October 2009 – Pittsburgh Business Times – by Anya Litvak

If his appearance on the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall was forecasted during the financial meltdown a year ago, Fareed Zakaria, listening to the talk of the day, might have thought he’d be standing in a world much different than the one he spoke about Tuesday evening.

“Everybody kept saying everything will change,” said the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” international affairs program. He quoted Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s promise during his confirmation hearing in January that capitalism would never be the same.

“Looking at the world today, it doesn’t seem the way it was supposed to be a year ago,” he said at the kickoff lecture of the Pittsburgh Middle East Institute’s second annual business conference. The conference continues Wednesday.

The reason for that is widespread stability, Zakaria explained.

“We are living in some ways in a more stable world than we realize,” he said.

He described a gradual movement after World War II to condition the world to support the way the U.S. operates. Organizations such as NATO and the International Monetary Fund serve as a cushion for that paradigm, he said.

Now, counties such as China, India, Brazil and Turkey are moving closer and closer to this model.

“There is no opting out” of the kind of capitalist system the U.S. and the West operate in, he said. When most countries pick themselves up after a crisis, “they rejoin the system.”

There is another type of stability, Zakaria said, that exists between world’s major economies, which for the first time are not in direct geopolitical conflict with each other.

“The rising powers of the world are not seeking to overturn the existing order,” he said. Instead, they’re looking to get rich within it.

Nevertheless, Zakaria said that managing the relationship with China is the U.S.’s “greatest strategic challenge.”

“In this march of societies, the only part of the world that has not moved significantly along is the Middle East,” he said. But that’s beginning to change.

“What you’re seeing is nothing less than a New Middle East,” he announced.

It isn’t the once powerful giants such as Egypt and Syria leading this charge, Zakaria said.

“The energy, the vitality and modernity is being led in the Gulf States.”

Those countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar, are reconciling Islam with the modern world and commerce the way the merchant class has always done in Arab countries, Zakaria said.

For example, Islamic finance — financial institutions that allot funding in concert with the principles of the Koran — is “a booming industry.”

Moving towards a more political and economic relationship with in the Middle East may be as obvious as understanding that a million people live in the Islamic world and allowing that to have the same zing as the promise of populated Asian markets.

“Don’t confuse the veil with the suicide belt,” he urged.

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