Fareed Zakaria is a Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs and is also a Contributing Editor for Newsweek. He writes extensively on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs and is the author of numerous articles and books including Strong Nation, Weak State: The Rise of America to World Power (1998). His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the National Interest and International Security. He has won the Overseas Press Club Award, and was awarded both the Harvard MacArthur Fellowship and the John M. Olin Fellowship. Dr. Zakaria received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. The Political Affairs Reader spoke to Dr. Zakaria from his New York City office. Our discussion covers topics ranging from the current crises in Kosovo to the United States’ future role in world affairs.

PAR: I wanted to thank you for doing this interview with us. I know you have a very busy schedule and you have been out of the office for a while, so I appreciate this.

Zakaria: My pleasure.

PAR: The first two questions I had were more informal, regarding your work at Foreign Affairs. I was wondering, just in general, how you first became interested in international relations, kind of what led you to work at the Council on Foreign Relations and more specifically, Foreign Affairs?

Zakaria: I have been interested in international relations since I can remember. I grew up in India and I wish I could tell you a story that has some kind of identity politics theme. But, even when I was a young kid in India, I was fascinated by the debates over the Vietnam War, over Carter’s foreign policy. I followed international relations intently, which meant in those days U.S.-Soviet relations, although India was sort of a strategic back-border. U.S.-Soviet relations did not directly affect India’s security. Of course, the whole world lived in the shadow of the Cold War, but India was not central to it. When I went to Yale, I studied modern European history and great power politics. My professor was a then obscure professor of history named Paul Kennedy. I also went to graduate school in political science at Harvard, and I worked at the New Republic along the way. So I always thought that I would always do something that was at the intersection of journalism, public affairs, and academia. As it turns out, Foreign Affairs is exactly at that intersection, so I am very glad and thrilled to be in this position. I think editing a magazine like this is a wonderful way to be able to look at those three worlds and to participate in them.

PAR: You must receive hundreds of submissions for every two-month publication of Foreign Affairs. I was wondering what kind of process do you go through to decide what articles get published and which don’t?

Zakaria: We do look at everything that comes in and try hard to do that sincerely. There are magazines where unsolicited manuscripts do not receive much attention and are summarily turned down. We do not do that. We often do publish things that come in over the transom. Of course, there are dozens of manuscripts that come in, for every one that we might accept. We commission a great many articles and there is also a lot of stuff that we may not formally commission, but we have conversations with authors, try to get a sense of what they are thinking about and help them shape an argument or an idea that they have. So there is a lot of give-and-take in the commissioning process. There is no formula other than to say that in general, the only way to edit a magazine is to keep the interests of the reader foremost in your mind. Yes, we have a lot of important writers and government officials, but you can’t let that obscure the fact that your ultimate loyalty is to the reader. If the article is bad, the fact that it is written by somebody famous is not going to make it any better. And if the article is bad, your responsibility is either to turn it down or drastically edit it, to make it so that the reader is going to get something

PAR: Well, I guess the next couple of questions I have are more concerned with policy and international affairs. The first of which is that it seems that you have been a critic of the United States intervention into Kosovo, noting that in certain areas, that any U.S. action may only expand the size and the scope of the conflict. Given NATO’s current and proposed strategy for the next few months, can the United States ever find a way to at least contain the conflict?

Zakaria: There is no easy answer now. The Clinton Administration has done something that I think no administration should do, which is in a rash and in ill-considered manner begun a war without clear objectives and without the means to achieve victory. Now when you start a war like that, the chances are that any outcome is going to be less than perfect. There is one, I suppose, the possibility a complete and utter victory over Belgrade and the replacement of Milosevic with a Jeffersonian Democracy. This would probably involve not just ground-troops, but also an invasion, not just of Kosovo, but of Serbia proper. It will be a very long, expensive, costly undertaking politically, militarily, and economically. Anything short of that is going to be an imperfect solution. What we have to now do, in this world of imperfect solutions, is ask ourselves what is the key objective? The key objective, it seems to me, is to restore the Kosovo Albanians to a situation where they can live with some security and dignity. We should try to create a partitioned Kosovo, some kind of an independent state with NATO, a quasi-independent state. I don’t think that it will be cheap either, in either time, energy, and effort, but I think the United States should be willing to bear this burden for a reasonable, attainable objective. It is a morally imperfect one, but I think the whole way in which this war has been raged should be a sobering fault for those who just think that some kind of military action if the cause is just, will improve matters. In fact, our military action has turned what was a humanitarian crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe.

PAR: Some have suggested that the longer the conflict drags on, other NATO member countries will be become less inclined to withhold use of their veto power over military action. I was wondering what your thoughts were on this possibility and how would you categorize the cohesion, or cohesion, or lack thereof, of NATO?

Zakaria: I think, frankly, [the alliance] has held up better than most people thought it would, but that’s partly because we are fighting this minimalist air war. It’s the sort of war by lowest common denominator, and so we are neither hitting the Serbs particularly hard, nor are we actually risking pilots who could fly low and hit Serb tanks and armored vehicles. It's a post-modern. If we were to wager a real war, whether by air or by ground, I think that cohesion would splinter somwhat. NATO could fight a war which was a real war against aggression, that is, a real war triggered by the self-defense aspect of the NATO charter because all the member states would feel like their interests were threatened. On the other hand, it could fight this kind of war, which is essentially a humanitarian war because, in effect, none of their vital interests are really threatened. But, the problem with that kind of war, is that they are not willing to go all out. They want to will the ends without willing the means.

PAR: You wrote an editorial regarding Kosovo, which appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago, where you talked about foreign intervention on the part of major powers. You noted that, the test of a world power is not only when it can say yes, but also when it can say no. Has the United States, at least during the Clinton administration photo courtesy of American ObservorDoes the U.S. Military really belong in Haiti?over the past seven some years, passed that test?

Zakaria: I think the United States has been promiscuous in its interventions. When something leaves the immediate news cycle of television cameras, people forget about it. It is important to note that almost by every measure, all of the Clinton administration’s interventions have failed. That is to say, they have not really solved the problem they were sending out to solve, and certainly they have not solved the problem in a permanent fashion or a durable manner. We do not have a functioning democracy in Haiti, we do not have a functioning nation in Somalia, and we do not have a reintegrated single state in Bosnia. We have not even destroyed Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, for that matter. I think that part of the reason for this carefree attitude towards the use of force, is that it can be done at low cost (to American lives).

PAR: What type of alternative approach would you have

Zakaria: Well, in Iraq, I would use force, with greater persistence in support of a clear goal— the return of an arms inspection regime to prevent Saddam Hussein from building weapons of mass destruction.

PAR: Well, what about Haiti,for example?

Zakaria: We decided that a coup in Haiti somehow threatened the vital interests of the United States. I am not convinced that that was the case. I think the United States should get used to the idea of doing a lot more humanitarian assistance to help people who are dislocated by terrible things that happen around the world. Frankly, we do very little. We have to do more on a consistent and sustained basis, and thatwill cost money. What we tend to do is when something bad happens, somewhat idiosyncratically, we will pick one place, usually where CNN news cameras can go and decide that somehow we are going to solve this political problem with a little use of military force. The cardinal rule is that there can be no American casualties. Well, you can’t solve entrenched problems around the world in that fashion. Again, you are willing the ends without willing the means and I think the United States has got to have a much more active humanitarian policy involving refugee aid, resettlement, and also accepting immigrants. I think in both the Bosnian case and the Haitian case such an approach would have ammeliorated human misery to a far greater extent than cruise missiles when they are not going to be backed up with more force.

PAR: Well, I wanted to thank you right now for your time. I just have one more question to ask you.

PAR: You have also argued that the United States, despite its vast military resources and its ability to push forth its hegemonic power throughout the world, should be very selective when it decides to do so. I was wondering, looking ahead into the 21st century what areas around the world do you think will be hot-spots in which United States should actively engage its resources in?

Zakaria: The United States has an awesome to try and shape the world and to maintain [the kind of] ... stability, peace, and prosperity that deters major war. That’s a tough thing to do. Frankly, if history is any guide, this is a very difficult thing to do and especially for one nation. We do not have long periods of peace among the great powers in history. We are in one such period. It’s been over fifty years. The United States has to try to preserve this central achievement of the post-1945 order- peace and stability among the great powers. That means deterrence in Europe, in Western Europe, in particular, and deterrence in East Asia. What I mean by deterrence is to try to ensure that there is no great power conflict in those areas. It also means, maintaining a degree of stability in the Middle East, which has vital resources that are the vital lifeblood of the industrialized world. Now, this is a very tall order, requiring dozens of implicit and explicit security guarantees to countries in Western Europe, East Asia and the Middle East. It also means doing all kinds of things on the international economic front. In addition, the United States should try to isolate and punish people like Milosevic, and to try to aid his victims. But I think these things have to be placed in perspective—that you know that you cannot do everything. That is not an argument for doing nothing, but it is an argument for maintaining some sense of priorities, political goals, reasonable costs and recognizing that means you will be making some morally imperfect compromises along the way. People who claim that we are morally sullied by the fact that we will not go all the way to overthrow Milosevic because of the terrible, brutal, cruel things he is doing, but we are also soiled by the fact that we did not do anything in Cambodia, Biaphra, or Rwanda. We are sullied already, by our very involvement in the world. Satre called this the reality of having "dirty hands". I am not advocating complacency. All I am saying is what we have to do is recognize that the key is trying to do something effectively. You can either use moralism to make a debating point or you can try to actually make a difference. I would like to see us have, attainable goals on the humanitarian front that are sustainable over time.

edited by Anna Tesmenitsky and Mark Paustenbach

Back Home

All content © The Colby Reader, c/o Student Activities, 5900 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, ME 04901,207-872-3847,politics@colby.edu