Fareed Zakaria, an illustrious Indian-American and editor of the international edition of Newsweek, is one of the most intelligent commentators on the state of the world. That he is the son of the late Dr Rafeeq Zakaria, a renowned Islamic scholar with whom I interacted closely, provides me an added reason to be an avid reader of his weekly column. Newsweek recently ran a cover story featuring an extract from his latest book, The Post-American World. Although its main theme is why the West needs to adapt itself to a new era marked by the “rise of the rest” — the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others — Zakaria’s one observation caught my attention.
“We are probably living in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence,” he affirms. “Wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s.” The world has by no means become an abode of peace, but the relative absence of catastrophic wars at a time when several big powers still possess huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction is indeed an achievement.
Many disparate factors have contributed to this positive development. However, if one individual were to be singled out for having made the greatest contribution to peace in the world, it has to be Mikhail Gorbachev. It was he who brought the Cold War animosity between the US and the Soviet Union, which was the biggest threat to global peace in the post-World War II period, to an end — almost single-handedly. He did so by bringing the communist-ruled Soviet Union and the Moscow-led Soviet bloc to an end.
Rarely does history present leaders who played a constructive role by destroying the very throne on which they were ensconsced, who became victors by losing the power which they wielded. It was Gorbachev’s singular achievement that he brought about this historic transformation peacefully. Few in the pre-Gorbachev era thought it was possible.
