Fareed Zakaria: belief

Transcript context

…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. 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. 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?…

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