War & Peace Quote by Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria’s move here is to treat geopolitics like plumbing: once the main blockage cracked, everything else started rushing through. By opening with the Berlin Wall, he grabs the era’s most overdetermined symbol, then quickly demotes it to just one barrier among many. That pivot is the real argument. The Cold War didn’t simply end; it reengineered the defaults of modern life, shifting from a world organized around territorial standoffs to one organized around circulation.

The list does the heavy lifting. “Money, trade, people and ideas” reads like a manifesto for globalization, but it’s also a subtle warning that the same channels that deliver prosperity also deliver disruption. Zakaria’s verb choice, “fell,” borrows the moral clarity of liberation narratives and applies it to deregulation and openness - a rhetorical upgrade that makes policy feel like destiny. He’s smuggling in a premise: that freer movement is not just inevitable, but broadly desirable, the natural sequel to political freedom.

Context matters. In the post-1991 mood, Western institutions and markets looked less like one option among many and more like the operating system. Zakaria is capturing that triumphalist confidence while hinting at its complexity: the collapse of “traditional barriers” doesn’t only mean opportunity for entrepreneurs and dissidents; it also means capital flight, brain drain, culture wars, and the anxious politics of borders reasserting themselves.

It works because it compresses an entire historical reorientation into a single metaphor: walls down, flows up.