Fareed Zakaria

His father, Rafiq Zakaria (1920–2005), was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic theologian.

His mother, Fatima Zakaria (1936–2021), his father's second wife, was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India.

She died during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai.

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria (born 20 January 1964) is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author.

He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.

Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India, to a Konkani Muslim family.

As a student at Yale University in the mid-1980s, Zakaria opposed anti-apartheid divestment and argued that Yale should not divest from its holdings in South Africa.

Zakaria "may have more intellectual range and insights than any other public thinker in the West," wrote David Shribman in The Boston Globe.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1986, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor in chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right.

After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992, at the age of 28.

Under his guidance, the magazine was redesigned to be published once every two months, moving away from a quarterly schedule.

He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations.

He later gained a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1993, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.

Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), The Post-American World (2008), and In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2015).

He co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books) with James F. Hoge Jr. His last three books have both been New York Times bestsellers and The Future of Freedom and The Post American World have both been translated into more than 25 languages.

In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International, and became a weekly columnist for Newsweek.

Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007) where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable.

George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, "He's so well versed in politics, and he can't be pigeonholed. I can't be sure whenever I turn to him where he's going to be coming from or what he's going to say."

In 2003, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told New York Magazine that Zakaria "has a first-class mind and likes to say things that run against conventional wisdom."

He hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–08).

His weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), premiered on CNN in June 2008.

It airs twice weekly in the United States and four times weekly on CNN International, reaching over 200 million homes.

In February 2008, Zakaria wrote that "Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age", adding that "a new world requires new thinking".

He supported Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and also for president.

The Post-American World, published in 2008 before the financial crisis, argued that the most important trend of modern times is the "rise of the rest," the economic emergence of China, India, Brazil, and other countries.

In January 2009, Forbes referred to Zakaria as one of the 25 most influential liberals in the American media.

Zakaria has stated that he tries not to be devoted to any type of ideology, saying "I feel that's part of my job... which is not to pick sides but to explain what I think is happening on the ground. I can't say, 'This is my team and I'm going to root for them no matter what they do.'"

In August 2010, he moved to Time to serve as editor at-large and columnist.

He writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Media group, which includes The Atlantic Monthly.

He has published on a variety of subjects for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic. For a brief period, he was a wine columnist for the web magazine Slate, with the pseudonym of George Saintsbury, after the English writer.

In 2011 an updated and expanded edition of The Post-American World ("Release 2.0") was published.

However, in 2011, the editors of The New Republic included him in a list of "over-rated thinkers" and commented, "There's something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment."

Zakaria's books include The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World.

The Future of Freedom argues that what is defined as democracy in the Western world is actually "liberal democracy", a combination of constitutional liberalism and participatory politics.

Zakaria points out that protection of liberty and the rule of law actually preceded popular elections by centuries in Western Europe, and that when countries only adopt elections without the protection of liberty, they create "illiberal democracy".

In 2013, he became one of the producers for the HBO series Vice, for which he serves as a consultant.

Zakaria, a member of the Berggruen Institute, additionally features as an interlocutor for the annual Berggruen Prize.

Zakaria self-identifies as a "centrist", though he has been described variously as a political liberal, a conservative, a moderate, or a radical centrist.

It celebrated its 10th anniversary on 5 June 2018, as announced on the weekly foreign affairs show on CNN.