Fareed Zakaria on Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"

Tyler Cowen interviews Fareed Zakaria.

Those who know Fareed Zakaria through his weekly column or CNN show may be surprised to learn he considers books the important way he can put new ideas in the world. But Fareed’s original aspiration was to be an academic, and it was a chance lunch with Walter Isaacson that convinced him to apply for a job as editor of Foreign Affairs instead of accepting an assistant professorship at Harvard. His latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is a testament to his enduring passion for ideas and his belief in the importance of classical liberalism in an age of increasing populism and authoritarianism.

Zakaria wrote his Harvard Poli Sci dissertation under Samuel Huntington. He talks of Huntington's famous essay, which later became a best-selling book:

COWEN: Was it you who commissioned Samuel Huntington’s very famous “Clash of Civilizations” essay?

ZAKARIA: Yes. I didn’t commission it. What happened is, I went to Sam and told him I was going to take this job at Foreign Affairs, which he was completely opposed to. My three advisers all advised me against taking the job. I realized that the reason was, they were all great academics. Within the world of academia, the way you gain fame and influence is by having great proteges, by having great students who then go on to become great academics. They all thought that my going would be a great loss to academia, but also a loss to their legacy.

Sam very much felt that I shouldn’t take the job, so I said to him, “I am going to do it, but can I ask a favor? You sent me a draft of an essay you’ve been writing, for my comments, a few months ago, called ‘The Clash of Civilizations.’ Can I take that with me to Foreign Affairs and publish it?” That’s how it became, so I took it with me. We edited it, and we made it the first-time-ever lead essay. Foreign Affairs had never had a lead essay before. The typeface was all the same. We redesigned the magazine, and we made this the clear cover essay.

COWEN: In a world where we have a major war with Russia attacking Ukraine, significant conflict in the Sudan, ongoing conflict in Congo — several million lives killed there — you think that essay is still correct? Because those are very significant conflicts, and they’re not really cross-civilizational. They’re within particular groups.

ZAKARIA: I think he got one thing very powerfully right, which is that at the end of the Cold War, where ideology was the core motivational factor behind much of the conflict of the Cold War — whether you were communist or capitalist, whether you were allied with the communist or the democratic world, whether you were a proxy for — those were the battle lines of the mid-20th century. Once that went away, what people were going to revert to was their identity, and their identity often rooted in religion.

If you think about the rise of al-Qaida, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, you think about the return of a certain kind of Chinese nationalism in China — I think that piece of it — you look at the rise of Hindu nationalism in India — he really understood that people were going to fall back on these older, descriptive identities in a way that they had not 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 — it’s not that they are motivated by things that are completely contradictory to identity politics, but they sometimes match up and they sometimes don’t.

Many of the wars in the Arab world have been Arab on Arab, Muslim on Muslim. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he was invading another fellow Arab, fellow Sunni state. As you point out, a number of the African conflicts are, essentially, you’d have to say, conflicts within civilizations. Some of the conflicts are ones where people find odd bedfellows so that the Chinese and the Russians are allying, even though, in a sense, they’re two different civilizations.

There’s a long history of this. Richelieu, when he was running France, the great Catholic power, allied routinely with Protestant powers. Power politics sometimes transcends identity politics. I think he missed that, but it’s still a very powerful and thought-provoking essay, I think.

COWEN: After 9/11 in 2001, you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek, “Why Do They Hate Us?” You talked about the rulers, failed ideas, religion. If you were to revise or rethink that piece today, how would you change it? Because we have 23 more years of data, right?

ZAKARIA: Yes. Not very much, honestly. 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 modern era, where it has undergone almost no political modernization. If you looked at Latin America in 1970 versus 2000, you would have seen a sea change, where 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’ve seen enormous transition.

The Arab world had remained absolutely static. My argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth, which had impeded modernization. But along with that, because of that failed modernization, they had developed this reactionary ideology of Islam, which said the answer is to go further back, not to go forward. “Islam is the solution,” was the cry of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1970s.

The problem that they were saying that Islam is a solution to was the failed modernization, the failed Westernization of these countries. That toxic mixture was at the heart of what was producing armed reactionary ideologies like al-Qaida and things like that. I really do feel very proud of that essay, but you’re absolutely right that we have 23 more years of data.

What’s interesting is that, partly because of 9/11, which I think in some ways was a great wake-up call, what you have seen is a much greater effort 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.

From all the stuff going on in Saudi Arabia right now, which is, yes, there’s a lot of economic bringing golf and other sports in, but there’s opening up the lives of women, allowing them to be educated, ending the segregation, allowing (famously) them to drive. And Saudi Arabia, in a way, was at the heart of this problem because it is the richest country and, in many ways, sent the signal of what kind of modernization was compatible with Islam and what was not.

I think that in a way you’ve seen more forward movement in the last 20 years than people realize, even though the regimes have largely stayed dictatorships. But that tension still exists, by the way. Egypt is a very brutal country because, again, it has fundamentally failed to modernize.

COWEN: 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 . . .If you see Iranians abroad, they earn high incomes, they have real science, they have real technology. 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?

ZAKARIA: I think it’s a very similar version of what we were just talking about. It’s oil wealth coupled with —

COWEN: But UAE has made the transition. Why isn’t Iran like UAE?

ZAKARIA: To begin with, those Gulf states — it’s important to remember — are tiny. You’re talking about a million or two people in Qatar. I think you’re talking about maybe 400,000 people. It’s much easier for an elite to dominate and rule those places. There’s a reason why Saudi Arabia was more difficult. Saudi Arabia, it’s the one real country, by which I mean real population size. That’s why, in a way, what MBS is doing has been more difficult. You’ve got to measure the population’s reaction to things.

Iran is a big country, bigger than all of them. I think that between the oil wealth and the failed modernization, where the Shah went to . . . In my current book, I talk about this. Iran strikes me very much like the French Revolution, where the Shah tried to move much too far, much too fast, much too disruptively — triggered an enormous backlash, which they’re still living with now.

You add to that the oil wealth, which makes it easy to not modernize. To just remind people what the problem with oil wealth is, it means you don’t have to modernize your economy. You don’t have to modernize your society because you can get enormous wealth just by drilling holes in the ground — actually by paying other people to drill holes in the ground. Mostly Western technology is used to extract those resources. So you never get through 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. Oil is 10 percent of Dubai’s GDP. It’s about 90 percent of Abu Dhabi’s. Even there, you see that variation. The thing that needs explaining is 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-rich countries that have never made it.

There are these small exceptions, and they’re all very small. They’re run by very forward-leaning absolute monarchs who have enormous power and can exercise that power because they have a tiny population.