Editor's Note: Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy episodes on iTunes.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
The controversy over the desecration of copies of the Quran in Afghanistan and the murders of Americans that have followed is, on one level, one moment in a long, complicated war. But it also highlights the difficult and ultimately unsustainable aspect of America's Afghan policy. President Obama wants to draw down troops, but his strategy remains to transition power and authority to an Afghan national army and police force as well as to the government in Kabul, which would run the country and its economy. This is a fantasy. We must recognize that and pursue a more realistic alternative. FULL POST
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Editor's Note: Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy episodes on iTunes.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
The American economy seems to have picked up. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering around 13,000 - the highest since the financial crisis began in May 2008. The NASDAQ is actually at its highest level since the technology bubble burst more than a decade ago. Stock prices aren't everything but data from the economy on the ground is also slowly getting better. Jobless claims are down; housing starts are up. Things do seem to be getting better, slowly but surely.
This is all good news for President Obama because there is a very strong correlation between economic growth and a president's prospects for reelection. The unemployment numbers are still pretty high but they are falling. Also, many models suggest that unemployment is not the crucial statistic to determine whether a President will win reelection.
Most people are employed. It's the rise in per capita GDP - the average person's income rise - that determines whether they feel things are getting better and thus whether they will vote for the incumbent or seek a change.
So does that mean the economy - and the president - are in good shape?
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
If you're trying to understand the recent protests against the Putin regime in Russia, one of the best guides is an outspoken columnist who's been writing trenchant essays in the nation's leading newspapers over the past month.
"Political competition is the heartbeat of democracy," this author writes, noting the absence of such competition in contemporary Russia. He describes the frustrations of the Russian middle class, demanding political rights. "Today, the quality of our state does not match civil society's readiness to participate in it." On corruption, perhaps the issue that most riles the public, the author is scathing. "The problem comes from the lack of transparency and accountability of government," he says.
Now, what makes this all deeply strange is that the author of these essays is Vladimir Putin - the architect, builder, and chief enforcer of the system that he is critiquing. Putin seems to understand Russia's problems better than your average dictator. He doesn't seem to understand that he is the source of those problems in many people's eyes. FULL POST
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Editor's Note: Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy episodes on iTunes.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Now that Mitt Romney is once again the front-runner, his campaign focus is returning to President Obama. And he's probably going to start repeating a line that he's used often in the past: "This is a president who fundamentally believes that this next century is the post-American century."
Now, I leave it to the president to describe what he believes, but as the author of the book The Post-American World, I'd like to clarify the phrase. At the very beginning of the book, I note: "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else."
Throughout the book, I am optimistic about America, and I'm convinced it can prosper in this new world and remain the most powerful country on the planet. But I argue that the age of America's singular dominance, its unipolarity, has ended. For a quarter-century after the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, the United States dominated the world with no real political or economic competitors.
Mitt, we are in a different world now. FULL POST
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Editor's Note: Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy episodes on iTunes.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
President Obama spoke forcefully in his State of the Union about the importance of reviving manufacturing in America. If you talk with economists they will tell you it's a very complex problem, involving tax, trade regulatory policy, exchange rates, and educational skills. It is all those things.
But when you move from high-level policy to specific cases, you will often find one element that is rarely talked about: a foreign government’s role in boosting its domestic manufacturers with specific loans, subsidies, streamlined regulations and benefits. In effect, these governments - many in Asia, though some in Europe as well - have a national industrial policy to help manufacturers.
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Editor's Note: Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy episodes on iTunes.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
It looks like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will win his party's nomination. So Republicans are following a familiar pattern: They are nominating the mainstream candidate who has waited his turn. The guy who ran once before. This is the party, after all, that had a Bush or a Dole on its ticket for about 20 years. It's also a party that nominated Richard Nixon on its presidential ticket 5 times. Republicans don't like surprises.
But there is something surprising about this primary. It's the charges that are working against Romney. Romney's opponents have tried to change his upward trend at two levels. First, they called him a "Massachusetts moderate" - but that didn't seem to work. People perhaps think that Romney is more electable in the general elections because he's more moderate than his opponents.
But a second line of attack does seem to be gaining traction - that of Romney as job-killer or Romney as the private equity guy, who buys companies, hollows them out and then outsources jobs.
Now it's striking that this attack is coming in a Republican presidential primary. After all, what Romney did while at Bain Capital was classic capitalist "creative destruction." He took over businesses and tried to make them more productive. To do so, he often had to shed jobs. In other companies - startups like Staples - he created jobs. FULL POST
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
There's not much foreign policy talk on the campaign trail except for one issue - Iran. Everyone is talking about Iran's new strength and assertiveness - its missile tests, its progress on the nuclear program, its moves in Iraq. Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, describes Iran as "the greatest threat that the world faces over the next decade." Newt Gingrich has compared the Iranian challenge to the rise of Hitler’s Germany. More measured commentators also see Iran’s rising influence and power across the Middle East.
In fact, the real story on the ground is that Iran is weak and getting weaker. Sanctions have pushed the economy into a nose-dive. The political system is fractured and fragmenting. Abroad, its closest ally and the regime of which it is almost the sole supporter - Syria - is itself crumbling. The Persian Gulf monarchies have banded together against Iran and shored up their relations with Washington. Last week, Saudi Arabia closed its largest-ever purchase of U.S. weaponry.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
It's the start of a new year and in the spirit of keeping myself honest, I thought I'd look back at what I said and wrote in TIME Magazine at the start of last year to see how I did. It's always risky to stick your neck out and humbling to look at your own predictions - but here goes.
The only indulgence I will allow myself is to start with the areas where I did well. I said that I thought that China would moderate its foreign policy behavior, recognizing that its assertiveness and arrogance over the last year had caused jitters throughout Asia. I think that happened.
I said that the Taliban's momentum would be broken in Afghanistan; it has somewhat. And I said that the American drawdown of troops in Iraq would take place and would cause no regional crisis or instability. All of that seemed to play out pretty much as I predicted.
I said that Iran would continue to be checked by a large group of regional and global powers. But there would be no American or Israeli strike. So far, so good.
Now, my misses:
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
We hear a lot about leadership these days - mostly in the sense of the failure of leadership or the absence of leadership. Certainly that is the view of the many people who oppose President Obama, including a number of Democrats who believe he has been a disappointment - a bad manager and an ineffectual leader.
Many think that Obama just doesn't have what it takes to be the kind of leader we need - the kind we have had in the past. Many Democrats pine for someone like Bill Clinton who was just such a 'gifted political player' and a 'legendary leader.'
Hmm. Now, I have huge admiration for Clinton. I think he was a very good president and is almost preternaturally talented as a politician. But history is kinder to leaders than the present.
Let's recall what Clinton's first few years looked like. He began his presidency with the fiasco of gays in the military, then moved on to two failed nominees for Attorney General. Remember, Zoë Baird? And then Clinton went on to try and fail spectacularly to pass universal health care. Two years into his presidency, the Republican Party won both the Senate and the House of Representatives, gaining control of the latter for the first time since 1952! In his second term, of course, there was the impeachment scandal. FULL POST
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
TIME magazine announced its person of the year this week - "the protester". From the Arab Spring to Athens, from New Delhi to New York, people power is stronger than its ever been. And now it's reached Moscow with the protests there last week.
The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society. Historians have pointed out that the Russian nation was literally the property of the Czar, that serfs were more like slaves than simply peasant workers and that the country lacked any institutions that contested the authority of the government. The communist takeover in 1917 only enhanced these features by building a superstate that dominated every aspect of people's lives. When it collapsed in 1991, it turned out there was only chaos underneath.
But there has always been a Russian civil society, small but vibrant, espousing universal values and human rights. It is the Russia of Tolstoy and Pasternak, Sakharov and Gorbachev, and it has always believed that Russia's destiny lies with the West. This Russia has not died under Putin.
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
President Obama gave an important speech in Kansas last week. Whether you agree with all of it or not, he has begun a national conversation about the economy and the role of government. That's what this election should be about. And in presenting his view, Obama shifted the economic conversation from deficits alone to the crucial issue of growth. After all, deficits matter because they could have a harmful effect on growth.
So the question we should all ask is: What would make this economy grow? What has stopped it from growing much over the last few years - indeed over much of the last decade?
One theory heard a lot these days is that the economy is burdened by excessive government regulation, interference and taxes. Cut them, the Republican candidates all say, and the economy will be unleashed.
It's a compelling picture, but the data simply do not support it. FULL POST
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
You wouldn't have thought anti-Americanism in Pakistan could get any worse, but last week NATO attacked a Pakistani army post, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers. Even before this episode, for which NATO expressed deep regret, it would be difficult to find a country on the planet that was more anti-American than Pakistan. In a Pew survey this year, only 12% of Pakistanis expressed a favorable view of the United States. Populist rage and official duplicity have built up even though Washington has lavished Islamabad with aid totaling $20 billion over the last decade.
I think it's time to recognize that the America’s Pakistan policy is just not working. I write this as someone who has consistently supported engaging with the Pakistani government as the best of bad options. But the evidence that this engagement is working is thin - and gets thinner with every passing month. FULL POST
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