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Fareed Zakaria
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Video: Global Issues with Fareed Zakaria
The Power of Personality
When I talk to people in a foreign country, no matter how strange, they are always familiar to me.
I never thought I'd be in this position. There's a debate taking place about what matters most when making judgments about foreign policy—experience and expertise on the one hand, or personal identity on the other. And I find myself coming down on the side of identity.
Throughout the campaign, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been squabbling over who has the better qualifications to lead the world's only superpower.
Hillary's case is obvious and perfectly defensible. She's been involved in foreign policy for eight years in the White House (though in a sideways fashion as First Lady) and then seven years as a senator. Most of the Democratic Party's blue-chip foreign-policy advisers support her. Plus, she has Bill.
Obama's argument is about more than identity. He was intelligent and prescient about the costs of the Iraq War. But he says that his judgment was formed by his experience as a boy with a Kenyan father—and later an Indonesian stepfather—who spent four years growing up in Indonesia, and who lived in the multicultural swirl of Hawaii.
I never thought I'd agree with Obama. I've spent my life acquiring formal expertise on foreign policy. I've got fancy degrees, have run research projects, taught in colleges and graduate schools, edited a foreign-affairs journal, advised politicians and businessmen, written columns and cover stories, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles all over the world. I've never thought of my identity as any kind of qualification. I've never written an article that contains the phrase "As an Indian-American ..." or "As a person of color ..."
But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn't an American. I was the outsider, growing up 8,000 miles away from the centers of power, being shaped by forces over which my country had no control.
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Member Comments
Posted By: rossmorgan @ 02/13/2008 10:56:54 AM
Comment: I believe Mr. Zakaria is echoing what Anthropologists have been saying for years. The ability to travel cultural distances can lead to more substantive and accurate views of the world. Obama's complex identity and personal biography make him a compelling candidate not only because of his international experiences as a youth, but because he emobodies many aspects of American identity. He is bi-racial, grew up poor yet attended elite institutions for his formal education. Thus, Barack Obama, in a sense, fits in everywhere and nowhere at the same time. His unique identity politics compell him to be a uniter. This is not simply rhetoric but comes from a desire to see the world through different prisms as Mr. Zakaria puts it.
Posted By: Zatoichi @ 01/29/2008 2:12:26 PM
Comment: An american foreign policy based on a non-european heritage vantage point is exactly what the world needs right now. Hillary will never know the indignity of sitting in an american public cafe and have an old white lady sitting in the next table scurry away for fear of your dark color, exotic dress or foreigh toungue. This is the end of the remnants of wetern european dominated cultural imperatives which have lingered in subtle ways to continue to dictate the terms of global egalitarianism. Just as the U.S. had 2 civil wars to liberate african-amerians, so too will the citizens of former european colonies have to purge themselves of their european masters, and thank god we may now have an American president to lead the way. And yes it is intuitive understanding, mainly because it is existential - certainly John Kennedy understood about being the outsider as a catholic in his wasp dominated world of the previous century.
Posted By: danee41 @ 01/14/2008 1:02:01 AM
Comment: He isn't simply saying that a person must be from another country to handle foreign affairs. He is saying that being able to personally identify with other non-Americans and "[feeling] it in your bones" is just a powerful way, not the only way.