Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India, to a Konkani Muslim family. His father, Rafiq Zakaria (1920–2005), was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and a scholar interested in Islam. His mother, Fatima Zakaria (1936–2021), his father's second wife, was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India. She died during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1986, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor in chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right. During his time at Yale, he was also a prominent advocate against divestment from Apartheid South Africa. He later gained a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1993, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.

After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992, at the age of 28. Under his guidance, the magazine was redesigned to be published once every two months, moving away from a quarterly schedule. He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International, and became a weekly columnist for Newsweek. In August 2010, he moved to Time to serve as editor at-large and columnist. He writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Media group, which includes The Atlantic Monthly.

He has published on a variety of subjects for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic. For a brief period, he was a wine columnist for the web magazine Slate, with the pseudonym of George Saintsbury, after the English writer.

Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), The Post-American World (2008), and In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2015). He co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books) with James F. Hoge Jr. His last three books have been New York Times bestsellers and The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World have both been translated into more than 25 languages. In 2011 an updated and expanded edition of The Post-American World ("Release 2.0") was published.

Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007) where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable. He hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–08). His weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), premiered on CNN in June 2008. It airs twice weekly in the United States and four times weekly on CNN International.

In 2013, he became one of the producers for the HBO series Vice, for which he serves as a consultant.

Zakaria, a member of the Berggruen Institute, additionally features as an interlocutor for the annual Berggruen Prize.

Zakaria was suspended for a week in August 2012 while Time and CNN investigated an allegation of plagiarism involving an August 20 column on gun control with similarities to a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. In a statement Zakaria apologized, saying that he had made "a terrible mistake". Six days later, after a review of his research notes and years of prior commentary, Time and CNN reinstated Zakaria. Time described the incident as "isolated" and "unintentional"; and CNN "... found nothing that merited continuing the suspension...".

The controversy was reignited in September 2014, when Esquire and The Week magazines reported on allegations made in pseudonymous blogs. Newsweek added a blanket warning to its archive of articles penned by Zakaria, and after an investigation of his several hundred columns for the magazine, found improper citation in seven. Similarly, after allegations surfaced on Twitter regarding the originality of one of Zakaria's columns for Slate, the online magazine appended a notice to the article indicating that, "This piece does not meet Slate's editorial standards, having failed to properly attribute quotations and information...". However, Slate Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg, who had, months before, exchanged barbs with one of the aforementioned anonymous bloggers on Twitter in defense of Zakaria, maintained his original position that what Zakaria did was not plagiarism.

Corrections to selected Zakaria columns were also issued by The Washington Post, which had responded to the initial allegations by telling the Poynter media industry news site that it would investigate. Later on the same day, November 10, the Post said that it had found "problematic" sourcing in five Zakaria columns, "and will likely note the lack of attribution in archived editions of the articles." However, editors at The Washington Post and Newsweek denied that Zakaria's errors constituted plagiarism.

Zakaria is a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1997, Zakaria married Paula Throckmorton, a jewelry designer. The couple have three children. In July 2018, his wife filed for divorce.

He lives on the Upper West Side in New York City. While a graduate student, Zakaria pursued his love of cooking, a passion deepened by his interest in chefs like Jacques Pépin and Julia Child. Zakaria is a self-described nonpracticing Muslim. He added: "My views on faith are complicated—somewhere between deism and agnosticism. I am completely secular in my outlook." His ex-wife is a Christian, and his three children have not been raised as Muslims.

Ideology

Zakaria self-identifies as a "centrist", though he has been described variously as a political liberal, a conservative, a moderate, or a radical centrist. George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, "He's so well versed in politics, and he can't be pigeonholed. I can't be sure whenever I turn to him where he's going to be coming from or what he's going to say." In February 2008, Zakaria wrote that "Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age", adding that "a new world requires new thinking". He supported Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and also for president. In January 2009, Forbes referred to Zakaria as one of the 25 most influential liberals in the American media. Zakaria has stated that he tries not to be devoted to any type of ideology, saying "I feel that's part of my job... which is not to pick sides but to explain what I think is happening on the ground. I can't say, 'This is my team and I'm going to root for them no matter what they do.'"

Zakaria "may have more intellectual range and insights than any other public thinker in the West", wrote David Shribman in The Boston Globe. In 2003, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told New York Magazine that Zakaria "has a first-class mind and likes to say things that run against conventional wisdom." However, in 2011, the editors of The New Republic included him in a list of "over-rated thinkers" and commented, "There's something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment."

Democracy and the United States

Zakaria's books include The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World. The Future of Freedom argues that what is defined as democracy in the Western world is actually "liberal democracy", a combination of constitutional liberalism and participatory politics. Zakaria points out that protection of liberty and the rule of law actually preceded popular elections by centuries in Western Europe, and that when countries only adopt elections without the protection of liberty, they create "illiberal democracy". The Post-American World, published just before the 2008 financial crisis, argued that the most important trend of modern times is the "rise of the rest", the economic emergence of China, India, Brazil, and other countries.

From 2006, Zakaria has also criticized what he views as "fear-based" American policies employed not only in combating terrorism, but also in enforcing immigration and drug smuggling laws, and has argued in favor of decriminalization of drugs and citizenship for presently illegal immigrants to the United States of all backgrounds.

Before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Zakaria endorsed Barack Obama on his CNN program. In May 2011 The New York Times reported that Obama has "sounded out prominent journalists like Fareed Zakaria... and Thomas L. Friedman" concerning Middle East issues.