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Fareed Zakaria is one of the most influential foreign affairs commentators in the world. Only forty-five years old, he is the editor of Newsweek International and hosts a weekly discussion show on CNN in which he interviews major political figures from around the world. With his upper-class Indian pedigree, lilting accent, and sterling academic credentials from Yale and Harvard, Zakaria has quickly earned himself a rare and coveted place among the American elite: that of a bona fide intellectual celebrity. His specialty is the distillation of arcane international relations theory into terms that the general public can easily understand. Zakaria’s journalistic success, however, has not satisfied his ambitions, and he apparently hopes to follow in the footsteps of his idol Henry Kissinger by becoming a foreign-born counselor to American policymakers. “My friends all say I’m going to be secretary of state,” he told New York magazine in 2003. “But I don’t see how that would be much different from the job I have now.” Though Zakaria didn’t make the short list of candidates to serve in the current administration, he does seem to have caught the attention of President Barack Obama, at least briefly. During the presidential campaign, Obama was photographed carrying a copy of Zakaria’s latest book, The Post-American World.
Fareed Zakaria is one of the most influential foreign affairs commentators in the world. Only forty-five years old, he is the editor of Newsweek International and hosts a weekly discussion show on CNN in which he interviews major political figures from around the world. With his upper-class Indian pedigree, lilting accent, and sterling academic credentials from Yale and Harvard, Zakaria has quickly earned himself a rare and coveted place among the American elite: that of a bona fide intellectual celebrity. His specialty is the distillation of arcane international relations theory into terms that the general public can easily understand. Zakaria’s journalistic success, however, has not satisfied his ambitions, and he apparently hopes to follow in the footsteps of his idol Henry Kissinger by becoming a foreign-born counselor to American policymakers. “My friends all say I’m going to be secretary of state,” he told New York magazine in 2003. “But I don’t see how that would be much different from the job I have now.” Though Zakaria didn’t make the short list of candidates to serve in the current administration, he does seem to have caught the attention of President Barack Obama, at least briefly. During the presidential campaign, Obama was photographed carrying a copy of Zakaria’s latest book, The Post-American World.
“When I talk to people in a foreign country, no matter how strange, they are always, at some level, familiar to me,” Zakaria wrote in a 2007 column that examined then-candidate Obama’s foreign policy experience in comparison to that of his chief Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton. Despite Clinton’s globe-trotting as First Lady and impressive tenure in the Senate, including her service on the Armed Services Committee, he came down on the side of Obama. To Zakaria, the fact that Obama was born to a Kenyan father, spent “four years growing up in Indonesia,” and was brought up “in the multicultural swirl of Hawaii” endowed the junior senator from Illinois with a comprehension of foreign cultures and peoples that was unique in the history of American presidential candidates.
Zakaria went further than this, however, writing that he instinctively identified with Obama because he saw the same attributes in himself. Despite teaching at “colleges and graduate schools” and accumulating “fancy degrees,” Zakaria believes that his worldview is “distinctive” because he spent so many years as a foreigner trying to become an American citizen. Obama’s rootless childhood, Zakaria wrote, has endowed him with a similar kind of empathy. Backing up his claim for the importance of a transnational mentality and a cosmopolitan childhood, Zakaria half-jokingly concluded, “Trust me on this. As a Ph.D. in international relations, I know what I’m talking about.”
James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic and a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow.
