'India should stop playing footsie with everyone and say loudly that we are part of an open world'

A Tan Adda held in Mumbai, political analyst and CNN news host Fareed Zakaria spoke on what Trump's win means for the rest of the world, how his talk of increasing tariffs will play out, and why India is the most pro-American country in the world

On a world in flux

I think what's happened is that we went through a period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when everybody thought they understood how the world was moving. Essentially, you had waves of liberalisation, greater openness of trade, technology, of immigration, even liberalisation of politics, and everybody thought this was the kind of natural expression of human aspiration. So there was a master narrative that everyone understood. Over the last five or seven years, people have realised that the master narrative no longer applies. Every year, over the last seven years, there have been fewer democracies than the previous year. So there's a seven-year democratic recession. And I think people can sense that the world that we were in and the narrative that was working is no longer working. What people don't know is where are we going now? Because it feels like a period of transition, but people are not sure it's a transition to what. As a result, each of these events the Ukraine war, the violence in the Middle East, what China is doing in East Asia - take on a kind of larger significance because people are wondering, okay, is this the new direction?

On whether Trump is the biggest mascot of deglobalisation