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Fareed Zakaria is a political and economics commentator, journalist, and author.

Outside of his writings, he is best known for his work as a journalist, particularly his program “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, where he takes a deeper look into pertinent issues in the world. A man of many talents, he is also a columnist for The Washington Post and Newsweek, and an editor at Time and Newsweek International.

He was born to a Muslim family in India, to a politician named Rafiq Zakaria, who was better known as an Islamic theologian. As for his mother’s talents, the story is that his mother once edited the “Sunday Times of India.”

As a child, he went to the Mumbai-based “Cathedral and John Connon School” before he proceeded to graduate from “Yale” with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986. At “Yale,” he was a “Yale Political Monthly” editor-in-chief, “Yale Political Union” president and had membership in the “Party of the Right” and “Scroll and Key.”

In 1993, he graduated from Harvard University with a doctorate in government, studying under Robert Keohane the international relations theorist.

He made his writing debut with the publishing of From “Wealth to Power” in 1998. Before that, he had published a bunch of essays about foreign affairs in the American context in “The American Encounter” which was published in 1997.

Many of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into more than 20 languages. Fareed has won several awards for his cover essays and columns. In 1999, “Esquire” magazine named him on the list of the 21st century’s most important people.
In 2007, “Prospect” and “Foreign Policy” magazines named him in the list of 100 leading public intellectuals. In addition to critical acclaim, he has also been honored with several honorary awards from several universities in the United States.

Zakaria also serves on the board of “Shakespeare and Company,” “Yale University,” “The Trilateral Commission,” and “The Council on Foreign Relations.”

Since 2008, Fareed Zakaria has been one of the most popular hosts on CNN, particularly with the program Fareed Zakaria GPS. On the program, he usually conducts in-depth interviews with heads of government such as David Cameron, Barack Obama, Moammar Gadhafi, Narendra Modi, and King Abdullah II.

He has also conducted interviews with countless journalists, intellectuals, politicians, and business leaders. His interviews have been broadcast in at least 300 million homes across the globe. In just its first year, the program got an Emmy nomination and won a Peabody, following an interview with Wen Jiabao the Chinese Premier.

Fareed Zakaria’s work “The Post-American World” is a work that showcases his modern realist tendencies.

In this novel, he asserts that the world has become less violent and is moving in the right direction. He also makes a convincing argument that the US needs to make use of its strengths to maintain a strong position, even as it acknowledges the reality of a coming multi-polar world.

According to Zakaria, most countries in the world are becoming relatively open societies similar to the Anglo-American classical liberal states by implementing free market principles. Due to this, millions of people across the world are getting out of poverty which means the world is rising but it does not mean that the US is declining.

Rather than pissing their pants, Americans need to acknowledge that the world is increasingly becoming more like the US. As such, nations such as Indonesia, China, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Russia will continue to capture a large share of the economic pie in the world.
For Zakaria, this is a sign that the US was the winner of the ideological war and as such, it needs to be collaborative in foreign policy rather than foster an atmosphere of fear in developing nations.

In “Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World” Fareed Zakaria offers historical reference and insight into the COVID-19 Pandemic. He calls it a hinge event in which governments all over the world were forced to make changes to how they governed and communicated decisions.
He asserts that good government sometimes is all about clear lines of authority but limited power. Zakaria also feels that the populace can usually understand the nuances of a situation, as long as it is presented honestly.

He makes use of stories about FDR who made bonds with the American people, even though he was from the American aristocracy. Somehow, he found ways to understand the pain and powerlessness of people from modest backgrounds, and this resulted in very effective solutions.
The novel also discusses the rise of China as the second-largest importer and largest manufacturer in the world, even as he asks what this means for international order.

Fareed offers insights into how countries turned inward and became more nationalistic during the pandemic and shares historical perspectives about realism and idealism. Nonetheless, he ends the book on a positive note, as he asserts that the pandemic created the possibility for reform and change and opened up new frontiers.

Fareed Zakaria’s novel “The Future of Freedom” is a stunning work in which the author makes a convincing case that most of the problems of today’s world are a result of too much democracy rather than too little.

Even though it is a work that he penned years before the Arab Spring, he asserts that Islamic populism if not checked can result in some very horrific results.

He also provides insight into the concept of limited government powers through balances and checks through the “Rule of Law” and the written constitution, the history of liberalism, and how this has resulted in freer, stable, and better than pure democracies.
He also asserts that countries without a strong rule of law such as China have sometimes done better economically as compared to contemporary democracies. However, his analysis of American democracy is his best case for less democracy and more liberty.

Zakaria notes how badly the government does when political and legislative processes are opened to the public. He analyses California’s experiment with direct democracy, and this makes for some depressing but enlightening reading.

He ultimately calls for a reduction in public input in the political process and the reinstitution of balances and checks in our government.