Fareed Zakaria: prediction

Transcript context

…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? 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. 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?…

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