Speaker

Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria

Indian-American journalist, author, and television host. He edits and presents Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, wrote a foreign affairs column for Newsweek and later the Washington Post, and served as managing editor of Foreign Affairs from age twenty-eight. His books include From Wealth to Power (his Harvard dissertation, published by Princeton), The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (2024).

Zakaria grew up in Bombay, was educated at Yale and Harvard (PhD under Samuel Huntington), and has spent his career arguing that liberal democracy and open markets are genuinely fragile achievements rather than the default trajectory of history — and that their current erosion under populism from both right and left deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.

Core positions

Ideas have consequences, and the right ideas at the right historical moment change the structure of civilisation. Zakaria holds that the liberal Enlightenment project — originating in the Dutch Republic, codified across the 17th and 18th centuries, and responsible for the sharp uptick in per capita welfare that begins around 1700 — is the most important achievement of the last five centuries. His central fear, laid out in Age of Revolutions, is that its beneficiaries no longer understand how contingent and constructed it was, and are therefore insufficiently alarmed by the forces now dismantling it.

On institutional explanation: culture is a grab bag, not a variable. Singapore’s anti-corruption record is explained by pay structures Lee Kuan Yew deliberately engineered, not by Confucian culture (which has produced deeply corrupt bureaucracies elsewhere). Oil wealth, not Islam, explains the Arab world’s failure to modernise — because oil revenues eliminate the pressure to build the tax base and bureaucratic competence that modernisation requires. Institutions and incentives explain what culture is recruited post-hoc to justify.

On the Huntington legacy: Zakaria commissioned ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ when he took it from Harvard to Foreign Affairs in 1993. He defends what it got right — the return of identity and religion as organising frames after the Cold War — while holding that it missed the persistence of pure power logic, which sometimes overrides civilisational alignment.

In the wiki