated; Zakaria notee that these countries call “anyone” who completes a 2-month training an engineer, and said that we don’t have to be afraid of “auto mechanics who call themselves engineers.” For the most part, according to Zakaria, the best schools for Indian and Chinese students are still in the U.S.

Even though the world is evolving into a post-American age, Zakaria still emphasized that “the only way to be modern is to be Western. The West invented modernity”—and, by implication, still defines it. Despite this modernity having its roots in major conflicts like the World Wars of the first half of the 20th century, Zakaria thinks “that familiar process of great power rising has been tamed.” To be modern is to accept a peaceful system where countries do not try to take over one another. The infrastruture enabling our modernity is built on mutual trust, however wary, that we won’t cross one another, which enables both global and social stability. Zakaria described the Western order as “easy to join, hard to overturn." Still, he recognized that nationalism is divisive and destructive, and said that avoiding excessive nationalist sentiment among rising nations will be crucial to preventing conflict as more countries become more powerful.

“There is no Asia,” Zakaria asserted last night, saying that the concept of a cohesive Asia is a western construction. “They kind of hate each other," said Zakaria of Japan, China, and India, implying that these countries are unlikely to join together in a coalition opposing the U.S. Calling us the “chairman of the board,” Zakaria posited that the importance of the United States increases as regional power increases, as we need to play a negotiator role between up-and-coming countries.

Despite recent economic shakeups here in the U.S., Zakaria still has faith a “systemic stability” in the global economy that allows “the rest” to rise up. The globalization of the economy is more what makes it stable than what shakes it up—Zakaria pointed out that Citigroup was saved by money from Abu Dhabi, while Singapore bailed out Merrill Lynch. The interconnected economy certainly makes things more complex, but also provides more options and stability when a particular area starts to crash.

Zakaria also emphasized our interconnectivity in relation to the environment. Saying that “the real problem… [is] everybody growing at the same time,” Zakaria expressed a need to save energy and provide for the future. Our “common humanity” necessitates that we cooperate to ensure that our progeny will have a world to live in. Citing Bush’s rejection of Kyoto as one of his few sensible acts, Zakaria said Kyoto is essentially useless because it doesn’t take into account India or China. By 2012, these two countries will have created 850 new coal plants, which will create enough pollution to undo all the reductions from the Kyoto Protocol. He told the audience that he's installed energy-saving lightbulbs in his own home, but noted that “the Chinese just ate that for breakfast"—and India’s having the rest of the West's energy savings (such as they are) for lunch.

Unless India and China are incorporated into the environmental movement, any progress the west makes in reducing emissions will be completely undone by these two countries. And, according to Zakaria, the only way these countries will stop contributing to global warming is if they are able to use clean coal—which they cannot afford. Consequently, “western subsidies for clean coal… [are] the “answer to global warming,” in Zakaria’s eyes.

Though Zakaria prefers to focus on up-and-coming countries, he also acknowledged that there are many countries struggling economically. At one point during the evening, he called these countries “insignificant”; when called out on this by an audience member, Zakaria clarified that he meant they were “insignificant to the global economy." Acknowledging the “bottom billion,” or the people living in the 50 countries with the worst economies in the world, as a “real problem,” Zakaria did not pretend to have an answer for these countries. While recognizing that brutal imperial techniques led in part to modernization in some areas, he does not see neocolonialism as a viable solution for economic underperformers.

Niall Ferguson humorously characterized “Subprimia, USA” as the most economically unstable country in the world right now, making the important point that the United States is not economically infallible. Citing an “institutional expertise” based on the assumption that capital flows out of the United States, Ferguson implied that today’s model of the U.S. borrowing heavily to let its citizens grossly overconsume is perhaps as worrying as any developing country’s economy.

In response to an audience member’s question about Iraq, Zakaria characterized it as “the black hole of American foreign policy” and said there’s “no way you can argue that Iraq has worked.” He proposed no specific solutions, but recognized that we might need to stay in the country for decades to come (much as the British stayed in Iraq for nearly 40 years early last century). Describing the U.S. as having completely dismantled Iraq in just one month, Zakaria notes that India—despite all its economic changes—still lets power rest in the hands of the Brahmins, or 1% of the population. The kind of changes we have inflicted on Iraq will not be resolved as fast as we want it to—if ever.

While he avoided endorsing a specific candidate in the upcoming election, Zakaria called them all “very credible” and intelligent. He’s glad they all support immigration reform and are prepared to address global warming as a serious issue. Describing Washington as “badly broken,” Zakaria asserted that the “incentives are all for conflict” between parties, preventing any bipartisan progress from being made. He wished that some candidate would acknowledge that we need “short term pain for long term gain,” something the government has been trying to sweep under the rug for too long, trying to enable us to keep up the overconsumption that Ferguson criticized.

For a commentary on a post-American world, the session remained relatively U.S.-centric. Still, it raised some good points about international interrelations. In perhaps his most quotable comment of the evening, Zakaria described our present state as “a world where we need to know more about the world,” and lamented that this scares some Americans. We need not all agree with Zakaria, but we should definitely take his words to heart and learn about the countries that will be playing a more important role in the world as globalization progresses.