Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1986, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor in chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right. He later gained a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1993, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.

After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992, at the age of 28. Under his guidance, the magazine was redesigned and moved from a quarterly to a bimonthly schedule. He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International, and became a weekly columnist for Newsweek. In August 2010 he moved to Time to serve as editor at-large and columnist. He writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Media group, which includes The Atlantic Monthly.

Zakaria is a naturalized American citizen. In 1997, Zakaria married Paula Throckmorton, a jewelry designer. The couple have three children. In July 2018, his wife filed for divorce.

Zakaria self-identifies as a “centrist”, though he has been described variously as a political liberal, a conservative, a moderate, or a radical centrist. George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, “He’s so well versed in politics, and he can’t be pigeonholed. I can’t be sure whenever I turn to him where he’s going to be coming from or what he’s going to say.” Zakaria wrote in February 2008 that “Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age”, adding that “a new world requires new thinking”. He supported Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and also for president. In January 2009 Forbes referred to Zakaria as one of the 25 most influential liberals in the American media. Zakaria has stated that he tries not to be devoted to any type of ideology, saying “I feel that’s part of my job… which is not to pick sides but to explain what I think is happening on the ground. I can’t say, ‘This is my team and I’m going to root for them no matter what they do.'”

Zakaria “may have more intellectual range and insights than any other public thinker in the West,” wrote David Shribman in The Boston Globe. In 2003, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told New York Magazine that Zakaria “has a first-class mind and likes to say things that run against conventional wisdom.” However, in 2011, the editors of The New Republic included him in a list of “over-rated thinkers” and commented, “There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment.”

From 2006, Zakaria has also criticized what he views as “fear-based” American policies employed not only in combating terrorism, but also in enforcing immigration and drug smuggling laws, and has argued in favor of decriminalization of drugs and citizenship for presently illegal immigrants to the United States of all backgrounds. Referring to his views on Iran, Leon Wieseltier described Zakaria as a “consummate spokesman for the shibboleths of the White House and for the smooth new worldliness, the at-the-highest-levels impatience with democracy and human rights as central objectives of our foreign policy, that now characterize advanced liberal thinking about America’s role in the world.”

In his 2006 book State of Denial, journalist Bob Woodward of The Washington Post described a 29 November 2001, meeting of Middle East analysts, including Zakaria, that was convened at the request of the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. According to a story in The New York Times on Woodward’s book, the Wolfowitz meeting ultimately produced a report for President George W. Bush that supported the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Zakaria, however, later told The New York Times that he had briefly attended what he thought was “a brainstorming session”. He was not told that a report would be prepared for the President, and in fact, the report did not have his name on it. The Times issued a correction.

Zakaria initially supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He said at the time, “The place is so dysfunctional … any stirring of the pot is good. America’s involvement in the region is for the good.” He argued for a United Nations–sanctioned operation with a much larger force—approximately 400,000 troops—than was actually employed by the administration of President George W. Bush. However, he soon became a critic. In addition to objecting to the war plan, he frequently criticized the way the Bush administration was running the occupation of Iraq. He argued against the disbanding of the army and bureaucracy yet supported the de-Baathification programs. He continued to argue that a functioning democracy in Iraq would be a powerful new model for Arab politics but suggested that an honest accounting would have to say that the costs of the invasion had been much higher than the benefits. He opposed the Iraq surge in March 2007, writing that it would work militarily but not politically, still leaving Iraq divided among its three communities. Instead he advocated that Washington push hard for a political settlement between the Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, and Kurds, and begin a reduction in forces to only 60,000 troops. He later wrote that the surge “succeeded” militarily but that it did not produce a political compact and that Iraq remains divided along sectarian lines, undermining its unity, democracy, and legacy.

Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007) where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable. He hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–08). His weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), premiered on CNN in June 2008. It airs twice weekly in the United States and four times weekly on CNN International, reaching over 200 million homes. It celebrated its 10th anniversary on 5 June 2018, as announced on the weekly foreign affairs show on CNN.

Zakaria’s books include The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World. The Future of Freedom argues that what is defined as democracy in the Western world is actually “liberal democracy”, a combination of constitutional liberalism and participatory politics. Zakaria points out that protection of liberty and the rule of law actually preceded popular elections by centuries in Western Europe, and that when countries only adopt elections without the protection of liberty, they create “illiberal democracy”. The Post-American World, published in 2008 before the financial crisis, argued that the most important trend of modern times is the “rise of the rest,” the economic emergence of China, India, Brazil, and other countries.

Before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Zakaria endorsed Barack Obama on his CNN program. In May 2011 The New York Times reported that President Obama has “sounded out prominent journalists like Fareed Zakaria … and Thomas L. Friedman” concerning Middle East issues.

Zakaria has been nominated five times for the National Magazine Award, and won it once, for his columns and commentary. His show has won a Peabody Award and been nominated for several Emmys. He was conferred India Abroad Person of the Year 2008 award on 20 March 2009, in New York. Filmmaker Mira Nair, who won the award for year 2007, honored her successor.

In January 2010, Zakaria was given the Padma Bhushan award by the Indian government for his contribution to the field of journalism.

In 2010, in protest at the Anti-Defamation League’s opposition to the building of the Park51 mosque and Islamic cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center site, Zakaria returned the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize awarded to him by the ADL in 2005. He declared that the ADL’s opposition to the mosque meant that he could not “in good conscience keep [the award] anymore”. In support of his decision, he stated that the larger issue in the controversy is freedom of religion in America, even while acknowledging that he is not a religious person. He also wrote that a “moderate, mainstream version of Islam” is essential to winning the war on terror, and that moves like the ADL’s make it harder for such a moderate version of Islam to emerge and thrive. On 8 August 2010, edition of Fareed Zakaria GPS, Zakaria addressed the issue, stating that in returning his award, he had hoped that the ADL would reconsider their stance.

Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), The Post-American World (2008), and In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2015). He co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books) with James F. Hoge Jr. His last three books have both been New York Times bestsellers and The Future of Freedom and The Post American World have both been translated into more than 25 languages. In 2011 an updated and expanded edition of The Post-American World (“Release 2.0”) was published.

Zakaria was suspended for a week in August 2012 while Time and CNN investigated an allegation of plagiarism involving a 20 August column on gun control with similarities to a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. In a statement Zakaria apologized, saying that he had made “a terrible mistake.” Six days later, after a review of his research notes and years of prior commentary, Time and CNN reinstated Zakaria. Time described the incident as “isolated” and “unintentional”; and CNN “… found nothing that merited continuing the suspension….”

In 2013, he became one of the producers for the HBO series Vice, for which he serves as a consultant.

The controversy was reignited in September 2014, when Esquire and The Week magazines reported on allegations made in pseudonymous blogs. Newsweek initially added a blanket warning to its archive of articles penned by Zakaria, but after an investigation of his several hundred columns for the magazine, found improper citation in only seven. Similarly, after allegations surfaced on Twitter regarding the originality of one of Zakaria’s columns for Slate, the online magazine appended a notice to the article indicating that, “This piece does not meet Slate’s editorial standards, having failed to properly attribute quotations and information…”. However, Slate Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg, who had, months before, exchanged barbs with one of the aforementioned anonymous bloggers on Twitter in defense of Zakaria, maintained his original position that what Zakaria did was not plagiarism.

In 2020, Zakaria was awarded the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Founders Award for Excellence in Journalism.