Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. January 14, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: As a humanitarian crisis continues in Gaza, Israel faces accusations—lodged by South Africa at the International Court of Justice—of pursuing genocide against Palestinians. Arguing that charge is invalid, Fareed nonetheless asks if Israel's war against Hamas has been proportionate.
Public comments by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have raised troubling questions, Fareed says. "Israel is a democracy and an open society, and precisely because of that it will one day have to ask itself whether it acted appropriately in the heat of its anger and sorrow after Oct. 7. Friends of Israel should help it ask those questions now, so that it does not look back on this episode with shame and regret."
After that: high tensions in the Middle East, as war continues in Gaza and as the US and UK have struck at Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militants, who have disrupted shipping in the Red Sea. Fareed is joined by Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics, who unpacks Iran's regional influence, risks of the Israel–Hamas war expanding to include Hezbollah, and more.
In one of 2024's most highly anticipated elections, Taiwan on Saturday elected to keep its ruling party in power, elevating the DPP candidate and current vice president Lai Ching-te to president. He was seen as the most staunchly pro-independence option on the ballot. What will that mean for the island, its long-running disputes with Beijing, and the Taiwan Strait as the epicenter of US–China tensions? Fareed talks with Bonny Lin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Academy Awards-shortlisted documentary "Beyond Utopia" chronicles harrowing attempts to escape North Korea, undertaken by citizens hoping to defect. Fareed talks with director Madeleine Gavin and one of the film's producers, former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, about those stories and what they tell us about the hermit kingdom.
Finally: revitalizing Ukraine's government through digital technology. Fareed talks with Kyiv's government minister in charge of that effort, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, about cutting-edge governance in his country. |
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What Will Lai's Win Mean for Taiwan? |
In a highly anticipated election on Saturday, Taiwan kept its ruling party in power, voting to elevate DPP candidate and current vice president Lai Ching-te to president. Seen as the most staunchly pro-independence candidate on the ballot, Lai is "openly loathed by Beijing," CNN's Nectar Gan and Wayne Chang write.
Beijing considers Taiwan to be a runaway province, not a country of its own, and tensions with the mainland loom large over Taiwanese politics. In a Nikkei Asia feature, Katsuji Nakazawa wrote before the vote that Chinese leader Xi Jinping's recent military purges were likely intended to ensure China's forces are in shape to seize Taiwan, if ordered. Re-unifying mainland China with Taiwan is a top goal of Xi's, and he'll want to appear to be making progress before seeking another term at the top, at a Communist Party congress in 2027, Nakazawa wrote. At The Atlantic, Michael Schuman heard from expert China watcher Bonnie Glaser that Xi is unlikely to continue abiding a democratic Taiwan. Beijing had sought to pressure Taiwanese voters to avoid choosing Lai, including by enacting new trade restrictions, The Economist wrote. In the mainland's South China Morning Post, six coauthors write: "The victory of a candidate whom mainland China has repeatedly branded a 'troublemaker' over his stance on independence is expected to further fuel cross-strait tensions."
And yet, as the Global Briefing has noted, mainland relations weren't the only matter on voters' minds. For young Taiwanese voters, the election has been "about more material issues such as wages, inflation, energy security, equality and social justice," Thompson Chau, Cheng Ting-Fang, and Lauli Li wrote in Nikkei Asia before the vote. Although the DPP draws special ire from Beijing, Taiwan's parties and their candidates have seemed broadly aligned on avoiding war and maintaining, more or less, the status quo. Further mitigating the possibility of a drastic swing in policy toward the mainland, the DPP did not secure a legislative majority.
That's not to say Lai's win won't exacerbate cross-strait tensions or steer how Taiwan approaches them. CNN's Gan and Chang sum it up: "All three candidates sold themselves as the best choice for avoiding that doomsday scenario (of war with mainland China), pledging to maintain peace and the status quo—which polls have consistently shown is what most people in Taiwan want. But the three men also held very different visions for how to achieve that goal. They all cited the need to boost Taiwan's defense capabilities to deter China's aggression but disagreed on their policy priorities, particularly how to deal with Beijing. The DPP's Lai stressed bolstering Taiwan's ties with like-minded democratic partners, such as the United States and Japan, while maintaining his administration's stance that Tawain is already a de facto sovereign nation—a view Beijing deems unacceptable." |
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Striking the Houthis: the 'Least Bad Option'? |
The US and UK struck Iran-backed Houthi-militant targets in Yemen this week, after the group disrupted Red Sea shipping over the war in Gaza. On Friday, the Global Briefing noted skepticism as to whether this was a good idea. At Foreign Policy, Christina Lu and Robbie Gramer write that it may have been the least bad course of action.
The strikes "revealed the limited batch of mostly bad options the United States has for dealing with the Houthi attacks as it scrambles to contain the regional crisis sparked by the war" in Gaza, Lu and Gramer write. "On the one hand, experts say, the scale of the Houthi attacks on a major global trade chokepoint made the cost of not taking any action untenable. … At the same time, launching strikes risks provoking sharper escalations or further ensnaring Washington and other regional powers in a widening conflict. … Washington is 'in a bad position,' Thomas Juneau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, said on Thursday before the strikes. 'There are no obviously good options for the U.S. at this point, so the challenge is to find the least bad option moving forward.'" |
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With Trump's Ballot Presence in Question, Does Turkey Offer a Lesson? |
Given former US President Donald Trump's efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, Colorado and Maine moved to block him from appearing on GOP presidential-primary ballots in 2024. As The New York Times' Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Mitch Smith write, this sets up an important US Supreme Court decision that could affect those two states and more.
The ballot drama is controversial, even among Trump's critics. On the question of whether Trump supported an insurrection, some question whether it's best to adjudicate that in the courts when Congress has already weighed in, impeaching and acquitting Trump of that charge. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, no fan of Trump, examines the legal and practical complexities. Trump critics "who are looking to this once-obscure, rarely invoked provision of the Constitution for salvation are apt to find themselves disappointed," Marcus writes. "It would be extraordinary for any Supreme Court to declare that the front-runner for his party's nomination can be barred from the ballot; doing so would unleash widespread confusion, and, worse, on the nation."
Echoing points Marcus and other US-politics analysts have made, Gönül Tol of the Middle East Institute writes in a Financial Times op-ed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's rise to power—and his erosion of Turkey's democratic standards, once he attained that power—foreshadows the danger of using institutions like the judiciary to block a populist. As Erdoğan did, Tol argues, Trump would likely inflame a sense of aggrieved victimhood among his followers, turning a ballot setback into a more-powerful political advantage.
Tol writes: "Populists do not come out of nowhere. Lack of public trust in democratic institutions helps fuel their rise. Populists fan that frustration by framing institutions of liberal democracy, such as courts, as creations of a self-serving corrupt elite and cast themselves as their victim. Invoking victimhood has bolstered Erdoğan's political career. A key moment in his long tenure was 1998, when he was the up-and-coming Islamist mayor of Istanbul. He was sentenced to 10 months in jail and banned from politics for reciting a poem that the secular establishment saw as a threat to the constitution. Erdoğan capitalised on the four months he served in prison to cast himself as the true democrat, waging a war in the name of 'the people' against an authoritarian establishment that used the courts to go after those seeking to challenge their privileged status. Appealing to victimhood helped Erdoğan capture votes well beyond his predecessor's Islamist base in the 2002 elections." When the secularist military sought to block Erdoğan's party's Islamist presidential candidate in 2007, Tol writes, he capitalized on a sense of victimhood yet again. Tol's conclusion: "When masses question the legitimacy of the system, autocracy is best rejected in the ballot box, not in the courtroom." |
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A popular superfood, açaí berries harvested in the Brazilian Amazon have drawn scrutiny from some child-labor authorities in the country, Marian Blasberg writes in a Der Spiegel feature, beginning her account with an 11-year-old boy climbing a tree "three or four meters up in the air" at sunrise. The official who leads the department for combating child labor in one Brazilian state "says there are cases of children breaking arms and legs falling from the trees, which can grow up to 20 meters tall," Blasberg writes. "One boy, he says, is now confined to a wheelchair following a fall. Others have been bitten by snakes or spiders, he reports, while yet others have cut themselves with their knives or torn up the skin on their legs when the bark of the normally smooth trees is cracked." |
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