Written by John Lounsbury
Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria discussed the current disarray of governance around the world in a presentation at the Oxford Union Society (University of Oxford) in January of this year. It is useful to hear this review presented before the COVID-19 pandemic became established because the underlying factors troubling the world today exist independently from the health crisis.
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This one hour video starts with a 17 minute presentation by Zakaria, followed by 44 minutes of Q&A.
From YouTube:
Zakaria is a renowned Indian-American journalist, and the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, a weekly domestic and foreign affairs program. He has interviewed world leaders, including US President Barack Obama and French President Emmanuel Macron, and writes a regular column for The Washington Post on foreign affairs. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Post-American World and The Future of Freedom, a New York Times bestseller.
ABOUT THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY: The Oxford Union is the world’s most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. Since 1823, the Union has been promoting debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.
From Wikipedia:
Zakaria was born in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), India, to a Konkani Muslim family.[4][5] His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic theologian. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was his father’s second wife. She was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India.
Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1986,[3] where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor in chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right. He later gained a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1993,[3] where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.[6]
After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992, at the age of 28. Under his guidance, the magazine was redesigned and moved from a quarterly to a bimonthly schedule. He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International,[3] and became a weekly columnist for Newsweek. In August 2010 he moved to Time to serve as editor at-large and columnist.[7] He writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Media group, which includes The Atlantic Monthly.
He has published on a variety of subjects for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic. For a brief period, he was a wine columnist for the web magazine Slate, with the pseudonym of George Saintsbury, after the English writer.[8][9][10]
Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), The Post-American World (2008), and In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2015). He co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books) with James F. Hoge Jr. His last three books have both been New York Times bestsellers and The Future of Freedom and The Post American World have both been translated into more than 25 languages. In 2011 an updated and expanded edition of The Post-American World (“Release 2.0”) was published.
Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC‘s This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002 – 2007) where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable. He hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005 – 08). His weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), premiered on CNN in June 2008.[3] It airs twice weekly in the United States and four times weekly on CNN International, reaching over 200 million homes. It celebrated its 10th anniversary on 5 June 2018, as announced on the weekly foreign affairs show on CNN.
In 2013, he became one of the producers for the HBO series Vice, for which he serves as a consultant.
There are many, many sound bites in this program. I would suggest three to listen for are those listed below because they central to very evocative sections of the discussion. But don’t listen any less attentively to the rest of the program – there are many more memorable statements and other evocative arguments.
- “Tribal affinity has become almost the defining feature of modern politics.”
- “Constitutions are based on something of a bluff …. and Trump has called that bluff.”
- “These domestic politcal revolutions are occurring at the same time that we are experiencing a global geopolitical revolution. This is a once-in-a-several-centuries event.”
Source: YouTube
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