Fareed Zakaria: America must remain leader Free World through peaceful trade.

Fareed Zakaria:
America’s 3 Pillars of Global StabilityBy Nick Girard
It was a dark night, March 1st, 2017. Venus and a sliver of a new moon reflected the sun that set over the Santa Cruz Mountains in Cupertino. The Flint Center stood as a large cube, inviting in its warmth compared to the chilly 50 degrees cold. The chaos from the lack of a parking guided a crowd of seniors through De Anza’s campus. A celebrity is waiting backstage. An authoritative voice boomed over the house speakers.
From the balcony of the Flint Center Auditorium, a sea of red seats and white hair can be seen attentively listening to an accomplished man whose role is speaking and digesting a day of news and knowledge into one hour.
In a time when Journalism itself is under attack with the highest office in the nation claiming that top news agencies are “fake news,” Fareed Zakaria visits De Anza as a speaker not a moment too soon. Zakaria is an accomplished TV personality known for his hour-long CNN briefs that summarize information with a concise and certain tone. The tenor of his voice is certain as he addresses the audience, he speaks of American exceptionalism and the role America still has in the world.
He see’s the current paradigm of peace and technology arising from certain conditions of the past. “The world as it is now started in 1980,” he said, noting the de-escalation of the cold war and the end of the soviet union. “The first pillar of that world was peace among the great powers of the world,” he said. “It’s difficult to remember when that’s ever been true, and that produced a stability that lasted,” he said. “We are living in a remarkably stable period of the world,” he said, saying later that the second pillar was economic stability and growth, “everyone is playing the same game … trying to buy and sell to the same people ... In 1979, the number of countries that grew by 3% was 30, that number today is 85, before the financial crisis that was 185 countries,” he said.
“These two pillars are bolstered by a third, the information revolution … digital goods can move seamlessly,” he said. He went on to explain the exponential growth of computing power and the power of modern electronics. How all of this enabled the digital revolution and how modern technology prevents easy invasion of a country.
He said the Saudi Arabia reaction to Saddam Hussein was, “give it a week and let’s not tell anyone that Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait,” and asks the crowd how long this would last in today’s world with twitter.
A real world example Zakaria offered was Turkey, whose prime minister broadcasted from his phone to his people to resist. There was no palace and radio to take control of, the power was distributed to many via electronics to the people, and that lead to a resistance that succeeded.
“They tell this story about the invention of chess, they claim that chess was invented in India. They say in journalism this story is ‘ too good to check,” Zakaria said. The story goes that a man challenged the treasurer, and for a square, a grain of rice was given, and the amount would be doubled for every square he won. If you win the game, you’d have 1^64, which is a larger number than there are atoms in the universe. He used this metaphor to segway rather artfully into a speech on embracing technologies with accelerating returns as we go into the digital revolution.
A pocket device like the iPhone 7 has "100x the computing power of the Cray" Supercomputers in less than a lifetime. All of this economic stability and technological growth has lifted people out of poverty as a result.
“The last 50 years lifted more people out of poverty than the last 150 years,” he said. He had hopeful messages: America is great and continues to innovate, America has more young people to keep us innovating than most industrialized nations, Self-driving cars could save 40,000 people from accidents a year, 1 million educated immigrants arrive a year. “Keep in mind the US is 5% of the world’s population, last year 6 or 7 Nobel prizes were won by Americans,” he said.
The optimism brought cheers from the audience, and the moderator joked that the crowd was mostly elderly, which brought laughter to the building.

Zakaria claimed hydrocarbon production has risen 10-fold since the 90’s, we have achieved energy independence and then some.  “The U.S. is shaping up to be the energy power of the future …wind, solar, hydrocarbons …  in many ways the leader for all of this is California,” he said.
“American government actually works pretty well,” he said.
All of this was his way of saying America should keep itself as the leader of the democratic, free, and liberal world. Keeping trade, peace, and technology flowing and growing.

Zakaria said that there was another America that was left behind during globalism that will have difficulty being retrained, and unskilled workers would soon have to face the rise of robotic job loss as well. He claimed Donald Trump changed the Republicans when he said he wouldn’t cut entitlements like the other candidates did, and instead said he wouldn’t touch Medicare. Trump’s message in Zakaria’s eyes was that “Mexicans will take your jobs, the Chinese will take your factories, and the Muslims will take your businesses.”

"The invention of the modern banking system began what we are now going through, ... the globalization of people, it’s in your face," he said. He went on to say goods, services, aren’t bad, but it’s harder to deal with different people and cultures and languages in your face. "70 million people have moved to Europe and the united states," he said.
“Fear is the most powerful motivator in the world, unfortunately,” he said.
“What we need is much greater investments in human capital, education, infrastructure.
In order to achieve [these goals] we don’t have to put out [hide from] the world ...
We will have retaliation, depression, and low growth if you label china as a currency manipulator,” he said. The room hung in tense silence after this comment, perhaps since Trump has called for higher import taxes.”
He praised Roosevelt’s policy, how Roosevelt built a new world order that let all nations have a level playing field in trade under the UN, and built a world worth fighting for even today.
“It would be a shame if we let China and Russia start playing games with politics and allow this world to crumble because at the end of the day it was a world built on American ideals, by Americans, for this great American vision that the world could be a better place.”
The crowd broke into uproarious applause after that last line that filled some audience members with optimism. An audience member said, “he knows how to end a speech.”
Kathy Dolan, an audience member, said, “the things that are important to me are that he cited data that counters the pessimism that Trump is serving out and presents an optimistic view of the future, and really speaks to the American promise that America has delivered to the whole world.”
Students and a sea of gray-haired elders shuffled slowly out of the building and flooded the campus with more wisdom and political discourse than it might see in a week, the parking lots were chaos for half an hour, but the inconvenience was well worth the inspiring words heard that night.