Zakaria: a serious style emerges

WORLD VIEW: "The Only Thing We Have to Fear …" by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, 2 June 2008, p. 37.

Until the last book (Post-American World, which to me is a bad title) and recent columns (last year or so), I never could discern any real identifiable style in Zakaria's writing, meaning that if you showed it to me without his name, I'd have no idea if he wrote it or somebody else.

I think that's really changed over the last year. Where, in the past, he was reticent to insert himself much in his writing, now he does it a lot more. Now, when you read him, it's more and more stuff that seems unique to his worldview, which is becoming ever more optimistic and—as a welcome result—far more resistant to fear-mongering, which he never really did. It's just that his previous writing was so . . . "on the one hand . . . on the other hand" that you never were quite sure where he came down—just that he was reasonably patient (the illiberal democracy argument).

Here he makes a nice leverage off a reasonable tally of global terrorism, one that doesn't count every act of violence in Iraq to inflate its numbers. Pretty reasonable stuff interpreted with some authority by Zakaria, who seems committed by his book to reject the terrorists-are-running-the-world thesis that so many in national security have fallen in love with in recent years.

On that basis alone, it is great to see the book coincide (no accident) with a major media blitz by his various backers to turn him into an A-list media star (although CNN could have given him a better time than 1pm on Sunday). There's not that many journalists out there who can talk intelligently about global affairs, and there's such a huge divide between the economic thinkers and the pol-mil-dip thinkers, that you basically have to switch channels to get much of a comprehensive view of globalization, which is all national security and treaties to the pol-mil-dip crowd and all markets and deals to the economics crowd. Naturally, I see a lot more reality captured in the latter camp than in the former, but Zakaria is a good person to address that gap.

Comments

[Tom Mull]

I discovered Zakaria before Barnett (both thru Don Beck). Again, my favorite Political Science PHd's: 1) Tom Barnett, 2) Fareed Zakaria, and 3) Douglas J. Amy (http://governmentisgood.com/ & http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/prlib.htm). I have all three well represented on my bookshelf. =)

[Hans Suter]

Tom, have you ever thought that a guy called Fareed Zakaria needs to establish his credentials first ?

[Tom Barnett]

With a Harvard PhD (we were classmates) and then years as editor of Foreign Affairs?

The guy comes from journalism royalty in India. What Fareed has never lacked, even in his youth, was self-confidence.

So no, Hans, I knew otherwise--first hand--decades ago.