Fareed Zakaria on the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intellectual | Conversations with Tyler

hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with fared Zakaria who truly needs no introduction but I would like to point out as of March 26th he has a new and wonderful book out age of revolutions progress and backlash from 1600 to the present fared welcome it's a huge pleasure to be here I'm a little intimidated I must confess cuz I've listened to you I'm a fan of the podcast and you range very widely and I'm worried you're going to ask me questions about something I wrote about 15 years ago that I don't remember you will remember it but I want to start by trying to figure out you so what did you learn from kuwan sing and when was that so this is the dedication of my of my book where I decided this current book I decided I was going to kind of try to remember all the people who helped me along the way in my life and it starts with hushan Singh who is probably if you had asked somebody in India 10 years ago they would have told you he's the most famous journalist in India I got to know him when I was uh 10 years old he was my mom's boss my my mother worked at a magazine called The Illustrated weekly of India and he was an extraordinary character he was a novelist who had also been a diplomat and then he had become editor of this magazine and he was a kind of uh intellectual who I don't know you know we have as many of these kinds of people uh as we used to he was a great he was a novelist who won a couple of awards for his books he was a great lover of the English language and of of poetry in particular and he in he really it was infectious so he gave me this real love of the language and love of poetry that I still uh have to this day uh he in a sense taught me how to write uh made me understand what good writing was turned me on to people like George Orwell uh and I you know I just have this very fond memory of he also taught me how to play tennis how to swim all kinds of things my father was not very athletic so he kind of filled that role in a way um so that's who he is um and I you know as you know the list is long I kind of tried to go through everybody who had really help me along the way and what was it he saw on you that encouraged him to pay so much attention to you cuz you were 10 you say right yeah I think I've always been intellectually very curious um I I don't think I'm the smartest person in the world but I am very intellectually curious and I get I love I I get fascinated by ideas and you know why things are some way so even when I was very young I remember uh I would read much more broadly than my peers um you know I think I looked this up once but Henry Ginger's Memoirs came out when I was 14 I think and I remember reading them cuz I remember my moms um at then at that point she was working at the Times of India they excerpted it and I remember telling her that they had chosen some of the wrong excerpts that there were there were other parts that would have been better so I must have read enough of it to have had an opinion why couldn't you talk sing out of his NE ruvi and socialism he was a great liberal he loved free speech broadminded as you know much better than I do right but he on economics was weak or no oh no you're entirely right and by the way I would I would say the same is true of my father with whom I had many many such conversations my father you you'd find this interesting uh uh Tyler my father was a young Indian nationalist uh who as he once put it to me made the most important decision in his life politically when he was 13 or 14 years old which was as a young Indian Muslim he chose neeru's vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a Nation rather than Jenna's view of religious nationalism so he chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim um but he was yeah and he was politically so you know interesting and and and forward leaning but he was a hopeless social I mean sort of Social Democrat but but veering towards socialism both these guys were and here's why I think for the that whole generation of people by the way my father went to got a scholarship to London University and went to work went to study with Harold laski the Great British socialist Economist and lki told him you you're actually not an economist you're a historian so my father went on and got a PhD in uh London University in in Indian history but um that whole generation of Indians uh who wanted Independence were um imbued with two there were two things going on one the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the labor party and you know the Fabian socialists all the all their allies were all socialists so there was a kind of common cause and there was an it was much it was there was a symbiosis because these were your friends these were your allies these were the only people supporting you the cause that mattered the most to you in your life and the second part was a lot of people who came out of third world countries felt we are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way in you know over hundreds of years and they looked at in the 30s uh the Soviet Union and thought this is a way to accelerate modernization industrialization and so they all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that kind of sped up the the historical process of modernization you know it that my own view was that was a that was a big mistake um though though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do uh that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea uh than in India but that that really explains it my father was in for in in Britain in 45 as a student and as a British subject then you got to vote in the election if you were in London if you were in Britain so I said to him um who did you vote for in the 1945 election remember this is the famous election right after World War II um in which uh you know Churchill gets defeated and he gets up the next morning and uh looks at the papers and his wife says to him uh uh darling it's a blessing in disguise and he says well at the moment it seems very effectively disguised um my father voted in that election I said to him you're a huge fan of Churchill cuz I had grown up around all the Churchill books and my father could quote the speeches and I said did did you vote for church he said oh good lord no um I said why I thought you were great admirer of his he said look on the the issue that mattered most to me in life he was a he was a you know unreconstructed imperialist a vote for labor was a vote for Indian independence a vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the Empire so you know that that again is why their friends were all socialists why do you think the Bengali intelligencia has been so especially leftwing is there a reason the the oh the Bengali intelligencia ah so the Bengali intelligencia was the kind of great intelligen of India probably the most literate the most learned um I think it's because they're very clever and one of the things I've always noticed is that people who are very clever political Elites tend to think that they should run the economy because they can they can do it better than the market you know Milton Friedman used to say that there are two groups of people who don't like the free market uh academics intellectuals because they think they can do it better than the market and businessmen because they don't like competition what they really want this is sort of a variation of the Peter teal argument what they all really want is to be monopolists and that that former part is I think what explains uh the Bengali intellectuals and by the way many of the kind of policy intellectuals in of India in the 50s and 60s who were very much socialists were brilliant you know this is not a case of of stupid people these were all and they were all educated at places like Berkeley and the London School of economics and Harvard you know so it it it the really is you we see the same phenomenon now right when you watch the Biden Administration putting in all these uh these these rules about you know chip making and things like every they think they can figure out the direction the economy is going in the way it should be guided um and I think that the reality is the market is much more powerful than than they are in these these areas to give you one simple example so they decided okay we need to be making high-end chips so who do they bet on they bet on Intel a company that has failed miserably to compete with tsmc the great Taiwanese um chip manufacturer and Intel is now getting multi-billion dollar grants from uh the United States government from the European Union because you know it fills all the categories that you're looking for big company sort of stable well-run Pro you know in some sense uh Pro can guarantee a lot of jobs but of course the reality is that tripm is is so complicated and so that the the the future of Chip making seems to be moving to companies like Nvidia and uh AMD and Micron uh leaving Intel far behind so Intel had lost the last war and got rewarded you know for its failure by being given a check by the US government saying try again and now it seems to be failing in this next War uh and who knew that actually it's Nvidia whose chips turn out to be designed for gaming uh turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence it's a perfect example of how the hakan market signals that come bottom up are much more powerful than a polit political Elite who did who tries to to tell you what it is but to answer your question you know political Elites love the idea that political Elites get to direct the economy what did you learn from the Anglican book of common prayer um you know so I went to an English uh to a to a protest high Protestant High Anglican School in India from you know for until 12th grade and we'd start every morning uh singing A Hymn reciting a book out of the book of common prayer I learned probably two things one was a kind of reverence for tradition and in particular I love the uh I love the the Himel of the the the Ang I think Britain's great contribution to music uh is religious music it's doesn't have anything to compare to compete with you know the Germans and the Italians and in Opera and things like that but religious music I think the the the Brits have done and the English have done particularly well and the second thing I would say is a kind of um an admiration for Christianity um for its extraordinary emphasis empis on uh being nice to people who have not had a good have have not had been lucky in life I would say that's to me the central message of Christianity certain that I take certainly from The Sermon on the Mount and and and it's imbued through the the the the book of common prayer is be you know be nice to the unfor to the people who have been less fortunate than you be nice to poor people be nice to uh recognize that you know the first in in in in God's kingdom the first shall be last and the last shall be first uh that there is an enormous emphasis on the idea that the those things that make you powerful in this world are not the things that really matter that your that your dignity as a human being doesn't come from that I think that's a very powerful idea it's a very revolutionary idea Tom Holland has a very good book about this uh the he's a he's a wonderful historian in Britain uh call I think it's called Dominion where he points out yeah he he points out what a revolutionary idea this was um it completely upended the Roman values which were very much the first shall be first you know the powerful and the rich and the uh are the ones to be valued and he and he points out here's this this Jewish preacher uh coming out of the out of the Middle East saying no the the the first shall be last the last shall be first in the Kingdom of Heaven do you think you picked up an antic clerical side from sing at all yeah I think I've never I've I've I've always liked the kind of more radical Protestant which is actually also the more radical Sunni idea in in Islam that people should have an individual relationship with God that there is the intermediaries seem to exist to exert power uh and are often corrupt and often distort the message um yeah and I I still believe that I think that one of the most sickening things to look at in America is these televangelists who who take advantage of you know the ordinary people and their faith and clearly to me it seemed to have constructed an elaborate and deeply corrupt a racket out of the whole thing I went to armar the year before and it was one of the most magical feelings I've ever had in any place and I'm still not sure what exactly I can trace it to I'm not a seek of course but what for you accounts for the the strong powerful wondrous feeling one gets from that place it's a very good question cuz I I also have that feeling and I think it it it might explain for example Amar is you know kind of the most important uh place for the sik religion and has a beautiful Temple it's called the Golden Temple uh and when Indira Gandhi as prime minister stormed it because there were a group of separatists who had hold up there um that really is what triggered um enormous enormous uh pain in and and anger in the sick Community which eventually led to her assassination um and I I bring that up only to emphasize your point that it has a kind of special magical feeling for six um I think it's there's something about the it architecturally um which is that it it's it you know there's a kind of Serenity uh about it sometimes you can find Hindu temp temp that are very elabor sism is a is a kind of offshoot of Hinduism and Hindu temples can be very elaborate but you know but but very elaborate and ornate and this somehow had a kind of simp has a Simplicity to it and then when you when you add to that the water I've always thought that water adds an enormously calming effect so it's something about that combination I think but I'm just speculating what languages did you grow up speaking Hindi and uru more than anything else Hindi and Udu are two Indian languages very very related um they both have the roughly the same grammatical structure uh but then Hindi derives its vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit or almost entirely from Sanskrit and Udu derives its uh vocabulary almost entirely from Persian Udu is a language of Indian Muslims and it's the official language of Pakistan um it's a beautiful language very lyrical you know very much in infuenced by that Persian literary sensibility if you're speaking Hindi there's a way to if you're speaking uh one of the language there's a way to alternate between both which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a kind of broad um you know kind of embrace of both the Hindu and the and the Muslim communities Naru India's first prime minister used to often do that he would say you know I'm delighted to be coming here to your home and he would say repeat the word home first in Udu then in Hindi so that in effect both both constituencies were covered uh Modi by contrast India's current prime minister who's a great Hindi Hindu nationalist takes pains almost never to use an uru word when he speaks he speaks in a kind of Highly sanskritized uh Hindi that Mo most Indians actually find hard to understand because the the the everyday language Bollywood Hindi is a mixture of Hindi words and uddu words you know so Persian and Sanskrit Origins but for Modi and for people of his ilk in the BJP his party it's very important to quote unquote cleanse the the H the language Hindi from foreign influences and that is why they will speak a very sanskritized Hindi given that you grew up speaking or do your connection with sing who was born in what is now Pakistan how much if if at all do you have an aesthetic longing you know for what used to be called historic India I don't mean in an imperialistic kind of way but just there was something proper about the fact that it was all connected is that in your thought much at all yes it's funny you I don't think I've ever written this so I don't so I I'm not quite sure how you pick that up but it's absolutely so I give you a simple example you know look I think of the partition of India was a complete travesty it was it was premised on this of religious nationalism it was horrendously executed the British got the the person who drew the Lions a man named Radcliffe um had never been to India um he had never been east of the Suz and was given this task and he did it in a month or two uh probably caused a million and a half to two million lives lost maybe 10 million people displaced and it broke that wonderfully diverse syncretic aspect of India so if you look at cities like Delhi and Lor what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India Hindu Muslim Punjabi Cindi and now what what you have is it's a much more bated so if you go to lore lore is a sort of Muslim city in Pakistan um and it has a Punjabi influence and Delhi has become essentially much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that that that Muslim influence uh and you know to me as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity it's sad to see that you know it's almost like you've you've U you've lost something that really made these places wonderfully Rich um you know I feel the same way when you look at when you read about the history of Europe you think of a place like Vienna which in its most dazzling moment was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the hapsburg empire large segment of of it was Jewish and it had as a res result all of the I mean think about Freud and Clinton and the music that came out of there and the architecture that came out of the turn of the century in the turn of the 19th century and it's all gone you know it's kind of like at this point a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian City do you feel Mumbai is still the most Cosmopolitan part of current India yes by far Mumbai is is Def the most cosmopol part of and and it still has a lot of cosmopolitanism because you know India still has a lot of Muslims I mean India even though it's it's you know the Muslim majority areas ended up being Pakistan Bangladesh but there's a very substantial minority around 10% which in Indian terms maybe 12% it's about 180 million Muslims which makes it I think the third or fourth largest Muslim country in the world why do do you think Indian Muslims have not radicalized so much or at least it seems that way to me as an outsider no you're 100% right they have not radicalized at all George W bush used to say uh and it's basically true that it's extraordinary to see a a a population of you know 150 plus Muslims living right next to Pakistan right next to Afghanistan and there was not a single known member of al-Qaeda I think there are now you know maybe a handful of members who Isis who have been found to to have been Indian Muslims but given the scale of you know almost 200 million Muslims the fact that there are at most you know five or 10 who are belong to these radical terrorist groups is extraordinary it's not even that they don't vote for Muslim parties in general they vote for the congress party which is a secular party so they don't even uh even in their voting forget terrorism they don't even V vote for you know kind of a specific Muslim or Islamic fundamentalist parties why is that though I think it's the kind of again the syncratic nature of India that India has always been diverse it's always um Hinduism is very tolerant it's a it's a kind of unusual religion in that you can be you can believe in one God and be Hindu you can believe in 300 you can be vegetarian and believe that's a religious dictate and you can be non vegetarian believe that that's completely compatible with your religion it's it's always embraced almost every Vari variant in variation and so I think you know in a sense Islam fit in um fit in within that tapestry very easily and it's been around for a while you know I mean when people talk about cleansing India of you know Hindu nationalists talk about cleansing India of foreign influences Islam has been in India since the 11th century so it's been around for a long time people I think feel you know comfortable and and don't feel the need to assert that distinctive identity by voting in a in a in a in a parochial way um some of that is changing and I worry about it because there is you know much more sustained persecution of Muslims uh these days in India but I I I see I still think in in many ways India is a sort of Wonder of this there's nothing quite like it no quite like it there are you know 15 official languages um and those are real languages I mean languages with thousands of years of L literature and poetry these are not dialects there are 400 dialects uh in India and and yet there's something that unifies the country um kind of almost geographically civilization fast forwarding a bit what did you learn debating at the AL political union I had great fun I uh I learned more than anything else honestly how to be how to do politics because you know the year political union was are kind of uh it was a speaking you know sort of like a mini Parliament but there there were political parties um and you had to make alliances you had to you know especially if you were trying to rise up there and I I became president my sophomore year which was pretty fast uh you had to be very good at politics and I discovered if I can be totally honest um I I was very good at politics but it scared me I did not like the person I became in doing it um you have to be pretty ruthless pretty expedient you have to make aines I wouldn't say you have to be deceptive but you have to do a little bit of over promising and and uh switching horses when it seems necessary and all of that left me with a with i i I I I I don't know if I decided this consciously but I think one of the reasons I'm a journalist and not a active participant is that I I saw what it does to you um as a person and I didn't I didn't love that I I was very good at it I will I will you know um boastfully say there was a I think 2003 piece in New York Magazine I know you know it the suggested you might someday be Secretary of State now this was never you saying that but when that came out no one laughed and now today that would be Unthinkable because our politics is somehow crazier uh what did you think in 2003 when you heard people thought you could someday be Secretary of State you know I was enormously flattered obviously um I didn't myself think that that was you know a likely scenario because I had already begun to see a shift that had taken place and uh if you look back to um when Nixon appointed Kissinger National Security advisor uh Kissinger had barely ever he had been a consultant to the Kennedy administration it really been an academic and Nixon had been attracted to him for two reasons one he had read his foreign affairs articles mostly in foreign affairs um and two he knew that uh Kissinger advised Nelson Rockefeller um and Nixon had a little bit of that Envy of the Eastern establishment when Carter appointed brinsky rinsky was a famous academic um again had never held government job there was something about the Cold War which made people think the stakes were so high you had to find you know the most brilliant person you could or something like that um in the last 30 or 40 years the trend has moved much further away from that and much more toward loyalty toward people who have been supporting you who have been uh on your team who have worked on your campaign and I you know I've never wanted to do that I've never done that and so I I always thought that that was a kind of you know people were using an old standard uh which is here's this guy who writes really interesting stuff on foreign policy you know maybe he's going to become hold High government office I don't think those those kind of people people like me uh are asked to do that kind of thing anymore and it's a separate question as to whether I do it I have been asked to Ser in government several times I've never but never at that at that level um I've never really wanted to do it because I realized it's a version of what I was saying to you about the the Yale political union I'm not a very good cordier and you have to be a cordier if you're going to serve you know you lose your own voice you have to take on the voice of the principal you know the president and you have to you have to be a good team player and I've always liked my own independence my own voice and so even though I was flattered at time when I would be offered these things um I never quite it never quite made sense to me I always found some excuse you know economists have a wonderful phrase revealed preferences um and after about the third time I was offered something when I turned it down I realized to myself you know what my revealed preference is I do not want to go into government at the Y political union who beat you the most often in those debates if anyone um I was pretty good uh uh I think that I would say I had a roommate uh who was also a member of the El political union I was right of Center in those days he was left of center and he was very very eloquent and very smart his name is David Murphy he then became a partner at wakel Lipton which is the the literally the leading law fir in the country the most most profitable law fir by far uh he now does arbitration uh and he's still a for formidable debater and we're still very much in touch um I think that was probably Brad baronson was another person who was very good who um um I think served in um the bush White House as in the office of legal counsil and then became general counsel to uh ge um and I would say those two more than anyone else so in in these years if I understand it correctly you're viewed very much as a prodigy did you feel pressure from that no I if I'm being totally honest I got energized by it I felt like you know I had the wind behind my back and and I was amazed that America would you know that America I mean wasn't America it was the where I was you know in Yale and Harvard and all that um that nobody cared where I came from nobody cared you know I remember once being asked when I was a graduate student at Harvard um Tony Lake uh was then National Security adviser and his office called and said um I'd written something in the New York Times I think um you know Mr Lake would like you to come to the White House to brief him um and I walked in and there was five people at around a table um Tony Lake the deputy National Security adviser Sandy berer George Stephanopoulos who was then director of communications at the White House um Joe NY who was the senior professor at Harvard um one other person and myself and I kept thinking to myself is are they going to realize at some point that I'm not an American citizen I mean they're asking me for my my advice on what America should do and I'm I'm not you know I'm on a student visa um and of course nobody ever did which is one of the great glories of America what did you learn from Walter isacson um Walter when I first got to know him was you know just a kind of a great journalist who had written this book the wise men um one of my funny social fuxa is I saw met him at a cocktail party at Harvard um at a you know student um Group which he he belonged to when he was at Harvard and that I belong to as a grad student called the Signet society and uh we were chatting about books and and somehow the the the book The Wise Men came up and I puffed myself up as a graduate student uh you know and said oh you know um I just reviewed that book for The American Scholar uh the ma the magazine of f bet Kappa and you know I said I I just reviewed that book and he looked at me and he said yeah and I wrote it so um I learned from him you know more than anything else had this wonderful ambition and I say wonderful because uh you know he was a journalist but he was decided he was going to write this book about American foreign policy about the group of people after World War II who really charted the course of American foreign policy charted the course of the American Century then he decides to write a biography of Henry Kissinger then he decides to write a book about Einstein and I think you know particularly when you're trained as an academic as I was you kind of get into a silo and and you think to yourself well I am only I only know about this one thing and Walter has this amazing breath about him where he's he's willing to you know take on anything Leonardo da Vinci and he pulls it off the books are amazing um that's that I think that sense of that breath of ambition I've always loved yes I I like the Leonardo book now you you wrote your dissertation under Huntington right correct under and what was your thesis topic and how did you choose it um I I'll be totally honest so my my thesis topic was I um I try to answer the question if if when countries rise uh in in in great power when when they rise economically they become great Powers because they quickly translate that economic power into diplomatic and military power what explains the principal exception in modern history which is the United States the United States by 1880 by most measures had uh overtaken Britain as the leading industrial power in the world but if you looked at its Army its Navy its diplomatic representation you know the number of embassies it had around the world it ranked you know 20th in the world I think it I think it had you know many many fewer uh foreign outposts than Italy it had a smaller Army than you know most European nations so what explained this massive delay in America Rising politically and and diplomatically and militarily um and and my my simple answer was that the United States was a very unusual creature in the in the modern world it was a very strong Nation with a very weak state so that the federal government in in the United States did not have the capacity to extract the resources from the society at large because I mean you didn't have income taxes in those days you still had the state militia systems where you know the federal troops were not it was not that easy uh particularly in the shadow of the Civil War for the federal government to raise uh raise troops so there were all these obstacles to America translating its National Power into state power that could be used anyway now the reason I did it was partly I was fascinated by it Paul Kennedy had been my advisor at Yale and he had been writing the rise and fall of the great Powers his his great uh toome at the time the second reason I did it was I wanted to get a job in Academia and this conformed to certain academic Fashions at the time about testing hypotheses uh you know and testing various theories of real politic called realism and classical realism and defensive realism all of which I now look back with a certain amount of regret because I think it kind of it it unne it added necessary theoretical layers to what was actually a very a very elegant uh historical uh thesis but you know look I was an immigrant kid I wanted a job and so part of the point was to write it in the style that would get me a job and um and you know it succeed it I think it it would have succeeded at that it it was a well regarded disseration it got print published by Princeton but by then I decided to to move away from Academia what put you off Academia and this was for the better in my view I think two things one I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved which was a kind of broad uh a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities which was sort of a kind of uh rigorous structural compar historical comparison uh looking at different uh countries trying to understand why why there were differences it was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice on Game Theory on you know kind of there was a kind of Economist Envy just as economists have math Envy political scientists have Economist envy and it was moving in that direction which whe whether it was the right direction or not um it was not it was not something I felt like I would thrive in and the second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington Sam Huntington was extraordinary uh uh character probably the most important social scientist um in the second half of the 20th century huge contributions to several fields of political science he lived next to next to me me obviously in a tiny graduate student department but he in a townhouse on Beacon Hill and so I would sometimes you know talk to him we'd have coffee in the mornings and he had a which is he'd get up about 6:00 a.m. he'd get down go down to the basement of his townhouse and at 6:30 he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was and he'd do that for three hours uninterrupted at least sometimes four and then at about 9:30 10 he would take the subway to Harvard and his point was you got to start the day by doing the important work of Academia which is producing knowledge all the rest of it teaching committee meeting all that you you can do later and he was so disciplined about that that every 5 years or so he put out another major piece of work another major book and I looked at that and I said to myself I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level um and so you know I I need to go into something that has deadlines that has structure that has uh more feedback you know because it's a as you know well Tyler there's a there's a very lonely aspect to being an academic you know there's a lot of fun and there's lots of interesting things but a lot of it is just sitting by yourself there's a kind of you know the in the in the the the new Leonard Bernstein movie there's a point at which Bradley Cooper says I'm guessing this comes out of a Bernstein interview where he was asked what's the difference between being a conductor and a and a composer and he says well being a performer you have a kind of you you have an constant relationship with the outside world you have a what he says you have a grand out OU outer life an outward you know a life directed outward but as a composer as a as a Creator you only have a grand internal life you're you know it's it's all within you and it has to and you have to be able to make generate ideas from that lonely space um and I've always found that hard so for me writing writing books is the hardest thing I do I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia um the television um column everything else I mean I think it's important but it's relatively in my in my conception in my hierarchy it's trivia the the most important thing you can do is to is to try and write books that that make a difference that that that put new ideas into the world but it's the hardest thing for me so by age 28 now you're editor of the journal Foreign Affairs which especially then was extremely important how did that happen um really luck um I was having lunch with Walter isacson this just shows you Serendipity in life um I was having lunch with Walter isacson in New York and I was telling him that Sam Hunton had offered me uh an assistant professorship at Harvard there was one there was was an Institute that Sam ran and that um that that he he had told me he thought he could create a an assistant professorship that was half halftime teaching halftime um assistant director of that Institute um and I was you know thrilled about it and Walter says to me well I don't know that you should really go into Academia you're you know there's this job out there the managing editor of Foreign Affairs and the editor-in chief is you know he's much older he's a real journalist you would balance him out really well you should you should try and get that job and I remember telling him Walter didn't you hear me I I think I'm going to get to be an assistant professor at Harford and he looks at me and says did you hear what I just told you I think you could be managing editor of Foreign Affairs and I realized that we were both totally socialized by our respective careers in graduate school you're on a conveyor belt and the end of the conveyor belt is becoming a great professor and where what better place to start than Harvard and in journalism you know the idea of being managing editor by the time you're 28 is so each of us was reflecting our our biases and our silos but then I went home and I realized you know I was really I'd always love journalism I started a magazine when I was in high school I'd you know been the editor of the Y political monthly I'd every summer job I'd ever had I worked at a magazine or a news paper because I found them fun I again revealed preferences telling you more than your than than you know what you say to yourself and so I called him up and said yeah you know throw my hat in the ring then I discovered it was very tough because I was 28 and everybody else there were it was who was being interviewed was you know 45 plus um they were all they had much more experience than I did so I had to really hustle to to get that to to be viable um but you know without that LUN with wal I wouldn't have happened was it you who commissioned Samuel Huntington's very famous Clash of civilizations essay yes I I didn't commission it so what happened is I went to Sam and told him I was going to take this job at foreign affairs um which he was completely opposed to my three advisers all advised me against taking the job um and I realized that the reason was that they were all great academics and the way you within the world of Academia the way you gain Fame and influence by having great proteges by having great students who then go on to become great academics and they all thought that my going would be a great loss to Academia but also you know in a kind of a loss to their legacy so Sam very much felt that I shouldn't take the job and um and so I said to him you know I am going to do it but can I ask a favor you sent me a a draft of an essay you've been writing for my comments a few months ago called The Clash of civilizations can I take take that with me to Foreign Affairs and and publish it uh and so that's how it became so I took it with me we edited it and we made it the first time ever uh the lead essay Foreign Affairs had never had a lead essay before you know the tie face all was all the same and we redesigned the magazine and we made this the O you know the kind of the clear cover essay in a world where we have a major war with Russia attacking Ukraine significant conflict in the sudans on goinging conflict in Congo several Million Lives uh killed there do you think that essay is still correct because those are very significant conflicts and they're not really cross- civilizational right they're within particular groups I think he got one thing uh very powerfully right um which is that at the end of the Cold War the the where ideology was the core motivational Factor behind much of the conflict of the of the of the Cold War um you know whether you were Communists or capitalists whether you were allied with the communist or the Democratic World whether you were a proxy for those were the kind of the the battle lines of the of the late 20th century of the mid 20th century that once that went away that what people were going to revert to was their their identity and their identity often rooted in religion and so if you think about the rise of al-Qaeda the rise of Islamic fundamentalism um you know you think about the the return of a certain kind of Chinese nationalism in China I think that piece of it you know you look at the rise of Hindu nationalism in India he really understood that that people were going to fall back on these older ascriptive identities in a way that they had not during the during the Cold War what I think he got wrong was international relations is fundamentally a struggle for power and that a lot of those power struggles uh are are you know they it's not that they are U motivated by by things that are completely contradict contradictory to uh identity politics but they sometimes match up and they sometimes don't you know when s you know most of many of the wars in the Arab world have been arabon Arab Muslim on Muslim uh when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait you know he was invading another fellow Arab fellow Sunni State um as you point out the number of the African conflicts are essentially you'd have to say conflicts within civilizations um and some of the conflicts are ones where people find odd bedfellows you know so that the Chinese and the Russians are allying even though in a sense they're two different civilizations and and there's a long history of this you know rishu when he was running France the great Catholic power Allied routinely with protest Powers uh so power politics sometimes transcends uh identity politics and I think he missed that but it's still a very powerful and thought thought-provoking essay I think after 911 in 2001 you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek why do they hate us uh you talked about the rulers failed ideas religion uh if you were to revise or rethink that piece today how would you change it 23 more years of right yeah not very much honestly the the central point I was making in that essay was that if you look at the Arab world it is the principal outlier in the in the modern era where it has undergone almost no political modernization that if you look at country you know if you looked at Latin America in 1970 versus 2000 you would have seen a sea change where mostly uh it was mostly dictatorships in 1970 and was mostly democracies by 2001 if you looked at obviously Central Europe totally transformed from communist to Liberal democracies even if you looked at Africa you would have seen enormous transition the Arab world had remained absolutely static and my argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth which had which had impeded modernization but along with that because of that failed modernization they had developed this kind of reactionary ideology of Islam which which kind of you know said the answer is to go further back not to go forward to go back to Islam is the solution was the was the Cry of the of the Islamic fundamentalist in the 1970s and the problem that they were you know they were saying the Islam is a solution to was the failed modernization the failed westernization of these of these countries so that that toxic mixture was at the heart of what was producing armed reactionary ideologies like Al-Qaeda and things like that so I don't think I got I I I really do feel very proud of that essay but you're absolutely right that we have 23 more years of data and what's interesting is that partly because of 911 which I think in some ways was a kind of great wakeup call what you have seen is a much greater effort to by by Elites to modernize the societies not simply to buy a modernity by buying Western Goods but to find ways to actually modernize the society you know everything from all the stuff going on in Saudi Arabia right now which is yes there's a lot of economic you know getting the the bringing Golf and other sports and but there's opening up the lives of women allowing them to be educated uh ending the segregation allowing famously them to drive all and Saudi Arabia in a way was at the heart of this problem because it is the richest country and it it in many ways sent the signal of what kind of modernization was compatible with Islam and what was not so so I think that in a way you've seen more forward movement in the last 20 years than uh Than People realize even though the regimes have largely stayed uh dictatorships but that tension still still exists by the way you know I mean you know Egypt is a very brittle country because again it has fundamentally failed to modernize I've been surprised how well some of the gulf Nations have done since say 2001 if we look at Iran which has really not done so well if you had to explain in as fundamental a model as possible you know if you see Iranians abroad they earn high incomes they have real science they have real technology uh there's some degree of national unity in a way maybe you wouldn't find say in Iraq but what's the fundamental thing at its core holding back Iran I think it's very similar version of what we were just talking about it's it's oil wealth uh couple UAE has made the transition right why why isn't Iran like UAE so to begin with those those Gulf States you know it's important to remember are tiny um you know you're talking about a million or two people in Qatar I think you're talking about maybe 400,000 people so it's much easier for an elite to dominate and Rule those places uh you know there's a reason why Saudi Arabia was more difficult Saudi Arabia is the the it's the one real country like by which I mean real population size um and that's why in a way what MBs is do doing has been more difficult and it's you've got to measure the population's reaction to things um Iran is a big country bigger than all of them and um and I think that between the oil wealth and the failed modernization where the Sha went to you know in my current book I talk about this when you look at Iran strikes me very much like the French Revolution where the Sha tried to move much too far much too fast much too disruptively triggered an enormous backlash which they're still living with now um and you add to that the oil wealth which makes it easy to not modernize you know to just remind people what the problem with oil wealth is that it means you don't have to modernize your economy you don't have to modernize your Society because by you can get enormous wealth just by drilling holes in the ground actually by paying other people to drill holes in the ground mostly uh Western technology is is used to extract those resources so the whole you sort of you never get through the the painful process of actually modernizing your society and many of these countries are in that situation as I said the Gulf States are so unusual and it's not an accident that the most modern of the gulf cities is Dubai the one city that has no oil you know oil is 10% of Dubai's uh GDP it's about 90% of of Abu dhabi's so even there you see that variation and I think you you know it's it's the you're right to point to the the thing that needs explaining is why have why is Dubai Abu Dhabi and Qatar and maybe Saudi worked not why do the other ones not work because the other ones are all like Nigeria like Venezuela the oil oil rich countries that have never made it there are these small exceptions and they're all very small they're they're run by very kind of forward leaning absolute monarchs who have enormous power and can exercise that power because they have a tiny population you had a famous interview with Lee quano the theme being culture is Destiny now Singapore has done very well since then do you think that is because of their culture I don't why hasn't Singapore become more corrupt yeah I I don't uh lean you clearly did um I think it's a perfect example of they they had very good leadership and they they and they institutionalized some of their best practices in a way that made a huge difference uh they so for example why are they not corrupt it's because lequan you thought long and hard about this problem and he decided that he was going to create a system of bureaucracy in Singapore um which was uh that they get paid close to Market wages so a u cabinet minister in Singapore makes about $1.5 million um a senior civil servant makes about a million dollars at the you know the highest level and it per they do it in a very um um very uh rigorous process where they essentially Benchmark against you know a company like McKenzie or things like that and they say and and of course you don't make the same amount but you're your the idea is that you should be able to make the kind of money that allows you to live a good life send your kids to to schools and colleges afford health care you know uh have a good retirement so that all those things that tend to be Temptations to be corrupt you don't need to do because if you just do your job well you're going to it so it's a perfect example of how there's nothing cultural about it there's there are Chinese bureaucracies in China uh and there are a lot of very smart people but they are super corrupt there's you know the Chinese businessmen in Indonesia and they're very corrupt but Singapore managed through the structure of its of its system and its laws to do it now to be fed lean you would argue that there's some part of this that is the Chinese Mandarin tradition of you know trusting bureaucrats and stuff but I've never bought the cultural argument you know they used people used to say that uh if you look at Max vber in his in his book on the on the on capitalism the Protestant Spirit uh he basically said the two areas the two cultures that are inimicable to growth that are going to be an obstacle to growth were Catholicism and Confucianism and and you know I mean if you look at Spain and Italy over the last 40 years they've grown pretty pretty darn fast uh in fact somewhat faster than than uh some of the larger countries in in the north and if you look at confusion ISM of course now people say it's the confusion ethic that has propelled China forward the same is true of India it used to be that people talked about the Hindu growth rate meaning low growth rate in the 1950s and 60s and now they say there's something about Indian culture that actually is very pro- entrepreneurial I I think that culture is a very big grab bag when you see success or failure you can always you know put your dip into that bag and find something that explains either the failure or the success I'm struck that this year both you and Rouser Sharma have books coming out again fed's book is age of revolutions progress and backlash from 1600 to the present that I would describe broadly as classically liberal do you think Classical liberalism is making a comeback or is it just being plowed under by progressivism wokeism trumpism illiberalism nationalism or are you leading a new trend I wish I wish I were leading a new trend but I don't think I am I think the reason these books are coming out um and I certainly mine as you know is centrally occupied with the problem that there's a great danger that we're going to lose this enormous uh I mean the probably the most important thing that's happened in in the last 5 600 years in human history is this this movement uh that has allowed for the creation of modern uh liberal Democratic societies with with somewhat market economies right if you look at the graph of of a of of uh income of GDP per capita GDP it's like a straight line there's no improvement until you get to about you know roughly speaking the 17th 18th century in Europe and then you see a sharp uptick you see this extraordinary rise and that coincides with the rise of Science and and you know intellectual curiosity and the scientific method and the Industrial Revolution after that all that was a product of this great burst of of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the west and I fear that that whole project is now under threat because of all the forces you described you know populism from the right and the left um you know dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that want to manipulate it to serve their purposes and part of and and part of the reason is it's just been so successful that it is it is producing change and transformation economically and socially uh and even personally and psychologically on a scale that is that is so disruptive and so um so troubling to people that they search for solutions they search for you know if you think about what we've gone through in the last 30 years and this is really the central argument of my book massive expansion of globalization massive expansion of Information Technology so that it has completely upended the old old economy um all of this happening and people are overwhelmed and they're and and you know they search in that in that Age of Anxiety they search for a solution and the solutions the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populace uh and they're deeply anti-liberal illiberal and so I worry that we're actually you know if we don't cherish what we have we'll lose what has been one of the great great moments of periods of of progress in human history what's the most surprising thing you learned writing this book one surprising thing that uh that you may uh new Tyler that I didn't was that the Left Right divide that we talk about it it came about about as kind of an accident it's you know if you think to yourself why do we speak of people being leftwing and rightwing and left of center and right of Center is because during the French Revolution actually just before the French Revolution uh there there was a National Assembly chamber in which people used to sit according to their their status you know whether they were commoners whether they were priest whether they were Aristocrats that was the division but as the debate turned into a debate about the preservation of the French monarchy the people who wanted to preserve the Monarch tended to cluster on the right of the chair of the presiding officer chair and the people who wanted to get rid of the monarchy tended to gather on the left and then this architect Pier Adrien Paris designs a a new chamber for for the National Assembly which becomes a rectangular box in which there is literally a right of a right a right side and a left side and all the people who wanted to preserve the monarchy state would congregate on the right and the people or naturally this was not by requirement and all the people who wanted to uh upend the monarchy were on the left and that is how you came up with left wi and rightwing which I've always thought is a wonderful example of sometimes in history you have these you know these serendipities which which then have a very long and Powerful effect why does your book cover the 17th century Dutch Golden Age The Dutch are the first modern country they are the first country that you know if you think about politics before that and you know certainly with the exception of Greece and ancient Greece and Rome and in modern history um the Dutch invent modern politics and economics they invent modern politics in the sense that it's the first time politics is not about courts and Kings it is about a merchant Republic with powerful factions and interest groups and political parties um or the precursor to political parties it's the beginning of modern economics because it's an economics based not simply on on land and agriculture but on you know the the famous uh thing that John Lock talked about which is mixing human human beings labor with the land and the the Dutch literally do this when they reclaim Land from the sea and find ways to manage it uh and then invent tall ships which is in some ways you know one of the first great technological revolutions that has a direct economic impact so you put all that together and the Dutch they they they become the the the richest country in the world and they become the leading technological power in the world so it was very important to me to start the story because they are really the beginnings of modern liberalism and I should be clear when I say liberalism I mean Classical liberalism liberalism as in uh of and pertaining to human Liberty Circa 1800 how large were the Chinese and Indian economies yeah this is one of those uh uh highly misleading statistics that certainly the chines and Indians often use but it it tells you very little so Circa 1800 the Chinese and Indian economies are the two largest economies in the world and people have taken this to mean oh you know the West had a temporary spurt because of colonies and cheap energy and that you know the Chinese and Indians are just coming back to where they were and that really misses first of all the the the statistic is misleading because in those days GDP was simply measured by using per cap by using population all Society was agricultural the more people you had the larger your GDP it was meaningless because the state could not extract that GDP in any meaningful way and it's meaningless because it doesn't it doesn't measure progress it doesn't measure per capita GDP growth which is the most important thing to look at so if you look at per capita GDP growth from 1350 to 1950 for 600 years India and China have basically no movement it's about $600 in 1350 and $600 in 1950 the west by by comparison moves up 600% in in that period from so it's a rough roughly $500 per capita GDP to roughly $5,000 per capita GDP and you can also look at all kinds of other measures you can look at diet there the economic historians who've done this very well and you know people in England were eating four to five times as much uh grain and protein as people in China and India you can look at the extraordinary flourishing of Science and Engineering uh you can look at the the the rise of the great universities it's all happening in the west the reason this is important is people need to understand the rise of the West has been a very profound deep rooted historical phenomenon that began sometime in the 15th century the the fact that we're moving out of that phase is a big big deal this is not a momentary blip this is a huge TR you know this is something that the West Define modernity so even when countries try to be modern they are in some way becoming Western because there is no path we know of to modernity without without that I mean one other way of just thinking about how silly that statistic is but you know in pure GDP terms China had a larger GDP than Britain in 1900 now look at Britain in 1900 the most advanced industrial society in the world ruling one quarter of the world largest Navy in the world was able to humiliate China by using a small fraction of its mil military power during the Opium power you know so so that's what tells you that that that number is really meaningless the West has been significantly more advanced than the rest of the world since the 16th century at least how did you end up writing online wine reviews for slate Michael Kinsley who was my first boss um at the new Republic uh called me up one day and asked me if I would write a foreign affairs column for the new webzine uh slate that he was uh starting with Microsoft and I said to him I'd love to mik uh but I just signed on with Newsweek to write a monthly column on Foreign Affairs um and he said you got to write something for me I really want you to be part of this new Venture it's really important to me um and I so I tell you what I could write about something I know about as much about as as Foreign Affairs as wine um and I'll try and write it in a way that would be of interest to a non-wine drinker and that was the Mandate I set myself which is try to write this in a way that is is of interest to somebody who wouldn't so I you know I I I I try to answer why is it that in that the British love Bordeaux wines and they call them clarate right where red Bordeaux is called clar it's a very long tradition and people have often said this is an example of British taste and culture well of course it isn't it's an example of tariff policies for 400 years uh when Elanor of aquatain was married read the second uh in France for those of you who remember the movie The Lion in Winter with Katherine heurn and pet Peter role um all everything that came out of Bordeaux uh was taxfree to Britain because of this marriage because Eleanor of aquatain was French and and came from the from essentially from Bordeaux and so all Bordeaux products um went to Britain tax-free and as a result the British developed an enormous liking for this wine so it was a good way of you know trying to get people who are not interested in wine interested in something about wine were your feelings conflicted at all when you started doing TV or was it just plain outright fun like I want to do this this is for me um when I started to do it I was just doing it as a commentator you know the M the the main gig I got was George Stephanopoulos asked me if I would be on the Sunday Roundtable that he had uh he inherited the the show that David Brinkley used to run um and that was fun that was just uh pure fun um when I started to try to do it myself and do my own show I had a little show on PBS that was more difficult and I had to find a way to make to come to terms with television cuz I really fundamentally thought of myself as somebody who was a writer who just happened to occasionally be on television offering an opinion and you couldn't if you look at it from that perspective you can't but think that television is superficial um you know because if you look at if you take my show which I'm very proud of but if you took the transcript of my my show it would probably fit on one page of the New York Times um you know that's just the nature of television what I came to realize and what I had to come I had to get myself to understand was that the better way to think about television is it's like Hau you have a very limited you know you have real constraints in terms of time but if you use those constraints well and powerfully and effectively you can have a huge impact because you're hitting people in a place where um print doesn't often hit so I now think of of the show very much in those terms you know each segment of my of my show is about six to seven minutes and I say to myself I've got six minutes with this person what is it I can do what can I what can I extract how can I how can I hone this in a way that the the audience gets the maximum Insight out of it a final question uh from a great distance it might seem that you're one of these people who's so busy being famous that it just drives you crazy or you don't get to do what you want to do in life yet the book is out you've done many other things you have an incredible Network you travel a lot you enjoy Wine and Food in a serious way uh what's your own self account of how that has come to be a good acceptable fulfilling life for you and that you're not Driven Crazy by being too busy being famous do you know what I'm getting it yeah very much so um so I would say first of all I'm not that famous you know as my kids will often remind me I'm like a a third tier celebrity uh by which I mean you know there's the sort of Brad Pit world right like that's a completely different world then there's the Anderson Cooper world uh and that's sort of one level below and I'm probably in that in the third range where you know if I'm if I'm at an airport every five or seven minutes somebody might come up to me and say hey I like the show um but it doesn't interfere with my life in any way uh the and you know it's a pleasure to have people I've I've almost never had somebody once or twice somebody come up and be nasty it's mostly you know people are very sweet they're nice occasionally somebody wants a selfie but it's really not very intrusive and it's not and and as I say it's partly because I'm really not that famous where it does uh have the impact you're describing is I I I have a lot of opportunities you know in terms of giving speeches going visiting places conferences um people wanting to meet all of that you you have to make choices and that part managing my time is one of the most difficult parts of my life life and I've tried to do it well I've tried to do it most importantly in a way that I still have a very rich personal life mostly for with my kids uh but also with my close friends my friends are you know I've maintained a social network that is mostly the people who I are really my friends you know not the famous people who invite you on their boat uh you know that's I know that that's not real I KN I know that if I didn't have my job I wouldn't I wouldn't get those invitations so I've tried to stay you know honest with myself that way um and to be enormously grateful and thankful for the opportunities for the luck that has allowed me to to do what I do be nice to people be decent you know recognize that I'm in an unusually privileged position uh and you know be the best representation I can of myself uh but I I think more than anything else probably having kids grounds you in that way you know because you can have all that other stuff and makes no difference you can be a terrible father and I probably spend most of my time you know when I think and and reflect and be self-critical I want to be sure that i' I've done right by my kids I've done right by my friends again fed's new book is age of revolutions progress and backlash from 1600 to the present fed Zakaria thank you very much d a huge pleasure thank you for having me on

Channel: Mercatus Center

Views: 33,588

Keywords: Economics, Policy, Lifestyle, Culture, India, Harvard, Yale, Foreign Policy, CNN, Television, News

Id: 0r82i9tWOwk

Length: 72min 58sec (4378 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024