Looking back at 2024
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Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live. Happy holidays. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're with family and you are getting some rest. What a year it's been. From the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, elections in India and America and everywhere else, dictators ousted in Syria and Bangladesh, we have covered it all here at FP Live.

Today, I wanted to take a step back and look at some of the bigger picture trends. At the end of every year, it's become an FP tradition to invite one big thinker to join us for a twofer, looking back and then gazing ahead. This one is the first of those two episodes. News moves quickly these days, so I should make clear we taped this interview on Tuesday, December 17th.

My guest this year is Fareed Zakaria. In 2020, FP named him among its top 10 global thinkers of the last decade for his books, columns, and shows.

I helped make that decision, and part of it was because some of Fareed's biggest ideas have really endured, whether it's the idea of the rise of the rest in a post-American world, or the notion of illiberal democracies and how that could be the future of freedom as we know it.

Fareed's got an uncanny knack of synthesizing trends like no one else I know. So enjoy the ride in part one of this two-part discussion. As always, we love hearing from you. Our email is live at foreignpolicy.com. Let's dive in. Fareed, welcome back. Pleasure to be with you, Roby.

So as we look back at 2024, I think we have to start with the U.S. elections. And Fareed, I'm imagining you feel like you predicted some of what happened. Your book, Age of Revolutions, was all about how societies everywhere are primed for a backlash. And maybe that's at least part of why Harris lost and why Trump won. What did you make of it?

Yeah, it's very kind of you to say that. But yeah, I do think that one of the things I was trying to get across in the book was that the rise of this kind of populism and the degree of anxiety and even anger, rage in the body politic, particularly in the West, was not a momentary spasm. This was part of a much broader, deeper backlash that we were going to be living with for years, if not decades. So I think that is one very important point

of reality that Trump's election provided, you know, the world, which is this is not going away. This was not a 2016 was not a fluke. This is part of the landscape of politics we have to deal with. And, you know, relatedly, the old Republican Party is gone. There is now only a populist MAGA Republican Party. I do think the big

take away beyond that kind of very broad trend is the degree to which this was an anti-incumbency year and an anti-incumbent year. You've probably seen the same data I have that John Byrne Murdoch at the FT put together very well. But in the last 15 months, 16 months, every incumbent government that faced election suffered an incumbent penalty. So much so that, you know, I mean, think of the British Tories. They go from their biggest...

margin of victory since Margaret Thatcher to their biggest margin of defeat in their 200 year existence. They now have the smallest minority that they've ever had. Look at the LDP in Japan, which basically has won every election since 1948 with one exception and they lost.

Look at, obviously, the United States. The one exception here is India. And we can get to that in a minute. But Modi suffered an incumbent penalty, but stayed in power. Why is that? Part of it is the turmoil, the change, people feeling like in the midst of all this, you

you know, kind of world revolutionary sense of unease and anxiety, throw the bums out. You know, whatever's happening now isn't working. And I think in some ways, somebody has called it the second COVID election, which is, I think, a nice way to think about it, which is that all this was dramatically exacerbated by COVID and the inflation that came out of COVID, the supply chain disruptions, the work disruption, stay at home, don't stay at home.

All that led to a greater degree of a sense of like, whatever's happening now is not working. And there's South Africa as well, countries like Mexico, Taiwan, where incumbents came back or incumbent parties came back, but weakened. Does this all make you think, Fareed, that democracy in some senses is in better shape than we had expected it to be in, in 2024?

Well, it's funny you put it very well, Ravi, because most people's reaction is democracy is in terrible shape. And there is something to the idea that we are in a crisis of democratic institutions. People do feel that democratic institutions are not delivering for them. But...

They are using democracy to solve that problem. And in a way, this proves, this shows you democracy's greatest strength, which is in moments of great anxiety, great turmoil, there is this amazing escape valve called

called an election. And you can throw the bums out, you can change the government, and you're going to get something different. And you can then decide whether that was what you wanted or what you didn't want. But I think that that is what you don't have.

in Iran, in Russia, in China, in Venezuela, which makes those regimes ultimately much more brittle than we realize as we saw with Syria, where at the end of the day, particularly a personalistic dictatorship, unlike say the Chinese who have an institutionalized dictatorship, those regimes tend to be quite fragile.

So let's get to the Middle East then. I'm curious how you rate the Biden administration's foreign policy there. I mean, for me, it feels like a little bit of a mixed picture because America has clearly lost a lot of soft power by being seen as complicit in Israel's war in Gaza. But then over the last few months, where you imagine that Washington looks at how weakened Iran is, how Hezbollah has decimated, how the Assad family has fled Syria,

And those are actually positive outcomes for the United States at least. Yeah, I think you put it right, which is to separate the issue of Gaza from the rest.

On the issue of Gaza, the U.S. is always going to pay a price for supporting Israel and for supporting particularly Bibi Netanyahu's war in Gaza, which is what many Israelis believe unnecessarily protracted, unnecessarily broad brush, unnecessarily cruel to ordinary civilians in Gaza. But put that aside, because honestly, that does not have a great significance.

significance in the regional balance of power. That is more fundamentally has always been to me a kind of issue of moral, of morality and Israel has all the power in this in this situation. The question is what does it want to do with the occupied territories? What does it want to do with the five million Palestinians who live under its rule? But if you as I say separate these two fronts on the second on the northern front

what has happened has been nothing short of miraculous, incredibly positive developments for both Israel and the United States. Basically, what you had in the Middle East was an American-led security order that was largely to the benefit of America, the moderate Arab states, the Gulf states in particular. The great source of opposition to it was the Iranian regime. And the Iranians...

actually not very strong, used a very ingenious method of asymmetrical power, which is allying themselves and supporting and funding a series of militias, sub-state actors, from the Houthis in Yemen to the militias in Iraq and Syria, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and of course to Hamas in Gaza.

What the Israelis decided to do, and this is interesting how history works, it seems as though it was almost accidental because they realized their pagers were being discovered by Hezbollah. And so they decided, let's unleash the northern strategy that we had always thought we might use. And it succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations. They were able to completely destroy Hezbollah's communications, then Hezbollah's command structure, then Hezbollah's weapons caches,

with no real pushback. Then they went further and destroyed all of Iran's air defenses. That in turn meant that the two great props of the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iran, substantially weakened. Russia distracted by Ukraine. Syria collapses. The Israelis then go destroy the Syrian Navy, destroy the Syrian air defenses, and occupy

the part of Syria next to the Golan Heights, so they have an even more commanding position. What this means is that the axis of resistance has basically been blown up. You still have parts of it, obviously, the Houthis in Yemen, but it's massively weakened. Iran has been massively weakened. Hezbollah is a shell of itself. It still exists as a very powerful political player in Lebanon. But the whole challenge to the American-led security order is

has largely collapsed. And we have to see where that goes, as we know in the Middle East, weakness can be as complicated and produce as much instability as strength. But for now, you are seeing a reordering of the Middle East with Israel as the indisputed military superpower and with the American-led security system in much better shape than it's been for a decade.

You know, some people have called this the Middle East's 1989 moment.

you know, reference to Europe there. But it could also be that this is the time that the Arab Spring's promise to some degree has been fulfilled. And you'll remember from that time, all the countries that were net importers of oil generally collapsed. The net exporters of oil were able to essentially bribe their people and stay in power. And now if you look at the players that are left standing, they're all ones that are very rich, energy independent, and are able to

to play the game that they need to play in 2025. What's your sense of what to make of the restructuring of the region and what it means longer term? So what would the big sort of battle lines be?

So fundamentally, I think this is a geopolitical restructuring. I don't think one should draw too many analogies between 1989. The other one that I always think of is 1848, the moment where all of Europe erupted into a kind of liberal revolution. But, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

There is one element here that reminds me more of 1848 than of 1989. In 1848, you had this massive liberal revolution across Europe. By 1851, three years later, all the conservative reactionary authoritarian regimes had taken charge, pushed back the liberal forces, and the revolutions were quashed. There was almost no sight of them at all. I mean, Medernick resigns in Austria, but that's it.

But if you look 20 years later, all the regimes had liberalized in substantial ways. So they had kind of gotten the message. They had pushed back because they didn't want those liberal revolutionaries in power, but they had liberalized.

Something similar is happening in the Arab world where you saw, as you said, the pushback immediately. All the old guard was able to reconstitute itself or bribe their way out of the problem. But look at Saudi Arabia.

What's going on in Saudi Arabia is really quite extraordinary. The degree of openness in a society that was so closed, not just women's rights, but the decision to kind of integrate more with the world economically, socially, culturally. You're seeing further expansion of those ideas in Dubai.

in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, which has been kind of somewhat isolated, is joining in. Now, it's not moving towards democracy and it's not moving even towards, you know, what we would consider liberalism, but it's moving in a better direction than it's been moving for a long time. So I do think there's some opening and openness. Geopolitically, the big issue is going to be how does Iran decide to handle what has really been a strategic defeat? Does it try to

find a new place in this order, weakened, less dominant, or is it going to still try to play the role of a spoiler? And if it plays or tries to play the role of a spoiler, we have a, you know, we're in for a confrontation. My hope is that if the United States steers this carefully, we might get to a much, much better and more stable place than we've been.

because a weakened Iran does not pose the same danger to Israel. It means Israel also becomes less paranoid, less worried about Iranian aggression.

But for that to happen, the Iranians need a way out. Right now, the policy of maximum pressure is one that, while it sounds good, it means that Iran has no incentive to cooperate. What is the point of Iran moderating? What is the point of Iran coming to a modus vivendi that is more constructive if it's going to face the same consequences

Exactly the same onslaught of sanctions, pressure, Israeli attacks. So there's got to be, you know, putting somebody in a box which has no windows and no doors doesn't leave them with a lot of reason to cooperate. I say there's a real opportunity there.

The rhetoric around Trump has tended to be very maximalist in terms of the pressure on Iran. But Trump is an opportunist and that may change. But if you take stock of the Biden foreign policy in the Middle East, you'd have to say that

Some of it by design, some of it by accident, the Israeli strikes. You know, the U.S. has ended up in a very good place in the Middle East at the end of the Biden administration, with the big exception of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which I recognize for many people is a huge exception. But just strategically, it's not that important other than the reputational effect the U.S. suffers. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, on the point you were making about Iran just being boxed in, I think the other sort of term that has come up again and again in 2024 is the quartet of chaos, which is the economists

phrasing. Other people use axis of evil, which I'm not a big fan of. But anyway, the quartet is Iran, China, Russia, North Korea. And I'm curious whether you think that these countries have sort of been brought together by U.S. policy in a sense, like

have a mix of American sanctions, America's sort of aligning of democracies against autocracies. Has that brought this quartet together or were they sort of naturally inclined to do chaos and come together?

They were fundamentally brought together by American power and American hegemony. Any student of balance of power, you know, you don't have to be an arch realist to understand that there is a tendency towards balancing. And the U.S. is so dominant in the world after 1989 that once you had balance,

lesser powers that had the capacity. In the 1990s, nobody had the capacity. China was 1 or 2% of global GDP. Russia was in free fall. So there was no game in town. But ever since you have had the reconstituted Russian state, the rise of Chinese economic and then military power,

you began to see the pushback. So I think it's important to remember this is a very broad structural reality that is a response to American hegemony. I don't think that, I think people who think that if America had dialed its diplomacy a little bit here, a little bit there, yeah, you could have affected it on the margins. But what the broad sweep of history tells you is when you have that much concentrated power, there are going to be balancers.

Where I do think the U.S. policy has exacerbated the problem is particularly on the Russia-China angle, because they are very different. In fact, if you think about the quartet of chaos, the three of them really that are spoiler states are

Iran, North Korea, and Russia. They really are fundamentally opposed to a rules-based system. They want a degree of chaos. They want the erosion of American power, even if that brings down the American-led open economic system, global integration, global institutions, free trade, all of that. They don't care. You know, two of them...

Russia and Iran sell oil, which actually does better when there's periods of crisis. And North Korea is an autarkic dictatorship, kind of almost running a nation of serfs. So those three have no incentive for peace, stability and integration.

China, on the other hand, does. China is a country that has grown to power largely because of peace, integration, globalization, stability. So there was, I think there was an opportunity to keep Russia and China from being as close as they have become.

And I think that honestly, there was a needless amount of anti-China rhetoric. Even when you had to do certain things, which I believe you had to do, which is ban the chips and things like that. The whole thing was done in such a confrontational way that I worry that we played a role. And this is actually a very interesting lesson, in my opinion, for liberals, which is there is a tendency among Democrats to

to always worry about being outflanked on the right. Ever since Vietnam, the Democratic Party has always worried about being outflanked on the right, and it leads them into bad places. Think of Iraq.

And in China, it's led them to a bad place. Largely, I said, because I don't believe most senior Democratic policymakers believe that the wisest policy toward China is this ultra hawkish confrontational approach that was epitomized by the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor in their first meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska, where Tony Blinken basically read the Riot Act to

the Chinese foreign minister on all kinds of issues that were really like human rights issues. And by the way, they did nothing about for the next four years. It was just performance. It was theater. But it pissed the Chinese off enormously. Instead, if you had taken a more cooperative approach and said, look, there are things we have to do to deter you on Taiwan, to make sure that we're not selling you the highest end American technology, but we want to have a cooperative relationship.

It's where they got to really this year, but it took them a long time and, you know, a lot of damage. So I wonder whether you could have always appealed to China's pure economic interest in saying, you're not a spoiler state.

You want an integrated world economy. You want trade. You want global institutions to work. You just want more power within them. And that's different from Russia. So I do think that the Biden administration, you know, if you think about it, I know there was a debate in the first week of the Biden administration, whether to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, whether to lift the tariffs on China. And in both cases, they decided we'll look weak.

And I think they should have done it. They would have paid a price. The Republicans were going to fire, we're going to call them appeasers anyway. And they did. You pay the price politically on these things anyway, you might as well do the right thing.

You know, to your point about that Anchorage, Alaska meeting, I met a Chinese diplomat recently. And I mean, this is like three and a half years on and they're still mad, absolutely mad about what happened there. They can recount the number of minutes that Blinken spoke for and the fact that the media was in the room and then they had separate rounds where they felt the need to go at it again. Do you think

Over the last year, all of the work that Jake Sullivan and others put into stabilizing the relationship, this is post-Anchorage, post the balloon incident, post Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Does that put the relationship on enough of a strong footing leading into a new administration? Or if you're Beijing, would you still be very worried?

I think it's done a lot, but I do think that a lot of damage was done in those first two years. And I think that Tony Blinken's testimony to the Senate in his confirmation hearings added to it, agreeing with Mike Pompeo's characterization of what's going on in Xinjiang as genocide, which I think really does not meet the definition of the term. You do not have

tens of thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands of people being killed. You have a very, you have what is a really ugly practice of kind of brainwashing, but that is very different from, maybe it can be characterized as war crimes or something, though even that I'm not sure.

But what was seen by the Chinese as you are weaponizing the relationship, you're taking these things and you're just doing anything you can to shame us, humiliate us. And you're absolutely right, Ravi, when you talk about the Anchorage meeting, because, you know, for the Chinese face is very important.

And this was a public shaming of a kind that startled them, was really never done by the US before. The Trump administration never did anything like that. In fact, Trump would always say, she's a great guy. He's an amazing guy. I just, you know, he's looking out for his interests. I'm looking out for mine. It was a very different characterization. So I do think it'll be hard to repair that. Of course, a new administration could do anything.

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The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Let's turn to the other major arena that we haven't discussed enough, and that's Russia and Ukraine. Farid, you visit Kyiv frequently. You've interviewed President Zelensky several times. When you look back at 2024, did Kyiv get its strategy right? Should they have gone on the offensive in Kursk, knowing what we now know? Should Washington have done a lot more to help?

Kursk is a tough one, that movement into Russia, because when I was in Ukraine, what I was struck by was it did...

helped morale enormously. It did provide the Ukrainians with a kind of shot in the arm of a sense that we can take the battle to the enemy. It was not militarily important. And it, you know, and therefore you could argue that it was a distraction of resources. But, you know, when you look at the battles of World War II, what is striking is so often Roosevelt and Churchill made a decision to do something that had a psychological effect

rather than a purely military effect. And those things do matter. So I'm reluctant to say that they got that wrong. I think what

What is fair to say is they got overly, there was a touch of hubris by the end of last year where they thought they were on a roll. And I think they were not focused enough on the reality that Russia is four times larger than them population-wise, 10 times larger economically. And

And this is not, while it is a colonial war, this is not a distant colonial war. The British in Kenya, the French in Indochina, this is right next door to Russia. The supply routes are very easy. So they should have been a little bit more prepared for kind of hard defense rather than an offense. That said, they have held the line amazingly well. People have predicted over the last decade

three months, ever since I was in Kyiv in September, people were predicting that you were going to see the fall of a series of cities, including Kherson and things like that. So far, they have at great cost managed to hold. So I am reluctant to say that the Ukrainians have done badly. I think

The Ukrainian, the biggest challenge the Ukrainians have faced is that they have not been given the arms that they needed as quickly as they needed them. They've gotten a lot of arms, but they have been staggered out, which has always struck me as

unfortunate because you're giving them to them anyway. Every weapon system they have asked for, the United States and Europe has eventually given to them. So if you're going to give it to them, why not give it to them right at the start? I mean, the way I approach the Ukraine war is to say, we've already picked our side. We've made it very clear we want the Ukrainians to win and the Russians to lose. Now, all that remains is to say, are you going to do what it takes to win?

because the alternative to winning is losing. And why would you want to lose? Why not crank up the pressure as much as you can? And the Biden people have been pretty good on Ukraine and they've rallied the world and they've managed to put together a coalition and the sanctions have crippled the Russian economy. But there is one area where I think they were a little too hesitant.

For understandable reasons, these are hard decisions. They didn't want to provoke the Russians into a kind of cataclysmic counteroffensive, let alone some kind of war with NATO. So there are real concerns. I think that they could have tilted the balance more in favor of the Ukrainians.

So in the last year, BRICS became BRICS+, adding Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, even the UAE. I'm curious how you see their power. I mean, I imagine, you know, I would have dismissed them a few years ago as a bloc.

But then there was this memorable moment in October when the IMF and World Bank meetings were on in D.C. Jake Sullivan was doing this big talk at Brookings and half a world away in Kazan in Russia, Putin was hosting Modi, Xi Jinping, Erdogan and the U.N. secretary general as if to say, no, the action is actually not in D.C., it's out here in this part of the world.

What is your sense of what that moment and the expansion of this block says about the way the global order seems to be shifting?

I think that one has to take seriously the bloc and the meetings in the sense that they are an indication that there are parts of the world, important parts of the world, big countries that really are unhappy with a world that is so dominated by the United States and a handful of Western countries or the United States and a handful of its allies like Japan. There is this sense

sense of a desire for kind of defiance, rebellion that is animating large parts of the world. And I think it's important to understand that. And that should be something American diplomacy tries to do something about to counter, to ameliorate.

As a reality, in terms of hard power, it's very difficult to imagine the BRICS amounting to anything. The BRICS remind me of nothing so much as the non-aligned movement of the 1970s. This group of very huge number of countries. I mean, I think for a while it was called the group of 77 because there were 77 countries that were part of it, including China and India and all these countries.

But it meant nothing because they had very little power. They actually had very little in common. And they didn't cooperate on things. And the idea that BRICS will give you a currency, I mean, this is all nonsense. I mean, look at how difficult it has been for the Europeans to put together a common currency with all the commonality and the shared history and the desire to get past World War I and World War II

And even that has been a huge struggle. The idea that countries that are as far away economically as China, Russia, India, South Africa are ever going to be able to create some kind of a common currency or even a kind of common, some version of SWIFT seems to me highly, highly unlikely. What is more likely is that cryptocurrencies in various forms will play that role

And frankly, I think what the US has to be thinking about is how does it make sure that the dollar is not marginalized in a world where there is a market

for people wanting to be free from dollar dominance, free from dollar sanctions, yet have all the advantages that come from some kind of internationally traded currency. And that is, you know, it's a digital alternative that I would worry much more about than the political one of BRICS.

Fascinating. And, you know, at the end of that BRICS summit, their sort of joint communique kind of reinforced the rules-based international order. So in many ways, they're looking at the West, they're trying to repudiate the West, but they want to replicate exactly what exists. But on that point, I

I think you wrote last year, at the end of last year, Fareed, that the rules-based international system built by the United States and others over the decades is under threat in three regions. And you were arguing that American retreat would exacerbate that. Do you think that has come to pass?

Well, I think that is the existential condition we are now in, that for the first time since 1989, you have this threat. As I said before, the countries that might have been opposed were too weak

So let's review where we are. I think the Russian challenge is ongoing and it is very real. The Russians would very much like to have a significant victory in Ukraine, which would go a long way to tearing up this country.

you know, kind of important cornerstone of the post-45 order, which is no aggression, no conquest by aggression, no legitimization of that conquest by aggression. If the Russians can tear that up, it does become a much more, you know, a kind of a little bit more of the law of the jungle and a little bit less of the rules-based international system.

In the Middle East, as I say, I think surprisingly, the U.S. and its allies have been able to push back. And what you have seen is actually an Iranian retreat, a Hezbollah retreat. And that is, I think, good for American interests, good for global stability, good for global integration.

China remains the kind of slow moving one because the Chinese, again, being much smarter, are not going to do anything. I don't believe anything nearly as dramatic and military as the Russians did. What China is trying to do is slowly build up its power and its relationships to replace the United States as the dominant power in East Asia.

And people forget, even though China is not doing so well economically right now, China is the largest trading partner of almost every country in Asia. It's actually the largest trading partner of most countries in Latin America. And it is using that power to try to renegotiate terms to its favor. So that game is ongoing. So I would say that we are still very much in that world that I described.

The results remain mixed. Positive developments in the Middle East. Nowhere else, I think, can you say that there have been any dramatic victories for America and its allies. Fareed, we'll have to leave it there. We're going to have you back for next week's episode where we're going to look ahead to 2025 and game out how all of this plays out in the next 12 months. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you.

And that was the CNN host and author Fareed Zakaria. This was actually the easy part of the discussion. Next week, we will project forward into 2025 and try to predict where things are headed. If you like this show, follow us on foreignpolicy.com slash live for the live video version. You should also rate us, share us, spread the word.

FPLive the podcast is produced by Rosie Julin and the executive producer of FPLive is Dana Shuren. I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time.