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 28, 2024 |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
In a world of conflict and tension, perhaps the most dangerous flashpoint is trending positively, Fareed points out on today's GPS, as he does in his latest Washington Post column.
Fraught in recent years, the US–China relationship is encouragingly stable, Fareed observes. "Both sides have adjusted their attitudes, but the larger shift has come from Beijing," Fareed says, noting the conciliatory approach taken recently by leader Xi Jinping and other top officials. Washington, too, realized the superpower relationship was drifting dangerously off course.
"A crucial attribute of America's age of hegemony, which began 80 years ago, was that Washington created a security system in which other countries could grow and prosper," Fareed says. "As long as they did not try to disrupt the international order, they could thrive economically, politically, socially, and culturally. … If China plays by these rules, Washington should give it some space. As America's economy powers ahead, the country would do well to maintain confidence in itself and design a foreign policy based on that accurate premise rather than one that is forged on doom and despair."
After that: Where is the war in Gaza heading? Is Israel achieving its objective of total victory over Hamas? Will the raft of current Middle East conflicts merge into one big war? Fareed examines the questions surrounding Israel's campaign against Hamas—and the outlook for Ukraine, as Russia's assault grinds on—with retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling and The New Yorker's Robin Wright.
"Artificial intelligence" was the phrase on everyone's lips at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this month. In a panel at the annual gathering of global political and business elites, Fareed talked with one of the technology's most important developers, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, about the state of AI, what capabilities it will acquire, and the trajectory of its relationship with humans.
Finally: Earlier this month, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its largest-ever annual budget and said it intends to help the world's poorest by using AI. In Davos, Fareed spoke with Bill Gates about human development and the future of tech—including what's improving health outcomes in low-income countries and whether AI will be as significant to human society as the Internet has been.
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Iran's Image, Escalation Risk, and the Nuclear Question |
What could tip the Middle East into a wider war? As The New Yorker's Robin Wright has written—and as Wright explains on today's GPS—there's a danger that multiple, ongoing conflicts across the region could converge into a single big one.
As the backer of several currently-warring parties—from Hamas to Hezbollah to Yemen's Houthis—Iran looms large over such fears. And for Tehran, analysts say, the need to project an image of strength will loom over key decisions.
Iran launched direct strikes this month in Syria, Iraq and Pakistan, heightening concerns about regional escalation. Examining the reasons behind those strikes, The Middle East Institute's Alex Vatanka wrote that after Iran suffered a devastating ISIS-claimed terrorist attack in the southeastern city of Kerman on Jan. 3, "Tehran had no choice but to act and do so fast, given the magnitude of the civilian death toll. For Iran, the symbolic value of its retaliatory strikes was more important than making sure the targets hit were actually responsible for the Kerman bombing. … (A)ll three of these above-mentioned missile strikes were mostly about Iran showing muscle and hoping they will deter its opponents in the future from attacking the country."
In a Foreign Affairs essay, Ali Vaez assesses that the war in Gaza, and the spate of smaller conflicts across the region involving Iranian-backed groups, could make Iran more likely to advance its nuclear program and build a bomb. Vaez writes: "Iran wants to be the Middle East's dominant power, but it has not been willing to capitalize on the war in Gaza by having the axis of resistance"—the name given to Iran's network of allied militias across the region—"open major new fronts against Israel or the United States. … The overall message is clear: Iran can cause chaos, but it is not strong enough to go on a real offensive. … Tehran may therefore conclude that this conflict (in Gaza) has made it look weaker rather than stronger. It may, accordingly, feel more vulnerable. If that is the case, Tehran could make a final dash for the ultimate deterrent: nuclear weapons." |
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A poor start to 2024 for China's stock market prompted Foreign Policy's James Palmer to reflect this week on China's recent, broader-based economic struggles, which have included slow growth and a shaky property sector: "The gulf between China's official (economic) optimism and the rest of the world's pessimism is at the root of the stock market slide, which is mostly fueled by an unprecedented sell-off by foreign investors that started in the second half of 2023 and has picked up speed this year. … (T)he psychological shock of the (broader economic) downturn (in China) is hitting harder than it might in another country because the Chinese government and public have become used to high GDP growth in the last three decades. Although some parts of China, especially the country's northeast, have suffered through hard times for years, for many people this shock is a new experience."
That global pessimism can be heard in a slew of recent negative prospectuses. In a Nikkei Asia feature this month, JC de Swaan wrote that China has been slow to reform its economy, which now looks less impressive, and less impressively managed, than India's and Japan's. In her econVue+ newsletter, Lyric Hughes Hale writes: "Badly needed reforms have been delayed for the past decade and the process is unlikely to resume." At the World Politics Review, Mary Gallagher writes that in the coming years and decades, China's aging population will collide with an administrative and welfare system ill-suited to the challenge. |
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Sudan's Civil Conflict Drags On |
Other wars have gotten more attention, but Sudan's internal conflict has not gone away—even as the paramilitary leader known as Hemedti, who has feuded with the Sudanese army for control of the country, took a recent "victory tour" of visits to African capitals, being treated as if he were Sudan's president, as The New York Times' Declan Walsh described it.
"All of the visits were carefully scripted to cast him as the legitimate ruler of Sudan," Ken Opalo writes in his An Africanist Perspective newsletter, declaring that the "worse side is currently winning" Sudan's internal struggle. The greater involvement of civilians "will significantly worsen the next phase … militias will likely also be used to settle parochial inter-communal disputes. The end result will be a more violent (internationalized) war economy, with the merchants of violence so created joining a regional marketplace of guns for hire by all manner of nefarious actors … Considering all the factors at play and the balance of power between the RSF (paramilitary network, led by Hemedti) and SAF (the Sudanese army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan), a negotiated settlement that facilitates power-sharing between RSF/SAF and a civilian administration is still the best interim outcome for Sudan. The ugly reality is that, in part because of their respective external entanglements, neither the RSF nor SAF will unilaterally down their weapons and cede power. Unfortunately, a negotiated settlement is presently unfathomable." |
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'The Meme-ification of American Politics' |
After the 2016 election, a Politico Magazine feature by Ben Schreckinger profiled pro-Trump "veterans of the Great Meme War" who had advanced, into various eddies of 2015–2017 US politics, the alt-right troll character Pepe the Frog. Had Pepe won the presidency for Trump? Maybe not, but Schreckinger's reporting underscored the likelihood that elections increasingly would be fought over by content warriors injecting puns, mockeries, and the like into an online memeplex of growing importance to offline voting behavior.
Eight years later, American politics indeed appears ready for "meme-ification," as Clare Malone writes for The New Yorker: "As the 2024 campaign gets under way, many Americans have tuned out current events. A 2023 Reuters Institute study found that only forty-eight per cent of respondents were 'very' or 'extremely' interested in the news, down from sixty-three per cent in 2017. News sites have seen a crash in traffic because of this fatigue. But at least half of American adults say they consume some news on social-media sites, according to the Pew Research Center. The share of adults who get their news from TikTok in particular has tripled since 2020; a third of adults under thirty regularly get their news from the platform. At the same time, Trump will be splitting his campaign schedule with court appearances, and Biden's advisers seem to think that fewer outings mean fewer opportunities for falls, flubs, and gaffes. As a result, the 2024 election seems likely to be waged in a media environment where more and more voters are forming opinions based on the funny video their cousin's husband's sister shared in the group chat." | |
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18th Century Speech Police |
In a concise book review in the current issue of The New England Quarterly, Jeannine DeLombard writes: "Hate speech. Cancel culture. Civility. Safe spaces.. … American law and culture is preoccupied with speech … As historian Kristin Olbertson documents in her delightfully readable new book, this preoccupation long predates the First Amendment—at least for one segment of the population. The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 argues that white, male colonial elites asserted and maintained their power and authority by policing the speech of their lower-status counterparts. They also sought to control the speech of women and Black people, and they were torn between viewing Indigenous speech as noble or as just plain savage. But it was the noise, threats, cursing, contempt, perjury, false reports, and defamation of white, plebeian men that consistently prompted criminal prosecutions in Massachusetts. By criminalizing that speech, Olbertson contends, colonial gentlemen sought to establish themselves as part of 'the new polite-ocracy' of the broader transatlantic British empire." |
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