2024-04-04
1 小时 2 分钟Fareed Zakaria says yes. But it’s not just political revolution — it’s economic, technological, even emotional. He doesn’t offer easy solutions but he does offer some hope.
So my sense of reading you overall, particularly reading your new book, Age of Revolutions, is a sense of sadness and surprise that the world finds itself today in a state of peril, that the powers of populism and darkness and closed thinking are battling hard and maybe winning against what seemed to be the liberal trend or a trend toward openness and relative peacefulness.
Is that too dark a read of your views?
No, I think you put it exactly right.
It's a sadness.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed as though many of the great Enlightenment liberal progressive projects in the world were moving forward and being embraced by people from eastern Europe to Latin America to Africa, opening up, holding elections, many of them free and fair markets that were often closed, opening up so that people had many more opportunities to move up.
Trade between countries growing, tourism between countries growing.
And then the information revolution, which was bringing us all together, binding us together, all these forces seemed to be moving forward.
They were each reinforcing the other in a kind of virtuous cycle.
And then what we've seen over the last ten years is every one of the trends I just mentioned has reversed.
We are in a democratic recession, were in an age of rising trade and tariff barriers and protectionism.
We are in an age where information systems that were once open are increasingly being cordoned off, monitored, regulated, and all of it is fueled by a certain degree of popular sentiment which says, stop this train.
We're moving too fast, and I need to protect myself.
That is Fareed Zakaria.
I host a show on CNN, write a column for the Washington Post, and write books like this one.
This one, Age of revolutions, is subtitled Progress and backlash from 1600 to the present.
The 1600 material, the first liberal revolution in the Netherlands, then the glorious revolution in England, and so on.
It's all interesting and well written and insightful, but it is the present that I wanted to speak about with Zakaria.
For my money, he is one of our smartest and sanest geopolitical observers.
And in a moment when it seems the world is on fire, I thought he could help us sort things out.
Zakaria says we are right to feel off balance.