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 21, 2024 | |
|
On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
Fareed traveled to Davos, Switzerland, this week for the World Economic Forum's annual gathering of global political and business leaders—and found attendees nervous about the 2024 US presidential vote.
As former President Donald Trump attempts a return to the White House, his victory would bring major consequences for countries around the world. If Trump retakes the presidency and rejects the longstanding, post-World War II view of America as having a broad role in world affairs, Fareed warns, that "could create power vacuums, leave allies exposed, and tempt adversaries to accelerate their attacks and heighten their ambitions. And that is why this time around, it is foreigners nervously watching and obsessing about the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary."
Then: de-escalating in the Middle East, as war has set the world on edge. At Davos, Fareed spoke with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, hearing how the kingdom views the war in Gaza, the necessity of an Israeli–Palestinian peace deal, and the US conflict with Houthi militants in the Red Sea.
Will war spill across the region? After Iran launched strikes in Syria, Iraq and Pakistan this week, and as global attention remains fixed on its allied militias across the region, Fareed asked Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian if Tehran wants more conflict—and if Israel has the right to retaliate against Hamas after Oct. 7.
After that: the key to ending Russia's war on Ukraine and securing a future for the country. At Davos, Fareed spoke with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and two Ukrainians who have served in their country's forces—combat medic Mariia Nazarova and gunner-medic Oleksandr Batalov—about what Ukraine is fighting for and its path ahead.
Finally: At nearly 90 years old, the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall travels nearly 300 days per year, raising awareness of the effects of climate change, training a new generation of conservationists, and spreading a message of hope. Fareed talks with Goodall about what she learned, living with primates and in her career afterward—about humans, our relationship with nature, and our political and economic lives. |
| |
The Red Sea and the Risk of 'One Big War' in the Middle East |
The US has waged a campaign of air strikes over disruption to Red Sea shipping, targeting Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militants as the group has attacked international cargo ships. Feeding into the Suez Canal and connecting the hemisphere's oceans, the Red Sea is important. As The Atlantic Council's Alex Mills wrote last week, the global maritime consultancy Clarksons estimated "that 10 percent of world trade by volume utilizes this route. This includes 20 percent of all container shipping, nearly 10 percent of seaborne oil, and 8 percent of LNG."
And yet, the price of oil hasn't skyrocketed, Keith Johnson points out at Foreign Policy. The Houthi attacks have rerouted some shipping around the southern tip of Africa, lengthening sea journeys and taking some capacity out of global shipping, but it turns out oil markets are resilient. In Davos, Chevron's CEO expressed surprise that prices haven't risen. Per FP's Johnson, "When it comes to pricing geopolitical risk, the amount of slack in the system—its spare capacity—is a giant shock absorber that reduces concern about current supply risk."
Economics aside, analysts see plenty of risk to global stability. As The Atlantic Council's Mills wrote, "the Red Sea is not unique in its importance: Strategic chokepoints for maritime trade exist all around the globe … As actors observe the impacts of Houthi threats and attacks, others will begin to consider their ability to orchestrate something similar. Of particular concern would be the potential for a global economic crisis if these methods were to be mimicked on other high-volume routes, in particular the South China Sea."
Most acute is the risk of a wider regional war in the Middle East. As Israel faces multiple regional foes, the danger of escalation remains high, and the US risks being drawn in, writes The New Yorker's Robin Wright. Pointedly, Wright warns of the possibility that multiple conflicts—between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, between Israel and Hezbollah on the Israel–Lebanon border, between Iran and various entities it struck directly this week, and between Western powers and the Houthis—converging into one big one. "The confluence of conflicts is dizzying," Wright observes, taking a broader look at Middle East politics. "The merger of multiple wars was almost inevitable, Dan Kurtzer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt … told me. The dearth of viable ideas and -isms has created space for extremist movements to fill a void, sometimes by default. 'Those movements have gained legitimacy at the expense of very ineffective secular movements,' he said. 'One long trend is a growing sense that Islam has better answers to the problems in the region than secular non-Islamic states.'" |
|
|
As many observers have pointed out, Iran appears key to the Middle East's escalatory dangers. It backs the militant groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi paramilitaries that have been at the center of fears about war spilling beyond Gaza and sweeping across the region. As such, in Davos Fareed asked Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian what Iran wants, vis-à-vis war and escalation. (See the interview on today's show.)
This week, a Financial Times feature by Andrew England and Najmeh Bozorgmehr asked that same question. Tensions between Iran and the West had calmed a bit before Hamas's Oct. 7 massacres and Israel's war against the group in Gaza. The FT authors hear from one Iranian official that Tehran's direct strikes this week in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan did not signify a change in strategy but merely a change in tactics to remind the US and Israel of the threat Iran can pose. "A critical question, however," the FT's England and Bozorgmehr write, "is whether the calculus in Tehran changes if a full-blown war erupts between Israel and Hizbollah—the proxy it has invested most heavily in, and which some see as indispensable to its patron."
There's also the question of whether Iran is really pulling the strings and how tightly those strings are attached to the militant groups that comprise Iran's so-called "axis of resistance" across the Middle East, from Hamas to the Houthis. Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr raised that point in a Foreign Affairs essay this week, noting that although Iran-backed groups are viewed as proxies of Tehran, they have wills and concerns of their own. Iran-backed groups are "not homogenous, and each has its own national agenda," the FT's England and Bozorgmehr write. As for Tehran's own plans and actions, the FT authors hear from Iran expert Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group that "Iran hasn't been the brilliant mastermind some perceive that is operating with a clear strategy, concrete objectives and clever manoeuvring. … A lot of its actions seem reactive, scrambling, short-sighted and impetuous." |
|
|
A full-blown rift has emerged between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the need for a future Palestinian state, endorsed by Biden and rejected by Netanyahu. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explores the divide, going so far as to suggest Netanyahu will run for reelection, effectively, against Biden, campaigning as a protector of Israel against Washington's plans.
A Palestinian state would simply be a launching pad for attacks on Israel and would endanger the Jewish state, Netanyahu has maintained. Friedman writes, arguing against the Israeli prime minister: "Forging a legitimate, unified, effective Palestinian partner for a two-state deal with Israel that could defuse those threats may be impossible to achieve, but believing that abandoning any effort to do so is in the long-term interest of the Jewish state is a dangerous illusion. And that is exactly what Netanyahu is peddling for his own cynical purposes." |
|
|
The Far Right Looms Over German Protests |
Germany's governing "traffic-light coalition" (or Ampelkoalition), named for the colors of the three parties currently sharing power in the Bundestag and the Chancellery, is facing what "looks to be a year of continued headaches and reactive crisis management," Aaron Allen writes for the World Politics Review, as thousands of farmers headed to Berlin this week to protest tax hikes and subsidy cuts. The cause of the strife, Allen writes, is a challenge that goes beyond any one particular area of fiscal policy: A Constitutional Court ruling has curtailed the government's repurposing of emergency pandemic funding, creating budget shortfalls and a broad necessity for spending rollbacks and tax increases. "It appears that the Ampelkoalition will not be out of Krisenmodus anytime soon," Allen concludes. (Selected by the government-funded Society for the German Language as 2023's word of the year, the latter term means "crisis mode." There "have always been crises," the group said. "But it feels like there is so much crisis that this is the new normal.")
As is often the case with popular angst, some worry the populist far right will swoop in and exploit dissatisfaction for electoral gain. At CNN Opinion, Paul Hockenos notes the important moment for Germany and the far-right AfD party, which is "riding higher than ever in opinion polls—making it the most popular party in some states. … Among my large number of foreign national—including naturalized Muslim—friends and colleagues in Germany, there is veritable uneasiness. If the far right's ideas seep into the mainstream, as so much of the AfD discourse already has, could they really be expelled from the country they call home?"
After an investigative report about an alleged "master plan" to deport migrants (which the AfD denies) prompted new calls to ban the party, Hockenos argues against that impulse, as the notion of banning the AfD "contradicts a basic democratic assumption" and would not address the "popular movement that backs it." |
|
|
Experts have long predicted that artificial intelligence would enable a glut of political disinformation, spam emails, and hacking. At Nikkei Asia this month, Atsushi Teraoka reported that one of those things is coming to pass, as email phishing attempts have risen due to AI.
Teraoka wrote: "In May, the CEO of an overseas affiliate of a Japanese company received an email … The sender claimed to be the chairman of the Japanese company. The email was followed by a telephone call from a 'senior managing director' … The caller's voice sounded similar to that of the person it was claiming to be, but it was synthesized by artificial intelligence, which also concocted the email. … Generative AI is being increasingly abused, with the number of business-related fraud cases in the first half of 2023 double that from a year earlier and measures to combat the dark side of the technology growing more urgent." |
|
|
| You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for Fareed's Global Briefing.
To stop receiving this newsletter, unsubscribe or sign up to manage your CNN account | |
® © 2024 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
1050 Techwood Drive NW, Atlanta, GA 30318 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario