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March 8, 2001 At
what age does a wunderkind begin to feel old? Thirty-six, according to
Fareed Zakaria. Or is it 37? "Wait
a minute, let me work this out," he says, doing a quick mental calculation.
"Good lord no, I just turned 37 on January 20!" When he
was a mere pup of 28, and the youngest-ever managing editor of highbrow
policy journal Foreign Affairs, Zakaria used to take out his contact lenses
and put on his specs just to ramp up his gravitas. The realisation that
he no longer needs to resort to such ruses seems to make him a little
doleful. "I'm
feeling old nowadays, I don't know why," he says. "I used to
feel very young. Besides, after the dotcom mania nobody can feel young
any more, when 23-year-olds are making $10 million." Despite
his advanced age, however, Zakaria indisputably remains one of the Bright
Young Things of America's foreign policy establishment, with admirers
as diverse as Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser to President
Bush, and men's magazine Esquire. Rice described
him as "intelligent about just about every area of the world"
while Esquire tapped him as one of its "21 most important people
of the 21st century". Now an even
broader audience, including Australian readers, is going to get the chance
to check out Zakaria's world view. After eight years at the worthy but
dry Foreign Affairs, early last month he joined the considerably more
populist Newsweek magazine -- although as of last week he still had not
finished moving into his new digs. Unpacking
has had to be squeezed in between a trip to the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, and work on his latest book, an as-yet untitled analysis
of the past, present and future of democracy all over the world.
"It
starts in 341AD and goes into the future, and it's 250 pages," Zakaria
says of the book, due out next year. "It's very ambitious, which
is why it's short. It either had to be very short, or very, very long." For such
a heavy hitter, descending from the rarefied air of the Foreign Affairs
office on Manhattan's East 68th Street to the Newsweek building on West
57th might almost be seen as slumming it. But Zakaria seems to be relishing
the change in atmosphere. "If
you are going to be involved with the world of politics and public policy,
if you want to be a public intellectual and shape public debate, you have
to find a way to engage with that broader audience," he says. "You
can't just have a parlour game among the elite."
Zakaria's
new job as editor of Newsweek International makes him responsible for
its 26 foreign-language editions and three English-language overseas editions
-- actually one edition with three different covers -- targeted at Europe,
Asia (the one Australia gets) and Latin America. It also delivers him
a global audience of approximately 3.5 million. As well
as editing, he will continue to write a column for the magazine and contribute
to The Washington Post, Newsweek's owner. Whether
his new role makes Zakaria primarily a journalist observing and recording
world affairs, or a participant helping to shape those affairs, is a question
he says he finds "interesting and awkward". "I
see myself very much as a participant," he says. "[But] it's
a tradition that is stronger I think in Europe, and even to a certain
extent in Australia, that you can have public intellectuals, if you will,
who also are editors. "I
would never change a news story or not report on something because it
conflicted with my political views. But in any case, news magazines no
longer cover the news in a formulaic, reportorial sense of the word, so
there is a lot of play for somebody who has strong views about the world."
Of the three
regions Zakaria's Newsweek covers, he says Asia interests him the most,
providing the sort of meaty issues he can really get his teeth into.
"Europe
is in some senses post-modern, dealing with issues that are not issues
of war and peace and depression but really science, lifestyle, technology
type issues," he says. "In Asia you're still dealing with very
core political, economic and social issues. The rise of China, the way
that will impact the region. Whether or not Indonesia will come apart.
Whether Japan will ever be able to reform its political system. "Asia
is still really in the throes of history and for that reason covering
it is much more important, but also more interesting." Zakaria
says he considers Australia to be an important market for the magazine.
"A place like Australia becomes important to us precisely because
it has several identities: it is an Asian country, it is a Pacific country,
but it is also part of the Western world in a broader sense," he
says. However,
that might just be him being polite to an Australian interviewer. Which
would be in character, because Zakaria is a personable bloke, intellectual
without being domineering and serious without being stuffy -- although
he does have to be reminded to smile when his photograph is taken.
Born and
raised in Mumbai, Zakaria is the son of Rafiq Zakaria, who was deputy
leader of India's ruling Congress Party when Indira Gandhi was prime minister,
and Fatima Zakaria, a former Sunday editor of The Times of India. His childhood
home was Rylestone, a Malabar Hill mansion built during the Raj for a
British high court judge, and he received a classical English education
at the Cathedral School, which is known as "Mumbai's Eton". When it
came time for university, however, Zakaria chose the US rather than Mumbai
or, as might have been expected, London. "I
have enormous affection for England but it was never a country that I
felt I could participate in, never a culture that seemed inviting to an
outsider in that way," he says. "Whereas the extraordinary thing
about American culture is that it really is wide open to outsiders." He still
returns to India once a year. "I miss my family, I miss my parents,"
he says. "But ... I feel like an American. I would be kidding you
if I said that when I go down South I feel like an American, but in New
York I feel like an American." His accent
is an amalgam of both his worlds: an Indian precision of pronunciation
mixed with a New Yorker's hard r's. Zakaria
studied at Yale and Harvard, where he received a doctorate of political
science in 1993. He fully intended eventually to return to India. Instead
he was snapped up by Foreign Affairs. Published by the New York-based
Council on Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly is one of the most widely circulated
journals on international politics and economics in the world.
He also
married an American, Paula Throckmorton Zakaria, whose jewellery designs
are worn by the likes of Gywneth Paltrow and who also writes on general
financial subjects occasionally for The Wall Street Journal. The couple
have a young son. Zakaria's
success at Foreign Affairs launched him into the elite circle of political
pundits, membership of which is characterised by talk show appearances
and a profile in The New York Times. His inclusion in the Esquire Top
21 list, with a bio written by Council on Foreign Affairs fellow Walter
Russell Mead, was icing. "What
he is becoming is the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation,"
Mead wrote, concluding that even if Zakaria's ideas on international affairs
are only half right, "the world is only going to get more dangerous.
And he will be one of the people who will get us out of trouble." Zakaria
is at once flattered and embarrassed by and dismissive of the piece. "The
thing about those kinds of lists is, you always assume that they are arbitrary,
but you never quite realise how arbitrary they are until they select you,"
he says. "[Esquire]
had a scientist, a basketball player and they needed some kind of public
intellectual type, and for some reason or other I fit the bill. I have
no illusions that it means anything more than that." However,
the article was only echoing an equally laudatory view expressed several
months earlier by Les Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Affairs
and Zakaria's old boss. Gelb told
The New York Times he believed Zakaria had the potential to one day follow
in the footsteps of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former
national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and become only the third
immigrant -- and the first from a non-European background -- to hold one
of those roles in the White House. "I
don't think anyone ever imagined that in the next decade or so there could
be a national security adviser from India," Gelb said. "This
is in the realm of possibility." However,
when reminded of Gelb's prediction, Zakaria gets a distinctly hunted look.
"I just feel like at one level it's a little unfair, because it seems
to suggest that my life would be a failure if I didn't become secretary
of state or something like that," he says. "Les
is a good friend [but] he has certain ambitions for me which are not maybe
exactly ones I have for myself. How would I put this best? If something
were to come up at some point of my life in terms of government service
then, sure, I'd be interested. But the more important question one has
to ask oneself is: do you want the seeking of a government position to
be the goal of your life? "I
also have a sense of just how much luck and chance and happenstance have
to do with one's career. The point I focus on is making sure you're having
an interesting, rich, fulfilling career." So for the
time being, at least, Zakaria's focus is on learning how to put out a
weekly magazine that is not only intelligent but intelligible to as many
people as possible. "The
trick is not that it's going to be lightweight, but that you have to talk
about broader issues in ways that are meaningful to people who want to
engage with these issues but are not professionally engaged with these
issues," he says. "It's exciting." His face
is alight with enthusiasm. He looks years younger than 37.
THE AUSTRALIAN
Statesman In The Making
Precocious
international affairs pundit Fareed Zakaria has a new job, writes Sally
Jackson from New York