Fareed Zakaria
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
When I saw that, I know the tweet you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
And I saw that and I thought to myself, you know, Elon Musk is so smart, but it's a perfect example of how these tech geniuses somehow seem to either lack any sort of historical understanding or any common sense.
Like you look at those pictures and as you say, my reaction was, you do understand that that world on the left that is that beautiful Rhodesia,
was true for like 3% of Rhodesians who were white, who were tyrannizing the 97% who were not.
And that's why you could live like that.
And the same is true in South Africa.
And by the way, I grew up in India where, you know, if you had looked at the British enclaves in Bombay and Delhi and Calcutta and Madras, they looked gorgeous.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, if you kind of went and looked at rural poverty in India, you know, and looked at where all the money was being extracted in a way, I mean, it's sort of weird to me that somebody as smart as Elon Musk would not think to himself, how did this come to be, you know?
And, you know, understanding that and building a foreign policy that was based around this idea that take Latin America, you know, we went in, we exploited it, we toppled regimes, and then we came to realize the point you're making.
So for the last 40 or 50 years, ever since the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, both parties decided, let's have a different approach to Latin America.
Let's partner with them.
Let's try to, you know, we'll figure out a way to help them restructure their economies.
We helped them transition.
Almost every Latin American country in the early 80s was a military junta.
They all became democracies by the 90s, with the exception of Cuba.
That whole process of partnering, integration, cooperation, law enforcement cooperation, drug cooperation ended up making the United States much more influential in Latin America.
And it produced, Mexico now is half a middle-class society.
There's no migration from Mexico into the US anymore because there are jobs there.