Fareed Zakaria Looks Back at 2024

More people voted in 2024 than ever before. In most cases, incumbents were booted out of office or came back weakened. Around the world, there seemed to be anger at inflation, immigration, and inequality. There were also two major wars, in Europe and the Middle East, several internal conflicts, and a growing fracturing of the global economy.

Every year, FP Live brings on a top global affairs analyst to look back at the year that was. This year, I was joined by Fareed Zakaria, a CNN host and author of books such as The Post-American World, The Future of Freedom, and Age of Revolutions. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript of key highlights.

Ravi Agrawal: As we look back at 2024, I think we have to start with the U.S. elections. Fareed, I’m imagining you feel like you predicted some of what happened. Your book, Age of Revolutions, was about how societies everywhere are primed for a backlash. Maybe that’s at least part of why [Vice President Kamala] Harris lost and why [former President Donald] Trump won. What did you make of it?

Fareed Zakaria: One thing I was trying to get across in the book was that the rise of this kind of populism and the degree of anxiety and even rage in the body politic, particularly in the West, was not a momentary spasm. This was part of a much broader, deeper backlash that we were going to be living with for years, if not decades. That is one very important reality that Trump’s election provided the world: This is not going away. And that this was not a fluke like 2016. This is part of the landscape of politics we have to deal with now. Relatedly, the old Republican Party is gone. There is now only a populist, MAGA Republican Party.

I do think the big takeaway is this was an anti-incumbency and an anti-incumbent year. In the last 16 months, every incumbent government that faced election suffered an incumbent penalty. Think of the British Tories. They went from their biggest margin of victory since Margaret Thatcher to their biggest margin of defeat in their 200-year existence. They now have the smallest minority that they’ve ever had. Look at the [Liberal Democratic Party] in Japan, which basically has won every election since 1948, with one exception. This year, they lost. Look at the United States. The main exception here is India, where Modi suffered an incumbent penalty but stayed in power.

Part of it is the turmoil, the change. People feeling like in the midst of this global, revolutionary sense of unease and anxiety—throw the bums out. Somebody called it the second COVID election, which is a nice way to think about it. All of this was dramatically exacerbated by COVID-19, including the inflation, the supply chain disruptions, and the work disruption. All that led to a greater sense that whatever is happening now is not working.

RA: There’s South Africa, as well as countries like Mexico or Taiwan, where incumbents came back or incumbent parties came back but were weakened. Does this all make you think that democracy, in some senses, is in better shape than we had expected it to be in 2024?

FZ: Well, it’s funny. Most people’s reaction is that democracy is in terrible shape. And there is something to that—the idea that we are in a crisis of democratic institutions. People do feel that democratic institutions are not delivering for them, but they are using democracy to solve that problem. In a way, this shows you democracy’s greatest strength, which is, in moments of great anxiety and turmoil, there is this amazing escape valve called an election. You can throw the bums out. You can change the government, and you’re going to get something different. That is what you don’t have in Iran, in Russia, in China, or in Venezuela, which makes those regimes ultimately much more brittle than we realized, as we saw with Syria. At the end of the day, a personalistic dictatorship—unlike the Chinese, who have an institutionalized dictatorship—those regimes tend to be quite fragile.

Read More

Our Top Long Reads From 2024

Foreign Policy’s best deep dives of the year.

Roundup

|

Allison Meakem

Stephen Walt on What to Expect From 2024

FP Live’s annual series looking ahead to the next 12 months.

Q&A

|

Ravi Agrawal

Is This a Revolution? Or Are People Just Very Ticked Off?

In a new book, Fareed Zakaria explores how much the times are a-changin’. At risk, he says, is the entire global system.

Review

|

Michael Hirsh

RA: Let’s get to the Middle East, which has had an important year. I’m curious how you rate the Biden administration’s foreign policy there. For me, it feels like a little bit of a mixed picture because America clearly lost a lot of soft power by being seen as complicit in Israel’s war in Gaza. But then, over the last few months, where you imagine that Washington looks at how weakened Iran is, how Hezbollah is decimated, how the Assad family has fled Syria, and those are actually positive outcomes—for the United States, at least.

FZ: I think you put it right, which is to separate the issue of Gaza from the rest. On the issue of Gaza, the United States is always going to pay a price for supporting Israel and for supporting particularly [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, which is what many Israelis believe is unnecessarily protracted and unnecessarily cruel to ordinary civilians in Gaza. But put that aside because that does not have a great significance in the regional balance of power and is more fundamentally an issue of morality. Israel has all the power in this situation. The question is, what does it want to do with the occupied territories? What does it want to do with the 5 million Palestinians who live under its rule? But if you look separately at the northern front, what has happened has been nothing short of miraculous, an incredibly positive development for both Israel and the United States.

What you had in the Middle East was an American-led security order that was largely to the benefit of America, the moderate Arab states, and the Gulf states, in particular. The great source of opposition to it was the Iranian regime. The Iranians, who are actually not very strong, used a very ingenious method of asymmetrical power, allying themselves with and funding a series of militias and substate actors from the Houthis in Yemen to the militias in Iraq and Syria, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, of course, to Hamas in Gaza. What the Israelis decided to do was unleash the northern strategy, and it succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. They were able to completely destroy Hezbollah’s communications, then Hezbollah’s command structure, and then Hezbollah’s weapons caches, with no real pushback. Then they went further and destroyed all of Iran’s air defenses. That, in turn, meant that the two great props of the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iran, were substantially weakened while Russia was distracted by Ukraine. And so Syria collapses. The Israelis then go destroy the Syrian navy and air defenses, and occupy the part of Syria next to the Golan Heights, so they have an even more commanding position.

The Axis of Resistance has basically been blown up. You still have parts of it, including the Houthis in Yemen, but Iran has been massively weakened. Hezbollah is a shell of itself. It still exists as a very powerful political player in Lebanon. But the whole challenge to the American-led security order has largely collapsed. And we have to see where that goes. As we know, in the Middle East, weakness can be as complicated and produce as much instability as strength. But for now, you are seeing a reordering of the Middle East with Israel as the indisputable military superpower and with the American-led security system in much better shape than it’s been for a decade.

RA: Some people have called this the Middle East’s 1989 moment. But it could also be that now, the Arab Spring’s promise to some degree has been fulfilled. What’s your sense of what to make of the restructuring of the region and what it means longer term?

FZ: This is a geopolitical restructuring, but I don’t think one should draw too many analogies between 1989 and now. The analogy I always think of is 1848, the moment where all of Europe erupted into global revolution. History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. There is one element here that reminds me more of 1848 than of 1989. In 1848, you had this massive liberal revolution across Europe. By 1851, three years later, all the conservative, reactionary, authoritarian regimes had taken charge, pushed back the liberal forces, and the revolutions were quashed. But if you look 20 years later, all the regimes had liberalized in substantial ways. Something similar is happening in the Arab world, where you saw the pushback immediately—all the old guard was able to reconstitute itself or bribed their way out of the problem.

But look at Saudi Arabia. What’s going on there is really quite extraordinary, not just the degree of openness in a society that was so closed but the decision to integrate more with the world economically, socially, and culturally. You’re seeing further expansion of those ideas in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi, and in Kuwait, which have previously been somewhat isolated. It’s not moving towards democracy or what we would consider liberalism, but it’s moving in a better direction than it had been moving for a long time.

Geopolitically, the big issue will be how Iran handles what has really been a strategic defeat. Does it try to find a new place in this order weakened and less dominant? Or is it going to still play the role of a spoiler? If it tries to play the role of spoiler, we are in for a confrontation. My hope is that if the United States steers this carefully, we might get to a better and more stable place, because a weakened Iran does not pose the same danger to Israel. So Israel also becomes less paranoid and less worried about Iranian aggression. But for that to happen, the Iranians need a way out.

The policy of maximum pressure, while it sounds good, means that Iran has no incentive to cooperate. Putting somebody in a box which has no windows and no doors doesn’t leave them with a lot of reason to cooperate. The rhetoric around Trump has tended to be very maximalist in terms of the pressure on Iran. But Trump is an opportunist and that may change.

But if you take stock of the Biden foreign policy in the Middle East, you’d have to say that, by design and by accident, the United States has ended up in a very good place in the Middle East, with the big exception of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which I recognize for many people is a huge exception. But strategically, it’s not that important other than the reputational effect the United States suffers.

RA: A concept that has come up again and again in 2024 is the “quartet of chaos,” to use the Economist’s phrasing, which is Iran, China, Russia, North Korea. They face American sanctions, and America’s alignment of democracies against autocracies. Have American policies united this quartet? Or were they naturally inclined to foment chaos and come together?

FZ: They were fundamentally brought together by American power and American hegemony. The United States was so dominant after 1989, but since then, you’ve seen pushback with a reconstituted Russian state and the rise of Chinese economic and then military power. This is a very broad structural reality in response to American hegemony. What the broad sweep of history tells you is when you have that much concentrated power, there are going to be balancers.

U.S. policy has exacerbated the problem, particularly on the Russia-China angle, because they are very different. In fact, if you think about the quartet, Iran, North Korea, and Russia really are spoiler states. They fundamentally oppose a rules-based system. They want a degree of chaos. They want the erosion of American power, even if that brings down the American-led open economic system, global integration, and global institutions. They have no incentive for peace, stability, and integration. China, on the other hand, does. China has grown to power largely because of peace, integration, globalization, stability. So there was an opportunity to keep Russia and China from being as close as they have become. Honestly, there was a needless amount of anti-China rhetoric, even when, as I believe the White House had to, banning chips and such. The whole thing was done in such a confrontational way.

And this is actually a very interesting lesson, in my opinion, for liberals, who tend to always worry about being outflanked on the right. Ever since Vietnam, this fear within the Democratic Party has led them into bad places. I don’t believe most senior Democratic policymakers believe that the wisest policy toward China is this ultra-hawkish, confrontational approach that was epitomized by Secretary of State [Antony Blinken] and National Security Advisor [Jake Sullivan] in their first meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Alaska, where Blinken basically read the Riot Act to the Chinese foreign minister. It was just performance. But it pissed the Chinese off enormously. I wonder whether they could have always appealed to China’s economic interests and said, “You’re not a spoiler state. You want an integrated world economy. You want trade. You want global institutions to work. You just want more power within them.” Which is different from Russia. There was a debate in the first week of the Biden administration whether to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, whether to lift the tariffs on China. And in both cases, they decided it would look weak. But they should have done it. If Republicans are going to call them appeasers anyway and Democrats will pay the price politically anyway, you might as well do the right thing.

RA: To your point about that Anchorage, Alaska, meeting, I met a Chinese diplomat recently and, three and a half years later, they’re still furious about what happened there. They can recount the number of minutes that Blinken spoke for and the fact that the media was in the room.

But let’s turn to another major arena: Russia and Ukraine. Fareed, you visit Kyiv frequently. You’ve interviewed [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky several times. When you look back at 2024, did Ukraine get its strategy right? Knowing what we know now, should they have gone on the offensive in Kursk? Should Washington have done a lot more to help?

FZ: Kursk is a tough one. That movement into Russia did help morale enormously. But it was not militarily important. Therefore, you could argue that it was a distraction of resources. But, psychological effects do matter. So I’m reluctant to say that they got that wrong.

It is fair to say there was a touch of hubris by the end of last year. They thought they were on a roll and were not focused enough on the reality that Russia has a population four times larger and an economy ten times larger. While this is a colonial war, it is not a distant colonial war. This is right next door to Russia. Resupplying the supply routes is very easy. So they should have been more prepared for hard defense rather than offense. That said, they have held the line amazingly well. They have, at great cost, managed to hold.

The biggest challenge the Ukrainians have faced is that they have not been given the arms that they needed as quickly as they needed them. They have gotten a lot of arms, but staggered, which always struck me as unfortunate because you’re giving them to them anyway. Every weapon system they have asked for, the United States and Europe eventually gave to them. So if you’re going to give it to them, why not right at the start? Why not crank up the pressure as much as you can? The Biden people have been pretty good on Ukraine, rallying the world and putting together a coalition. The sanctions have crippled the Russian economy. But these are hard decisions. They didn’t want to provoke the Russians into a cataclysmic counteroffensive, let alone some kind of war with NATO. So there are real concerns that they could have tilted the balance more in favor of the Ukrainians.

RA: In the last year, BRICS became BRICS+, adding Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, even the United Arab Emirates. I’m curious how you see their power. There was a memorable moment in October when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings were in D.C. Jake Sullivan was giving a talk at Brookings. And half a world away, in Kazan, Russia, [President Vladimir] Putin was hosting [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi, [Chinese Preisdent] Xi Jinping, [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, and United Nations Secretary-General [António Guterres] as if to say no, “the action is actually not in D.C. It’s here.” What is your sense of what that moment meant? What does the expansion of this bloc say about how the global order is shifting?

FZ: One has to take the bloc and these meetings seriously. They are an indication that parts of the world, important parts of the world, are unhappy with a global order that is so dominated by the United States and a handful of its allies like Japan. There is this desire for defiance and rebellion that is animating large parts of the world. It’s important to understand that. And American diplomacy should try to do something to counter it and to ameliorate it as a reality in terms of hard power. It’s very difficult to imagine the BRICS amounting to anything. The BRICS remind me of nothing so much as the nonaligned movement of the 1970s. It included a huge number of countries, but they had very little power. They had very little in common, and they didn’t cooperate. The idea that BRICS will create a currency is nonsense. Look at how difficult it has been for the Europeans to put together a common currency, even with all their commonality. It seems highly, highly unlikely that countries as far away economically as China, Russia, India, and South Africa could create a common currency or even a kind of cooperative like SWIFT.

What is more likely is that cryptocurrencies in various forms will play that role. And, frankly, the United States has to be thinking about how to make sure that the dollar is not marginalized, given that there is a market for people wanting to be free from dollar dominance, free from dollar sanctions, yet have all the advantages that come from some kind of internationally traded currency. I worry more about a digital alternative than the political one of BRICS.