CNN Host, Fareed Zakaria: Is the Post-War World Order Collapsing?

0:00That world is clearly at risk of eroding, perhaps even collapsing. And what that would take us to is great power rivalry, a kind of unwinding of many of these structures of international cooperation. The liberal world order, open markets, rule of law and free movement of people is the system that many founders and investors built their career on. Our guest today, Fareed Zakaria, has spent 30 years studying that system and what happens when it breaks down He's one of the most compelling and relevant thinkers on what's happening in the world right now Fareed grew up in Mumbai, studied at Yale and Harvard and became managing editor of Foreign Affairs at just 28 The youngest in the magazine's history He spent the decades since hosting GPS on CNN with guests including Obama and Modi writing a weekly column for the Washington Post and producing four New York Times bestsellers.

0:56This conversation will focus on where the world might be in 2040, whether the chaos of today will continue, and his diagnosis of why we are where we are today. So sitting here today in 2026, it would have been hard in 2016, 10 years ago, to imagine everything that's happened. We've had Brexit, the UK has left the EU, we've got Russia invading Ukraine, another war with Iran. We've seen Donald Trump be president two times. All would have been hard to predict back in 2016. So I'd love to play a little thought experiment with you, Fareed. If we're sitting here in 2040, what would the world be like then?

1:35So let me preface it by saying, I think there's a mistake that people make when they try to think about the future, which is to think that there is a future out there that is going to happen, and that the job of somebody who's supposed to be smart like me is to tell you what it is. But the future is actually contingent on so many things that we do that it's very hard to say, well, that is the future. But I think what I can do is say to you, where are the trends going and what could happen if we were to intervene? There's no question that the trend line is basically toward a disillusion of the American-led international order created after 1945.

2:18And this is a huge transformation because the system that was put in place in 1945 by the United States, largely by the United States and Britain, and with others sort of helping along, was really unique. before that we had had hundreds of years of great power rivalry, nationalism, national self-interest, territorial acquisition. I mean, if you think about it, a place like Alsace-Lorraine traded hands three times in the 40 years before 1945. You know, it was German, then it was French, then it was German. And what 1945 was an effort to do was to say, we're going to try and do something different.

3:04So it became an international order defined by rules, norms, and values, defined very importantly by an open world economy and free trade, so that countries could grow their way into greatness and didn't have to, you know, aggress their way into, they didn't have to invade their way into greatness. In fusion of ideas like human rights and foreign aid, which were largely absent in the world before that. So it's a very unusual one. And most people, I think, would be surprised to realize how much of it has stuck. So territorial acquisition by force, which was routine in the era before 1945, is virtually non-existent after 1945.

3:54You can count on one hand the number of major cases of territorial acquisition by force that have that have stuck. And almost all of them have a kind of shadow of illegitimacy around them. That's why Russia's invasion of Ukraine is such a violation of international order. So that world is clearly at risk of eroding, perhaps even collapsing. And what that would take us to is back to the future, to a world of great power rivalry, freewheeling, freelancing, everyone just doing what's in his or her own interests, depending on whether you want to call nations male or female, and a kind of unwinding of many of these structures of international cooperation that we've talked about.

4:47You're already seeing it. The whole international aid apparatus is collapsing. saying concerns about human rights are becoming much, much fainter, as the United States, which was in many ways the champion of them, is clearly relegating them to secondary or even tertiary status and using them utterly manipulatively, as with Iran. When it suited our purposes, we claimed we were getting involved for the Iranian people, who seemed to have been forgotten in the process of resolving this issue. So that's the dominant trend. Now, I don't want to give up hope because for two reasons. One, I think that while it is true that the great power that was at the center of this whole operation, the United States, is losing both its dedication to this project, but also its capacity in some ways.

5:46It's not raw economic and technological power, which the United States has, but broader political power. Clearly, the United States is in some sense losing that central hegemonic position it had. But also you have the rise of countries like China, which has a very different conception of world order. Russia, which is actively trying to tear down this world order. a Europe that is too weak and disunited to play a meaningful role on the world stage. But, you know, this world order has served so many countries so well, even China. China grew rich and powerful for the first time in three centuries under this world order.

6:33Every Asian country that I go to is terrified of the prospect that this order is unwinding, because whether it's Vietnam or India, they all know that they have grown to a greater level of per capita income than ever before because of this order. So there's a lot of countries, there's a large part of the world that wants to see some version of this order continue. So is it possible, you know, is it possible with a weakened United States but coalescing with its allies? I mean, I've always been of the view that what we needed was for the United States to say, okay, we're not going to be the hegemonic power, but we could assemble a coalition of the United States and Europe and Japan and Korea and Singapore and maybe India, and now you're up to 70 % of global GDP.

7:25You're up to 85 % of global military spending. So that's a powerful freedom caucus in the world, as it were. which of these two outcomes, you know, what happens, I think, depends on the choices that we make. I mean, centrally, the United States, I do think Europe has an important role to play. I think if Europe could get its act together and actually act in, you know, it's not so hard to imagine because in trade, Europe acts in a unified, purposeful way and is very powerful on the world scene. It needs to do the same with foreign policy. It needs to do the same with defense policy. It needs to do the same in banking.

8:08It needs to do the same in tech. You know, one of the reasons Europe, which is full of incredibly talented people, really punches way below its weight in technology is you talk to any tech entrepreneur, they're not actually in a European market. They're in 27 markets with 27 regulators. And so you can't get to scale. I mean, the same is true in banking. You can't get to scale. The same is true in defense, in a sense. If you want to have an alternative military industrial complex to the United States, you need scale. Farid, when you talk about, you know, the route back or the route forward, perhaps, towards, you know, a brighter version of the future you just described, for people who quite like a rules-based order, who quite like the rule of law, quite like, you know, liberal democracies as opposed to illiberal democracies, which you've written about, what is the path and and does the offer need to fundamentally change is the problem for you know centrists people who pursued that kind of third way politics is the problem one of of fundamental offer is it about communication and not being charismatic enough in the leadership what's what's the problem with that offer and what needs to change well that's a great question i and i think honestly if i had the answer to that um i think it would be it would be a rich vein to mine because, look, you're seeing everywhere this center in...

9:32Under stress is the way I would put it. In Britain right now, you're looking at a situation where it would have been impossible to imagine, but the two main parties, Conservative and Labour, including the Conservative Party, is basically the most successful political party in the Western world, are in shambles and its reform and the Greens who are rising. I think some of it is because of the success of that centrist neoliberalism. In other words, people pocket the success that it has produced. All the increases in per capita income, all the increases in convenience, all the technology, all the fruits of globalization.

10:22Nobody wants to give any of these up, right? Even immigration, as Britain saw when it turned away from the European Union, they realized, oh, my God, we do need people to man the NHS. And so suddenly they're all coming in from Nigeria. There's a reality to globalization. Why have we survived this oil shock so well? Oil prices really haven't gone up as much as most people predicted. Well, because the incredible flexibility and suppleness of global capital and globalization. So part of it is success. I think, you know, it's easy to pocket all the gains and focus on the areas which are real problems, which is that the growth is uneven, that it is causing or accelerating a certain deindustrialization, and that leaves certain groups of people disempowered.

11:16but I think fundamentally it's because liberalism has always had this problem, and I'm using liberalism in a very broad, you know, classical liberalism, the Enlightenment tradition, which is that we tell people, you know, it used to be that the church told you what a good life was, and then dictators told you what a good life was, and monarchs tell you what a good life is. We're going to tell you that's your private decision. We want to construct a society in which nobody tells you what the meaning of life is, what a good life is. And you get to choose. For you, it's Christianity, bravo. For you, it's Islam.

11:56For you, it's whatever it may be. It's all right. Buddhism, yoga, whatever you like. And I think people find that more disconcerting than we have realized. that most people find the idea of constructing, you know, the meaning of life for themselves very, very difficult. And, you know, unless you're Aristotle, it probably is very difficult. And so they'd rather, you know, go to the Bible or go to the Quran or go to the Talmud. And so the idea of being unmoored by, you know, losing the certainties of faith and tradition and community and nation is very unsettling. And what the right gives you instead is certainty often.

12:42It says, we'll go back. We're going to take you back to the good old days. That's why the most important line in Donald Trump's slogan is, again. It is a promise to return you to some Edenic past, which probably didn't exist, but it sounds very reassuring. There's some fantastic ideas in this. I just want to make sure we articulate them and pull the thread. So you think that globalization and the kind of liberal democratic rule based order delivered fantastic things and society has become somewhat hedonically habituated I guess to the benefits we've seen and are focusing on the negatives. But actually, you think the diagnosis of the ills is more about potentially not having a shared culture, a shared set of morals, a shared narrative, because that is part of the promise of the liberal democratic order rather than globalization not necessarily delivering on its economic promises.

13:35I think absolutely. And look, the data bears this out. I mean, the, you know, there are some things John Mokir, the guy who won the Nobel Prize for economics last year, talks about this. the progress is so sweeping that you can't even put a price to it. So his example is, until the middle of the 19th century, all surgery was done without anesthesia. So what would happen is, the person would be usually given some vodka to get him drunk. He would then be told to bite the bullet. That's where the phrase comes from. and the surgeon would go in for a few minutes because that's all you had. After that, the person would probably die of shock or sepsis or something.

14:24Today, what would you pay not to have, right? There is no price that somebody would be willing to pay to say, okay, yeah, it's okay. Don't use anesthesia on me while you're doing. Or childbirth. Right, childbirth. I mean, I remember reading Oberon War's memoirs in which he talks about, I think they came from a grand family and he talks about, but don't feel so envious because my uncle, the Earl, or whoever it was, died when he was 45 of a tooth infection. Because in those days, those things. So there are so many advantages that we don't even think about and nobody wants to turn them back. Look at how we reacted furiously to the rise of a little bit of inflation that took place in the last five or six years.

15:13And it's not even beyond economic and kind of health benefits. There's a very interesting debate in the United States taking place. There's a kind of post-liberal right that J.D. Vance represents, kind of saying we want to go back. And they're very careful about how they phrase what they were. We've created a society in which individual rights are exercised too much in favor of at the expense of collective or family values and things like that. So then if you press them and say, so what are you talking about? Well, it's too easy to get divorced. So are you saying you want to unwind the no-fault divorce assumptions that allow men and women to get?

16:05well they don't want to say it but that is what they want and they don't want to say it because it would be wildly unpopular you know or say you want you want to re-stigmatize uh being gay you know in other words that when people talk about going back to the age when there was you know family and values uncertainty what they're talking about is the denial of people's individual rights and freedoms, which I think most people in the United States and Britain in Europe would recoil at. And so it has to be soft peddled as this, we want to go take you back. You know, there's something comforting and soothing about it.

16:43But very often what you're talking about is repression, oppression, denial of rights, and nobody would stand for that. The one thing I would push back on is there has been a big expansion of what's considered rights over the last decade, right? I mean, it's a continually expanding concept. In the classical liberal sense, rights were pretty clearly defined. So this is, I think that you're a very good interviewer. So this gets us to the problem with liberalism is that after achieving a certain amount of success, and this is very much a particular view, I think liberals start saying, okay, what next?

17:22You know, because in many ways, liberalism achieved so much. It defeated the church. It defeated aristocracy. It defeated monarchies. If you look at what the liberal project was, you know, in the 90s. And even the liberal democratic project, which I would call, kind of got revised after a while when people saw the brutality of capitalism, the inventiveness. So it became a kind of social welfare thing. That also got achieved. You really created mass middle class societies with welfare states. So what do we now believe in? now we believe in cultural rights and we believe in more and more individual rights and these individual rights are provided to more and more groups and the groups can define themselves as they want and in many cases in my opinion these are actually illiberal ideas because you're now saying you're not judging people in martin luther king's famous line by the content of their character but rather by the color of their skin if you remember in his famous speech he says i want my children to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

18:22But if you have racial quotas for college admission and for employment, that is doing the opposite. I understand it came out of well-meaning reasons and, you know, a desire to recognize the playing field was not equal, but it is fundamentally illiberal. And there should have been time clocks on them and it should have been done much more carefully. And most importantly, it should not be expanded to mean everything and everybody. And I do think some of the, maybe a lot of the move on the right, to the right, has been a kind of cultural backlash. You know, because you think about it, everywhere you look, what is the single issue that fuels the populist right?

19:06It's immigration and assimilation, which are essentially about this whole issue of, you know, are we supposed to provide special favors for people who don't look like us, who come in from abroad, all that kind of thing. And by the way, you can see the one place that doesn't have much right-wing populism that is an advanced industrial country with all the other problems is Japan. And the one thing Japan doesn't have is immigration. So in a sense, you can see where the problem lies. And liberalism did go. I think it went seriously awry. And I found this when years ago I started to argue very strongly against asylum, the way asylum has been expanded.

19:54And I would get furious responses from people on the left saying you're being heartless. And I kept trying to explain to them, you will break, you know, society can only take so much change and you will break the compact you have. Farid, let's close this part just by talking a bit more about America and America's place in the world, which you've written a lot about. You've written a lot about the decline of America. Now, where politically speaking, it seems so broken, so polarized, or as our mutual friend David Miliband would say, Balkanized, where different sides see each other almost as a threat to their way of life.

20:28But on the other hand, economically, it does seem to be bouncing back pretty significantly, really riding the wave of AI in a very aggressive way, which the Trump administration has been quite central to. Have you revised your view at all about America's decline when you build in some of the economic success stories that are emerging recently? No, because, you know, when I wrote the book, The Post-American World, the first line of the book is, this is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of the rest. And I really do think you have to be able to understand America as a very ragged, uneven country.

21:08And what I write about when I talk about American decline is the decline of American political influence, diplomatic influence, the aura of America, the hegemony of America in kind of agenda setting and things like that. I have always felt and continue to believe the United States is the most dynamic large economy in the world by far. And that is not going to change anytime soon. I think it's way beyond AI. It's that fundamentally the United States has found a way to maintain a very dynamic sense of creative destruction, even though it is a very rich and very advanced country. There is still this enormous sense of the opportunity to try and fail, to fail and regroup.

21:55You know, there's no stigma attached to failing. There is no limit to what your ambition can be. Look at Elon Musk. All of that remains very strong in America. And it remains strong for many reasons, or I would say a central one, is immigration. I mean, I think the United States has enormous natural advantages. People forget that. We are an incredibly naturally resource-rich country with enormous great waterways and ports and things like that. We are probably, as a large country, we have the most capitalist system, the most pro-market system. There are others, I think that do better than us, like probably on balance Singapore and Switzerland are probably better run, but no large economy is better run from a pro-market point of view.

22:48But the third part is we have dynamism. And it's very hard for rich countries to have dynamism. I sometimes say this too when I'm talking to groups of businessmen to try to make them aware of this point. I say now, because they're all usually successful, you know, in some setting like that. And I say, now you've all done very well. Let me ask you, if you honestly were to look at yourselves and say, your children, whom I'm sure you love dearly, are any of them as driven as you were? And I very rarely got a single hand going up because, you know, the children, I understand, is rationally reacting to their circumstances, which are wealth, compared to the businessmen who grew up in probably much, you know, different circumstances.

23:33And that's what immigration does. It brings you those people with real drive, real determination to succeed. And you look at somebody like Elon Musk. And of course, he's brilliant. He's a great engineer. But behind all of that also is a kid who grew up in South Africa trying to get out and say, I want to make it on the biggest canvas in the world. And that is so much part of what keeps the American economy going. So much more we could go into there, Fareed. we could keep going for hours talking about geopolitics with you. We have to leave it there for part one. We're going to be back next week for part two, talking more about your career as a broadcaster and what you've learned about the art of the interview.