♪ ♪ ♪ (theme music playing) ♪ RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm gonna be joined in conversation today with Fareed Zakaria.

Fareed Zakaria is well-known to many people for his TV show on CNN, “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” He's also a best-selling author, columnist, and also a distinguished commentator on foreign policy well-known all over the world for his expertise in this area.

Uh, we're coming to you today from the Robert Smith Auditorium at New York Historical, and I wanna thank you Fareed, for being here.

ZAKARIA: My pleasure, David.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let me ask you, uh, at the beginning, um, many people don't know your background.

I think it'd be useful before we talk about your book because it is interesting that so many people who are distinguished commentators or practitioners of foreign policy are immigrants to this country.

Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Fareed Zakaria.

So, let's talk about your background.

Uh, where were you born?

ZAKARIA: I was born in India, in what is now called Mumbai, but was Bombay when I was growing up, uh, to a, a family of, uh, very educated, but middle class.

My father was a, a lawyer, turned politician.

My mother was a journalist, and I grew up in a house alive with ideas and conversation.

Um, when it came time to look, look around for colleges, I was fascinated by America.

I was fascinated by America as a country, but also by American universities.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So, you went to Yale and you were the head of the Yale Political Union, among other things, and you did pretty well at Yale.

And then you went and got your PhD at Harvard, and then what do you do with a PhD in, was it in government?

ZAKARIA: It was in international relations.

RUBENSTEIN: All right.

So, what do you do with that, with your international relations PhD from Harvard?

ZAKARIA: So, I happened to get to know Walter Isaacson because he was writing his biography of Kissinger.

And somebody said to him, "You know, there's this kid at Harvard who really knows all about, you know, Kissinger's historical work and his, you know, the balance of power theory and all.

Why don't you send him the manuscript because he, he could probably find, you know, make sure that you've got it all right."

And Walter sends me the manuscript.

We had met once or twice.

We got to know each other and, uh, we had lunch in New York, and I told him, "I was so proud that Harvard had told me that they were, um, gonna offer me an assistant professorship."

And he said, "Oh God, I don't think you should do that.

I, I think there's the managing editorship of “Foreign Affairs Magazine” is opening up.

You're a little young for it, but I think you should try for that job."

And I said to him, "Walter, didn't you just hear what I said?

I think I've just been offered an assistant professorship at Harvard."

And he said, "Didn't you hear what just said?

I, I, I think you could get the managing editorship of ‘Foreign Affairs'."

And eventually I went and became managing editor of “Foreign Affairs.” RUBENSTEIN: You did that for a number of years, and then later you became a columnist, and then you wrote some books.

And then, uh, it was about six... 16 or 17 years ago you started your TV show.

ZAKARIA: Correct.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's talk about your book, “Age of Revolutions”.

Um, you point out in the book that revolution is a contradictory kind of word.

It means stable, like the earth revolves around, uh, the sun, but also revolution means things are changing a lot.

So, what do you mean by age of revolutions, the stable part or the part that's really, uh, chaotic?

ZAKARIA: No, I, it, it's really the second.

What I wondered in science revolution had that meaning, you know, that the earth revolves around the sun in a fixed orbit, and that was the original meaning.

But in politics, it came to take this meaning of upending everything.

And I'm definitely looking at it with the view of what are the events that really transformed societies and then therefore transformed the world.

How did we end up, you know, getting something like the Industrial Revolution, which I call the mother of all revolutions, which really completely changes the world.

I mean, if you look at per capita GDP in the world, it's, it's sort of like this, it's a flat line, you know, we about $200 per capita per person.

And then initially it begins with the Dutch and British who started a little bit earlier, and then you get the Industrial Revolution and boom, you suddenly see material standards of living for the world, which had stayed the same for thousands of years, suddenly transform.

And we are now, just so people are wondering, world average, uh, per capita GDP is now about $5,000.

So, we've gone from $200 to $5,000 in really about 300 years.

RUBENSTEIN: So, the revolution that we're embarking on right now, um, the revolution is a second or third Industrial Revolution, would you say?

ZAKARIA: Yeah.

So typically, I mean, when, when, when scholars date these things, the first Industrial Revolution was what happened in Britain in the 18th Century.

The second Industrial Revolution is really around the, the late 19th Century, so 1880s to 1920s.

It's basically cars, chemicals, petroleum, movies, television.

The third Industrial Revolution was computers and I think in a way you could say that it is likely that we are going into a fourth Industrial Revolution with artificial intelligence.

And I think that is probably going to be the most profound thing we lived through in our lifetimes.

RUBENSTEIN: The word revolution is used for, to describe our war when we fought with the British to become independent.

But your view is that's not really a revolutionary war, right?

ZAKARIA: Yeah.

I think the American Revolution is, is a, is a misnomer.

I mean, look, I'm, I'm partly saying this just to be provocative because, because obviously it's a political revolution.

You go from being ruled by a monarch to a democratic system.

Our democratic system was a model for the world.

But if you think of revolution in that kind of deep, broad social economic transformation that I'm using it in the French Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, uh, it wasn't really.

Um, the, the two great historians of the, of the, uh, American Revolution, Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn argue correctly, I think.

That what the revolutionaries were actually asking for was a return to the rights that they had enjoyed as free Englishmen before Parliament and King George usurped those rights.

And if you read the Declaration of Independence, it's all about this long use, you know, usurpation of rights.

So, they are trying to get back to that.

Um, and then when you look at what happens after the revolution takes place, yes, the political system changes, but the social system, the economic system, stays completely intact.

We retain slavery and the plantation system in the South.

We retain what is essentially becoming a kind of aristocratic feudal system in the north.

There was a, there was an effort to, to do a kind of real revolution, Shays' Rebellion, which was an effort for radical redistribution of wealth, and it was shut down.

There's a very good book on this called “Gentleman Revolutionaries” about how the North, there was really, um, an effort to have a real revolu-revolution, but it was stamped down.

RUBENSTEIN: So, when you use the word revolution in the sense of in... an industrial technological, that's a different kind of thing than a political revolution.

ZAKARIA: Exactly.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk for a moment about political revolutions.

Which ones do you think actually succeeded in making the people living after the revolution happier and better off?

Is it a Russian Revolution?

Would you say that was a successful revolution?

ZAKARIA: No, no, I think that the most important failed revolutions that did terribly for their people are probably the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, if you consider the Chinese takeover and, and the communist takeover in China Revolution.

Because all of those had this characteristic where there were a bunch of political elites take over a country and try from the top down to massively transform these societies along some ideological vision.

Whereas there's, there's another tradition of revolution, which I would argue is the English and American tradition, where you have slow changes from the bottom, economic technological that then changed the politics.

So, in the British case, you have the Glorious Revolution, which, which sidelines the king a little bit, makes parliament more important.

You have the Industrial Revolution, which makes merchants more important, which emphasizes the importance of knowledge and merit.

And then that slowly changes the political system so it becomes more and more democratic.

And that, those kind of slower organic revolutions that are from the bottom up are much more effective at transforming.

Uh, if you think about it, all these revolutions from the top down, the Iranian Revolution, they almost never work.

They, they create an enormous amount of turmoil in society, they create massive dislocations.

And at the end of the day, you know human societies change best when they evolve rather than through brute force.

RUBENSTEIN: So, the revolution that you would say is most successful in the political side was that the English Revolution?

ZAKARIA: I would say the English, because it's the really, the, the most important, the Dutch somehow managed before them to have a kind of revolution, create a merchant republic.

But, but the Dutch never had a very strong king or anything like that.

The English had a very powerful monarch, and so it's a real revolution when parliament decides, first thing, you know they're going to execute the King, Charles I. But then, essentially, come to an arrangement where they say, "You can reign, but we will rule."

That idea, the limitation of absolute power is the, you know, is, is the most important, uh, milestone on the road to liberal democracy and to limited government.

Even today, we fight those same battles and the battles we fight today about the excess and the overreach of presidential power and how, you know, are other branches of government going to stop that overreach, are, date back to the 17th Century and to the Glorious Revolution.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's talk about, uh, what happened after World War II, maybe not the word revolution, not appropriate.

But after World War II, we basically had a bipolar world, Russia, Soviet Union, and United States, and we were fighting with each other.

And in the end, why do you think the United States prevailed and our system more or less beat the Soviet Union's system?

ZAKARIA: I think fundamentally the Soviet system was unable to, uh, manage the course of modernity economically and technologically.

So, it did pretty well, most people don't realize this and when, when, you know in America we faulted a lot of Third World countries for going communist or flirting with communism.

It's important to understand in the 1930s, when a lot of these people were making these decisions, you know, third world revolutionaries, the United States and the Western world was caught in a horrible depression.

Unemployment rates were 25%.

It looked like Western capitalism was failing, and the Soviet Union was industrializing.

It was, you know, and by the 1940s, the Soviet Union was growing faster than the United States.

And, and that is the power of, of a government that decides to marshal all the resources of society toward one end, you know, building factories.

But the problem is the world changes and the economy changes, and new technologies come about.

And what those kind of top-down government-led systems can't do is adapt and change and, and that's what happened to the Soviet Union.

And it really happens in the late 60s, early 70s, with the rise of the digital revolution, where the Soviets just are unable to understand, comprehend, and they start falling way behind.

And so you have the pressure of maintaining a global empire with all kinds of subsidies they're providing to all kinds of countries, all over the world, from Cuba to Eastern Europe, and the reality that their, their economic engine is collapsing.

I think it was more that than anything else.

RUBENSTEIN: So, after the Soviet Union collapse, we went to more or less a unipolar world where the United States is the dominant and the only superpower in the world.

Was that a good thing for the world to just have one superpower?

ZAKARIA: Look, I'm an immigrant, and I think that the United States has been one of the great forces for good in human history.

I think we made a lot of mistakes.

I think that, you, you know, Vietnam was a mistake.

Iraq was a mistake.

But the only way you can seriously think about a country's influence is in comparison to what?

You know, what other great power, when it was dominant, did better than the United States did?

Uh, you know, the Kaisers' Germany?

Would it have been better if they had won World War I?

Uh, Hitler's Germany?

Would they have been better if they had won World War II?

The Sov-Stalin, Soviet Union would've been better if they had been the dominant power?

So, I think the United States being the one pole of the world was a very good thing.

It pushed the world toward more openness, more democracy, more freedom.

Look at the, that period from the 1990s onward, all of Latin America goes democratic.

In 1980, almost all of Latin America was run by, uh, by dictatorships and juntas, and behind high protectionist barriers.

By the middle of the 1990s, all of Latin America, with the exception of Vene-Venezuela and Cuba are free market democracies.

Look at Africa, 45 elections held in Africa in the 1940s.

Look at Eastern Europe, liberated from communism.

Look at even places like Korea and Taiwan, which were right-wing dictatorships, which become democracies.

That is not unrelated to the fact that the pole, the north star of the world, was a liberal democracy that believed that its historical mission was to push these, these, these trends forward.

So, I absolutely think it was a, uh, it's been, it's been a great thing and Americans should be very proud.

RUBENSTEIN: Do you think we're now in back to a bipolar world where it's United States and China are the two dominant powers?

Or is China still not really able to compete with us in everything that we are, are good at?

ZAKARIA: Not yet.

I think it's, uh, it's exactly as you said.

Think about it this way, you know, 'cause these things are fuzzy concepts, but, um, the, the, the United States is about 25% of global GDP, 26%.

Uh, it's amazing how, how well we have maintained our standing, by the way, we were 25% of world GDP when Ronald Reagan was elected 40 years ago.

We have, we have maintained our, our share of world GDP through all the rise of China, rise of India.

China is about 16, 17, uh, depen-depending on how you count it.

Um, so they're close to us, there's clearly the second-largest economy in the world.

But a lot of what makes you powerful is your influence around the world.

So we have about 50 to 60 treaty allies.

This is the greatest force multiplication that the United States has when it spreads its influence around the world.

China has one treaty ally, North Korea, and let's say it is one unofficial ally, Russia.

So, you, you could compare us to all of Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, uh, you know, you, you, you, you have this extraordinary capacity to spread American ideas, influence, uh, of values and the Chinese don't quite have that.

And the reason I call the book I wrote a few years ago, the “The Post-American World,” is that you can sense the world is changing.

It's no longer, as you say, unipolar.

It's no longer the United States dominating the world, but it's not a Chinese world, it's not yet even a bipolar world.

It's some messy world that exists aft, in the shadow of American hegemony after American hegemony and that's why I call it the Post-American World.

RUBENSTEIN: So, are we going through a new revolution now where the United States, which was all over the world, providing foreign aid, as you mentioned, and doing other kinds of things, we're pulling back from the world that we've known since World War II?

And is that a kind of revolution, or would you call it something else that we're now engaged in?

ZAKARIA: I talk about it in the book.

I think periodically what happens in these moments, uh, is after periods of intense revolutionary change, uh, as we've had, think about the digital revolution, globalization, the identity revolution that's taken place in almost every Western society as women have risen to, to importance, as minorities have, you have a backlash.

And I think we are very firmly in a period of backlash where people are, there are a lot of people saying, "Totally understandable reasons.

Stop the train, it's gone... it's going too fast, I want to get off or reverse course."

Uh, and yeah, and you're seeing that in, with regard to economics, you're seeing that with regard to technology, you're seeing that with regard to culture where people are saying, "You know, enough of all this, we, we want to go back."

The most important words, I think, in that slogan, Make America Great Again, is, again.

It's a "politics of nostalgia."

There, there was some Garden of Eden period where we could go back to.

And I think that in international terms, it is very much part of that backlash.

Why, why are we bearing all these burdens?

Why can't we go back to a time when we didn't have to do all these things where, you know we were able to just isolate ourselves and let the world, uh, go on.

The truth is, we can't, we're, we are still, you know, enmeshed in the world whether we like it or not.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you knew Henry Kissinger reasonably well, I would say.

He was National Security Advisor and sometimes Secretary of State, at the same time he was National Security Advisor for a while.

What was it that he had that made him so distinctive and so successful?

And why is he such a dominant figure?

Was he smarter than everybody else, more, uh, clever, better negotiator, better bureaucrat?

What was his skill set that was so unique?

ZAKARIA: Two or three things, I think, as always hap, it happens in this kind of situations, it's no one thing.

He, he's, he's absolutely brilliant.

You just have to read his senior thesis at Harvard to understand that.

He wrote as a senior, and he came from a public high school in, in New York City, you know.

As a senior at Harvard he writes a book called “The Meaning of History Reflections on Kant, Toynbee and Spengler.” It's 384 pages.

It was so long that Harvard instituted what they called the "Kissinger Rule" after it, which was that no undergraduate could write a thesis, senior thesis longer than 375, 85 pages.

Um, and it's quite brilliant.

I mean, he's making serious observations about Emmanuel Kant at, at age 22, um, but maybe 24 because he went to world, you know, he served in World War II.

Um, so he's brilliant.

Secondly, he's, he's, he, this is something I think he doesn't get as much credit for.

He is, he's an extraordinarily good negotiator because he could always put himself in the position of the adversary.

He always understood what it looked, what the world looked like from the Soviet point of view, he understood what it looked like to the Chinese.

And remember he's negotiating with the Chinese toward the end of the Cultural Revolution.

The Mao at this point is, you know, in full crazy mode, uh, the, the society is in, you know in these convulsions, but he found a way to connect on the central issue that mattered to them, which was to distance themselves from the Soviet Union.

And the third is that he had a president who wanted to do big ambitious things in foreign policy.

And I think you have to give Nixon enormous amount of credit for all his, his, his problems and his domestic, you know, dishonesty and illegalities.

He was a very smart foreign policy, uh, president who wanted to do big things, and he gave Kissinger the leeway to do them.

RUBENSTEIN: So, since, uh, other than Kissinger, who would you say you most admire who've been Secretary of State, let's say in the last 40 or 50 years?

Are there, is there another one or two that you think are really distinctive?

ZAKARIA: I'd say the most distinctive Secretaries of State, Dean Asheson, Harry Truman's Secretary of State, is probably incredibly important because he sets up the post-war system that we think about now.

Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, all that in large part, I mean, there was a collective effort, but he, he's central to it.

Um, George Shultz, uh, Reagan's Secretary of State, because he understood economics and he understood something that most people at the time didn't, which was that the Soviet Union was losing the Cold War because it was economically unable to compete.

And Jim Baker, who's probably the greatest deal maker I've ever seen.

I interviewed him, I've gotten to know him quite well, and he's just a master negotiator.

I've never quite seen anything, any, anyone quite as good.

RUBENSTEIN: So, since World War II, what would you say is the greatest foreign policy decision United States made?

Marshall Plan or... ZAKARIA: I think the best foreign policy decision actually ca-ca it came before war, the end of World War II.

Um, Franklin Roosevelt in about 1942, uh, invites Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada to Hyde Park at his Hudson Valley, uh, estate.

And he says to him, and he outlines his thinking, and he says, "What I have decided is that the United States is not going to have spent all this blood and treasure, uh, getting into a World War if we are not able to construct a completely different international system than the one that has existed before."

That we've, you know, in the past, you just had war and mercantilism and protectionism and national competition, and it just blows the world up.

I mean, remember, in a sense, he's gone through two World Wars, uh, in his lifetime, this kind of massive European civil war that, that 100 million people die in.

And he outlines to him the kind of system he wants to put in place, which is remarkably like the system that ended up being created in the late 40s, an open world economy, a rules-based system, an international organization, state sovereignty being very important, no aggression should be, should be, uh, tolerated.

And it's extraordinary to me that, that, you know that with, if you think to yourself, if, if not for Franklin Roosevelt being the president of the United States at that moment, would we have had the international system we have today?

RUBENSTEIN: So, you've interviewed scores, hundreds of, uh, international leaders.

Take the ones who are not now living.

Who was the most impressive international leader you ever interviewed or that you've ever admired?

ZAKARIA: Probably Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

It, it sounds a little obscure, but here's this guy.

Takes over what is really a sandbar in Southeast Asia with a per capita GDP that must have been $200 or $300.

Singapore's per capita GDP today is $80,000 higher than the United States.

Um, and he managed to do that transformation essentially in one, one and a half generations while, and this was as important to him while taking a multi, uh, you know, multicultural population, Chinese, Malays, Indians, expats.

And there's never been a race riot since Singapore has been, uh, in its existence, maybe a few in the early years, but not for 60 years, 70 years.

So, it's been peaceful, these different races have managed to live in harmony, uh, and they've been an economic powerhouse.

The thing about Lee Kuan Yew is he was a, he was a great thinker, very strategic, but he was also a great doer, though that's a very rare combination.

You often find people who are strategic in their thinking, but then they don't know how to implement stuff.

He could do both.

RUBENSTEIN: Of the people you've interviewed over the years, what interview would you say you're most proud of it, it actually revealed a lot about somebody, or you were so proud you got the interview.

Is there one in that category?

ZAKARIA: Well, proud that I got the interview, certainly probably Putin, because he's very, he's very reluctant to give interviews.

RUBENSTEIN: You've interviewed him once?

ZAKARIA: Once.

I met him several times, but I've interviewed him once.

RUBENSTEIN: And does he understand English, or does he have a... ZAKARIA: He understands English quite well.

He does, he's reluctant to speak it.

At the end of the interview, um, he spent a little bit of time chatting with me.

Um, and he's very clever, he's very well, well briefed.

Um, he, you know, at one point, uh, he started to explain to me how he thought NATO and Russia could have a closer relationship, and he had once mentioned that to Bill Clinton.

And I said to him, uh, "President Putin, you know, um, I wrote something similar in Newsweek many years ago," and he looked at me and said, "I know, that's why I brought it up."

RUBENSTEIN: He's well researched.

ZAKARIA: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: So today, if you were trying to get an interview with anybody in the world today, who would you most like to interview?

Or would it be Putin or?

ZAKARIA: The person I've tried to interview and had no success with, whom I would've loved to interview, was Pope Francis.

Um, I thought that he was really a remarkable man.

I thought that the way in which he reoriented the Catholic Church towards what I always thought was the core of Christianity.

You know, I grew up in a, with a Christian school, so I had lots of, there was a great deal of influence in my life in Christianity.

And the thing about being in India is you hear what the message of the church is, and it was all about, essentially, the central message of Christianity was, be nice to poor people.

Be nice to the, to the unfortunate, to the meek, you know, the meek shall inherit, uh, the, the earth.

In the kingdom of heaven, the last shall be first, the first shall be last.

It was really revolutionary and upending the old hierarchy of, of, of the world.

And I thought that Francis really understood that.

I mean, like when I came to America, I was surprised that here Christianity is all about, you know, abortion and homosexuality, and you know which are like little tidbits in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

And here, here you have the Sermon on the Mount, which is really the essence of what it's meant to be about, which, which somehow seemed to get, uh, bypassed.

And he had that focus where he really tried to return the church to its central message.

RUBENSTEIN: Great conversation with Fareed Zakaria.

Thank you very much.

ZAKARIA: Thank you, David.

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