Offensive Realism

Book Reviewed: Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Not so long ago, Fareed Zakaria’s journey from the small Muslim elite of Bombay to the centers of metropolitan power would have gone through Oxbridge to some suitable seat of significance in London or perhaps back to India. Instead, he chose to travel through Yale and Harvard Universities to the Council on Foreign Relations, that venerable and stodgy institution of the U.S. establishment. Ensconced in the palace on Park Avenue, he is de facto editor of its house organ, Foreign Affairs, which he has managed, against very bad odds, to transform from one of the greatest bores in the land to something that breathes and occasionally even sparkles. From this base, he also ventures forth into the world of policy wonks in his role as one of its brightest young things (to use Evelyn Waugh’s language, which somehow I find appropriate here). He is the subaltern as organic intellectual of imperial power. He is smarter than the ruling class he serves; a subaltern nonetheless he remains. Behind the immaculate surface, he is, I think, acutely aware of this.

Whether or not he will be able to break that mold in the next decade or so will be an interesting indication of how far the system can culturally stretch. The role of foreign advisor to the prince is, of course, one that distinctly “foreign” figures, beginning with Henry Kissinger, have been allowed to occupy. Zakaria, having reached prominence but not preeminence, will surely want to advance further in that world. Overall, he has made the right moves. He is critical, but not too critical. He is clever, but careful (on the whole) not to be too clever. His air of ironic detachment and his unusual willingness to engage a fairly wide range of intellectuals never intimates any cynicism, much less any subterranean anti-Americanism. Zakaria is genuinely pro-American and deeply dislikes tendencies, cultural or political, to the contrary, especially within the intelligentsia. His centrism has a conservative-realist hue, Burkean affinities that might well find a place of convenience within some future Democratic administration with greater geopolitical desires than the present one.

On that score, it must indeed be said that, after the Gulf War, the 1990s have not been a good moment for the foreign-policy establishment. The Clinton regime has pursued one foreign policy with dogged consistency and one alone: economic “liberalization.” Republicans have largely agreed—hence, for example, the total absence of any debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement in the presidential election of 1996. Elsewhere, the record has been episodic and lacking in conviction—a posture revealed with painful clarity throughout the Balkan sequence. Facing that dismal horizon, Zakaria has chosen to retain the perspective of “grand strategy” but to propose a suitably “moderate” form of political realism centered on the need to be selective. Immature democracy in faraway places, he has recently warned, can produce “illiberal” regimes, and so the West must abandon its undiscriminating commitment to such overly schematic principles of political rule and become far more discerning and hard-nosed. In fact, he argues, what makes the West the West is not democracy but “constitutional liberalism,” a conservatively legal system that respects tradition, individual and property. As he says approvingly (but quite rightly): “What is distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on electoral majorities.”¹

Perhaps tactically, Zakaria makes no reference to what must surely be the “illiberal” example closest to heart, namely, the chauvinist movement of Hindu nationalism in his own home province in India. Perhaps tactically, too, he makes no reference either to his Burkean sources of inspiration. His outlook is otherwise rooted in the neoconservative attack in the wake of the 1960s on the domestic “excesses” of democracy. Though annoying and gratuitous, Zakaria’s constant evocation...