Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is a favorite subject on Sepia Mutiny and the man is rapidly achieving prominence as one of the top foreign policy pundits in the World (desi or otherwise). Surfing around, I came across a pretty interesting profile of Zakaria in NY Metro magazine from back in April of 2003.
Of particular interest was the Desi-inspired origin of Zakaria’s politics (views which apparently run against the “prescribed’ Asian American grain) –
Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”
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p>Few examples out there demonstrate the degree to which certain high minded political ideals can utterly fail to mesh with reality than the lost 40 years of post-independence Indian development.
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p>Fareed has raised the ire of many desi liberals (check out the comments on this thread, for ex) for, among other things, his (equivocal) support of the polarizing Iraq war. Serious detractors may attack his conclusions but most acknowledge the intellectual weight of his arguments (well, with the exception of anonymous ones who dismiss him as an “Uncle Tom“)
For more of Fareed’s musings, his eponymous website can be found here. SM’ers might be interested in a summary / review of his book The Future of Freedom on my personal blog here.
Fareed is a liberal globalist kinda like Thomas Friedman of the NYT. Hes a neo liberal who believes in globalism and free trade as a means to achieve otherwise very liberal goals. His support for the Iraq War is more in the Neo Liberal mold and not because of his conservatism. On almost all social issues (ranging from gay marriage to abortion) hes just a plain old liberal and has nothing in common with cavemen like Ponorruru.
Vinod – good piece. I disagree with him on Iraq, but there are two things that I really appreciate about him in general:
1) Independent thinking and boldness – e.g. although he might have supported the war, he hasn’t supported the way the administration has run it. From the article on your blog – “In fact, Iraq is central to that conflict. I don’t mean this in the deceptive and dishonest sense that many in the Bush administration have claimed….”
2) Clear, balanced analysis and communication – his piece after 911 (I think it’s called “Why They Hate US”) is probably one of the best essays I’ve read on politics in the Middle East.
What do you think of his tv show? He’s great during the interviews but I think he’s a little stiff when it comes to presentation. Loosen up Fareed!
Actually, although he initially supported the Iraq war, Zakaria has become a huge Bush critic:
He thinks Bush is weak on terror:
He thinks the war detracts from the truly important challenges:
He thinks Bush’s war execution has been atrocious (video).
I meant Ponnuru of National Review.
I just love the smackdowns that Fareeds lays on that pompous know it all George Will on This Week with Stephanopoulos.
and yet… in the end, he still ultimately supports the decision to go into Iraq (like Tom Friedman) and thus distances himself quite dramatically from the MoveOn / Dean / Pelosi camp on their central, defining issue. That wing of Dem leadership takes issue on “whether” to go into Iraq, well before the question of “how” (that’s not to say they won’t leverage Zakaria’s criticism of Bush when it presents itself..).
BUT, Zakaria is firmly on record as ultimately supporting the Iraq war –
[link]
I personally think of Fareed as more Classical Liberal (in the mold of Thomas Jefferson) than Conservative…. (much as I like to think of myself). When you get into that rarified air, the diff b/t a “liberal globalist” and a “neo-con” is mighty thin (ultimately, that diff being whether or not military power can / should be employed to achieve Classical Liberal goals…. something both Friedman and Zakaria believe).
Not sure that I agree – Zakaria is miles apart from either Leo Strauss or his mentor Huntington’s clumsy “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.
When you get into that rarified air, the diff b/t a “liberal globalist” and a “neo-con” is mighty thin (ultimately, that diff being whether or not military power can / should be employed to achieve Classical Liberal goals…. something both Friedman and Zakaria believe).
I personally see Friedman and Zakaria as liberal globalists whose weapon of choice is free trade and global markets (support for Iraq war notwithstanding) while the Neo Cons are more like the European Liberal Colonialists of the 18th century who believed in muscular proselytizing by force/occupation to achieve their liberals goals.
Not sure that I agree – Zakaria is miles apart from either Leo Strauss or his mentor Huntington’s clumsy “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.
Clash of Civilizations was clumsy but his nonsensical thesis in Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity is much worse.
AMFD – the review on Amazon makes it sound plain nutty! Have you read it?
We’re probably deep in Foreign Affairs geek land but… Although Fareed studied under him, Huntington isn’t really a a neo-con… Huntington is more of a paleo-con / Kissinger-esque realpolitik…
probably the salient diff b/t the 2 of them is the a priori role that Western culture plays in the development of institutions like democracy, trade, the formation of factions, etc. Huntington would argue that Westernization (to some degree or another) is a sort of pre-req before you get democracy, trade, and thus peace. Which is a big part of why Huntington is so scared of threats to Western / National identity as a precursor to conflict.
Zakaria, Friedman and other “neo cons” would see something somewhat the inverse – that by opening up trade, markets, and the like, you’ll induce a sort of Westernization in other countries (India being a great example…). Westernization here meaning “Classical Liberalism” – individual rights, trade, small-ish governments, deregulation, etc. While Huntington would defensively gaurd against an ascendent China, for ex., Zakaria & others would aggressively engage them as much as possible because, ultimately, it will ensure that they become more like us.
Other sorts of “globalists” (I love Fonte’s formulation “Transnational Progressives”) take an even broader exception – to them Westernization / Classical Liberalism isn’t a terribly attractive goal and they instead look for global institutions like the UN to pursue regulation, govt control, etc. for progessive causes…
Not any more, not with this team. Look at the video.
His view changed because this administration bungled it so badly. My quotes postdate yours.
AMFD – the review on Amazon makes it sound plain nutty! Have you read it?
I have and its nuttier than the nutty reviews. Instead of buying this book, here is a good link for checking out his nativist hysteria.
from a poli-sci standpoint vinod’s characterizations above (#11) are right on.
what all these people have in common, however, is that they are WAY establishment. beltway, beltway, beltway. no an ounce of funkiness in them. fareed has cast his lot with that world, and seems to be doing quite nicely for himself in it. more power to him, but he’s still a dork.
peace
Fareed, Dec 5, 2005 –
Fareed Zakaria (still) supports the war, though he does not (now) support the execution of the war.
He makes it clear here:
The right lesson of Iraq so far is not that nation-building must fail, but rather that President Bush’s approach to it, unless corrected, will fail. The right lesson is not that U.S. military intervention always ruptures alliances and creates an enraged international public, but rather that this particular intervention did. Most important, it is not that American power aggressively employed does more harm than good. Rather, the right lesson is that American power, because it is so overweening, must be used with extraordinary care and wisdom.
AMfD, that quote is from 6/04. Mines postdate.
Vinod turned up some new hopefulness on Zakaria’s part as of Dec. 5 this year. I conclude that Zakaria continues to hope we’ll somehow muddle through the Iraq war.
However, all the quotes agree that he thinks poorly of Dubya:
One good thing Zakaria has done for himself is that he doesnt go all the way, on one side or the other. Basically emphasizing more on facts and less on opinion, he has had people guessing about his orientation (not that kind 🙂 )
Its always fun watching him on the “This Week” round-table with Geroge Will, although they are combating like they used to.
exactly. and in that he marks himself as a disciple not of the repugnant sam huntington, but of one of the leading harvard luminaries in international relations during fareed’s time there, joseph nye.
nye was/is your classic wishy washy establishment political analyst. i remember taking his intro IR class… way back in ’85… and every single lecture could be summarized as:
1/ here’s an issue 2/ here’s what some people say about it 3/ here’s what other people say about it 4/ therefore the truth must be somewhere in between. class dismissed!
all the personality and edge of a used dishrag. yet everyone thought nye was some kind of genius for this. same for fareed now.
peace
Zakaria is hardly a Uncle Tom, a label freely dispensed by minority communities in the US, to anyone who goes against the minorities’ way of thinking and reasoning. He is no conservative either. Many liberals and moderates were also fooled by the initial evidence presented by the Bush (mis)administration and have changed their stance since. Zakaria is a learned intellectual who makes factual observations, as opposed to the twist-the-facts-to-suit-me garbage spewed by Limbaugh, Coulter and other cons or the revisionist news transmitted by the left-leaning media. We need more like him.
Actually, although he initially supported the Iraq war, Zakaria has become a huge Bush critic.
The man is an opportunist in my opinion – he does what is good for his career. For his views, he should have ended up in fox news and when he got a job in PBS, his tone has changed. During the election times, he was all for Bush – he was eyeing some position in the administration at that point. He is a mediocre analyst in my opinion. I hardly see a fresh view point ever from him.
Vinod – seems like there’s an interesting transition there.
From what I understand of Huntington, for the orderly transition of a state there needs to be strong political/legal provisions in place – thus deregulation, decentralization have a highly degenerative potential unless accompanied by adequate governance.
Zakaria developes the ideological equivalent – for a state to transition into democracy successfully, there must be a strong commitment to the principles of liberalism.
Huntington does not see transition at an ideological level – for him there are faultlines where for Zakaria there are potentially channels -and I think this is where much of the difference lies. Btw, I see far more “neocon” than “paleocon” in Huntington.
Friedman has always been a bit too wishy-washy for me. Maybe it’s just my own personal prejudice, but I think there are a lot more people out there with more interesting things to say.
One of my more amusing brushes with fame was holding Fareed Zakaria’s glass of water for him while he gave a speech at the Asia Society for SAJA. ( I guess the podium was sloped, or something.) Unfortunately this meant that I did not take notes. The big elections had just gone down in India, and here was an interesting point I took away from the speech–despite the fact that Mr. Zakaria was ra ra pro freemarkets and economic “reforms”, he was much more ra ra pro democracy. And in the Democracy of India, the people had more or less spoken that they wished to slow down the reforms, just a bit. He made an interesting comparison in China–in China there is much faster growth, and as long as you stay on the good side of the Party, there are a lot of ways in which Chinese entrepreneurs deal with significantly less regulation than most people. On the other hand, my Chinese-American friend’s relatives can’t read his blog, while my Indian relatives can read mine. (Please remember that the Communist Party in China today is less about helping the rural workers and more about the gloriousness of getting rich.) Slow growth may be the price to pay for listening to the people–as Gandhi said, freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes.
I say that because a lot of people like to equate democracy with extreme capitalism, or assume that the necessary result of regulation is corrupt bureacuracy. To look at India’s corruption and draw the conclusion that all regulation must lead to corruption ignores ALL THE OTHER elements that go into the stew. A somewhat immature and highly fractured judicial system. A comparative lack of traditional synergy between civil society and government. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of your non-professional-activist relatives or cousins in India going to a School Board Meeting, a Transit Boart Meeting, a Local Planning Meeting, or the like. All politics in India, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is oriented around the Party. Very little of it is oriented around the agency. For all our partisianship here, that’s not how this country works–yet. There is still a huge if decreasing amount of governmental surface area that interacts with the public and receives its constant comment and oversight. In India that surface area started out small.
Few examples out there demonstrate the degree to which certain high minded political ideals can utterly fail to mesh with reality than the lost 40 years of post-independence Indian development.
This strikes me as a deeply disingenuous notion. 40 years of lost development and then poof, everything started working like magic? That makes no sense. It might have been much slower than it could have been, but there’s no way to prove that it didn’t also build in a measure of stability that is sorely lacking in the cohort class of nations given independance.
I couldn’t agree more. The ‘lost 40 years’ is probably the reason that indian companies are not wiped off the markets when the MNCs started pouring money to india. Nehru’s establishment laid out the foundation of a republic that was secular and liberal – it couldn’t have been done any differently given that we had just gotten the colonialists out. And with regards to corruption, “Pathology of corruption” examines the roots of corruption in India and that goes all the way back to the british times – they basically used money to buy off local rajas and the practice continues until today. It is not to say that the corruption didnt reach gigantic proportions during Nehru’s and Indira’s regimes, but it is way deeper than that.
For China detractors .. Please read this : China’s Even Heftier Economy
Saheli,
I agree with you 100% in your thesis. However, @ the grassroot level (panchayat, housing cooperative level), even in India, the politics is quite similar to America – maybe, not packaged or marketted or put forth that well.
In a housing cooperative society level election in any city/ village in India, caste dynamics and social status may (or may not) come to play but party politics definitely takes a back seat. In general, people take very keen interest in civic ammenties type politics at the local level – you like the politics of water, electricity, etc. – at that level Congress, BJP, DMK has almost no say – social status may have. Since my father has retired from academia, he and his retired professor buddies spent a hell lot of time on the politics of development of their neighborhood in my home town – they have a constitution, by-laws, elections, and the whole nine yards.
Remember, in India, a large number of population is similar to Clinton Republicans or Reagan Democracts – they rightfully do not commit to any strict ideology. In in late 70s, Indira Gandhi was thrown out of power, Janata Party comes in and makes a bigger mess – and she comes to power with a bigger mandate in a very short period of time.
Sure, India has huge problems but at some levels, the democracy there is very sophisticated and at some not – it always has been that way. It is very one of the few countries, where even the poorest of the poor knows the power of his or her vote.
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of your non-professional-activist relatives or cousins in India going to a School Board Meeting, a Transit Boart Meeting, a Local Planning Meeting, or the like”
Saheli, I raise my hand. Please read comment #.26
“And in the Democracy of India, the people had more or less spoken that they wished to slow down the reforms, just a bit”
Saheli, Let’s put this way, a sizable population in India thought they were being left out from the “India Shining” cho-cho train. I think they all (poor, middle, rich) want to part of it – the electorate’s expectations in India are higher now – that is the way it should be.
I’m not discrediting everything that happened during the lost 40 – afterall the country didn’t utterly fall apart into a big African style mess. BUT, there were other paths….
For ex., no matter how bad you might think British colonialism was (Manish uses the term “Gothic Horror” – I’m not quite there), it was still far far far better than it’s Japanese / Chinese counterpart which Korea experienced up until the post WWII period. And yet this graph just says SO MUCH – S. Korea starts at about the same place as India in 1950 and ends up somewhere dramatically different.
Still, it’s funny you should use the phrase “poof… magic” because India is one of the few cases in economic history where something like that happened post 1991 – at least in economic terms. The economy liberalizes, and boom, the “hindu rate of growth” myth is shattered almost like…. magic. In staid economic terms, we use phrases like “inflection points” but for the real world poor of India, what transpired truly was magic. For ex., Brad Delong –
GDP and thus lifestyles doubling 2-3x a generation vs. (at best) once a generation is truly magical.
Badmash –
I think they would both agree that “Illiberal Democracy” is a real risk. But for Huntington, the way Democracy gets liberalized first is because of adherence to certain western precepts.
Because we believe, for ex., that theft sends you to hell (or, in its post-modern form, generates “bad karma”), we steal at less than the “optimal” amount based on a cold calculation of [risk of getting caught] x [cost of getting caught]. As a result, society as a whole requires fewer laws, fewer cops, fewer prisons, lower taxes, facilitates more open stores, fewer store clerks, etc. — it’s a low crime culture which enables a decentralized government.
For Zakaria, the way Democracy gets liberalized first is because we need to treat each other a certain way if we wish to participate in an economy.
Just a random (and admittedly not exactly non-controversial) example, Thomas Sowell recently wrote this about the Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts –
(read the rest if you want the details).
An “illiberal monopoly” is utterly sustainable in a politically-dominated environment. BUT, there’s just way too much incentive to “defect” in an economic environment — the result is that eventually someone creates a busline that serves black folks well and they make all the $$$ from those folks. That sort of “plurality” is natural in a market.
In other countries the same phenomena unfolds… it’s one thing for the Chinese govt to discriminate against the Tibetans… it’s a diff thing for Chinese biz to do it – they’re giving up real $$$. So, as Zakaria and Sowell would argue, a real world way to improve the lot of the Tibetans is to push Chinese society further into the market and from their govt…..
Oy, my email address isn’t supposed to be on there – could the administrator remove it please. Thanks 🙂
Ah…. it’s good to see Vinod writing so much again…
Huntington opposed the Iraq War so if by neocon you mean someone who unconditionally supports the use of force to spread democracy, then no, Huntington is not one.
But if you’re using the older sense of neocon (e.g. Daniel Patrick Moynihan) as an anticommunist progressive, then yes, Huntington fits. Huntington describes himself as a New Deal Democrat.
Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races…
Voila! If only Mr Sowell was there to remind us of the terror of government intervention and the efficiences of the market, we would have no need for those peksy Housing Anti Discrimination laws. I am sure without the Housing Anti Discrimination Laws, Mr Sowell (an African American) with his nice pay check could have found housing anywhere he liked in the 70’s. I mean why else would private owners exclude a black man from purchasing/renting property when the color of their dollars is not any different. Of course we liberals took it upon ourselves to involve the government in passing housing anti discrimination laws when the free market was taking care of it anyway.
I was going to use the example of bank loans instead of Anti Discrimination Housing laws to illustrate my point, but Mr Sowell already beat me to it.
Mr. Sowell’s views are shockingly naive, I think. This is blind trust in the “market forces”. I say naive, because he assumes people act rationally.
Sheesh… I sorta knew I was opening up a can of worms when that example…
Pointing out a case where discrimination was “institutionalized” by an illiberal government shouldn’t be construed as Sowell (or myself) arguing that there isn’t a role for govt in providing equal rights…..
Well, Fukuyama opposed the war too so I guess labels don’t mean much these days…
I’ve always found the South Korea example to be unconvincing as a universal benchmark because SK also benefited from an enormously disproportionate strategic and economic interest from the United States.
Interesting point Saheli and Kush – India’s past and China’s present offer some problems as far as the neoliberal consensus on “liberal economies lead to political freedoms”. (Check out Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom)
Saheli,
Some of the most powerful change in India came through party-free, grass-roots, cooperative movements, some examples,
1) Operation Flood, the Amul thing 2) The relationship of Operation Flood to Green Revolution 3) Also, Pl read this World Bank report about electricity and water stuff, I was talking about Badmash, i just ordered amartya sen’s “the argumentative indian”, yesterday through amazon.
Kush – it’s a good read. Enjoy and lemme know what you think of it!
Fareed Zakaria is HOT!
Yes, Kush, it’s a wonderful book. Again, one of the other most well-balanced writers and thinkers that India has. Definitely a book which should influence anyone’s thinking about India.
badmash & technophobicgeek,
I think Amartya Sen is way ahead of all the other “India/ Developing World Experts”. if you get a chance, read his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Yesterday, I read his piece “Contrary India” in The Economist – and then had to order the book.
There’s a lot of inequality in India so its not surprising that there’s lots of conservatives
😉
Here’s another 1 on Zakaria.
Looks interesting, spank you!
More FZ in the NY Observer.
I am new to your blog. Great posts and informed comments all around. However, I am bothered by the way you give a pass to Fareed Zakaria on the Iraq war. Some of you claim that he is not a conservative like that Ponnuru – as if supporting gay rights makes it ok to kill Innocent Iraqi’s and American’s ? Why the double standard? Hope one of you enlightens me….
Also a newbie to SM… (your blog is fantastic, by the way!)
The above posters have probably answered this already, (and more articulately) but what the hey…
“Conservative” is a conflation of two separate ideological phenomena in the States: 1) The “classical liberal”/neoliberal element (exemplified by those such as Zakaria) 2) The socially conservative (as opposed to socially progressive pro-gay rights, etc) element a central component of which is the “religious right”. Both “conservative” elements were supportive of the Iraq war – Mr. Zakaria’s initial support was grounded in the belief that economic liberalization of a formerly socialist-nationalist Iraq would be mutually beneficial to both Iraqis and Americans. He seems to have (for good reason) changed his mind.
I don’t think anyone is “giving him a pass” (at least I hope not). Although I disagree with his ideological framework, Mr. Zakaria is interesting on a few levels – he is both an intelligent mainstream analyst who speaks to the American public and a minority, who speaks on the behalf of many conservative-minded desis. On the same note, it is a bit dangerous to have Fareed Zakaria “represent” an ethnic “community” – comparable to the way that Neil Bissoondath is a minority voice who is both a speaker in and used by the mainstream political right in Canada (he has a fascinating book, Selling Illusions: the Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada)…
So if Bush was brown skinned and professed a Classical Liberal belief – then he would not be so bad. Oh, and I forgot, he should also support gay marriage.
If the above criteria are met, then morals and conventions be damned.
Good Call Sepia.