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. February 17, 2024 |
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Alexey Navalny has been the foremost Russian critic of President Vladimir Putin for at least a decade. Navalny championed anti-Putin protests in 2011, mounted a campaign for mayor of Moscow, exposed corruption in high places through his foundation, and suffered a 2020 poisoning, widely believed to have been perpetrated by Russia's powers that be. After receiving treatment in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia despite the near certainty of being imprisoned. He has languished in a penal colony east of Moscow, then in another in Siberia north of the Arctic Circle. His determination, bravery, and humor throughout have been remarkable. Navalny has died in prison at age 47, Russia's prison service said Friday, prompting bitter criticism of the Kremlin—including by US President Joe Biden—and reflections on Navalny and his work. At the annual Munich Security Conference, Navalny's wife Yulia said, according to the translation provided by independent Russian media-outlet-in-exile TV Rain, that "Putin and his friends" will be held responsible for what they have "done to our country and … to my family and to my husband." Navalny spent much time in solitary confinement and received inadequate medical care, Navalny's daughter Dasha told Fareed on GPS in January 2023. Fareed discussed a scene with Dasha that was particularly emblematic of her father's personality and persistence in dogging Russia's ruling order: In the CNN Films documentary "Navalny," released in 2022 and viewable on HBO Max, Navalny was shown prank-calling someone he believed was responsible for his poisoning, asking the man what had gone wrong with the operation—and hearing the man indicate that he, too, was confused as to why the poisoning hadn't succeeded in killing Navalny. "Vladimir Putin's Russia has just become even more bleak and soulless" with Navalny's reported death, writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, hoping Americans and Europeans can learn from Navalny's bravery. Navalny "offered a glimpse of a different Russia from Vladimir Putin's venal autocracy," the Financial Times writes in an editorial. After Navalny's poisoning in 2020, The New Yorker's Masha Gessen wrote of the Kremlin's previous moves against him: "In 2013, the Kremlin tried to silence Navalny by sending him to prison, but thousands of Muscovites poured into the streets, themselves risking arrest, and the authorities quickly retracted the sentence. Navalny later spent months under house arrest, then did one stint after another under administrative arrest, which lasted from ten days to a month. The regime, in other words, tried to silence him by a thousand cuts rather than a single blow that might have inspired the kind of protest that scares Putin." Today, The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum writes: "Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country." The Economist adds: "Even the isolation chambers of such frigid prisons could not silence him or sap his strength. … He never regretted his decision to return (to Russia), though his cellmates and guards asked about it constantly. He told them he had convictions: he would not give up on his ideas or his country. He told his supporters not to give up either. 'The Putinist state cannot last,' he wrote in January, on the third anniversary of his return to Russia. 'One day we'll look over, and he will be gone.'" |
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Fareed on Tucker Carlson's Love for Moscow |
The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson held a long interview with Putin this month—proclaiming, elsewhere while on his trip to Moscow, that today Russia is superior to the US in many ways, as Fareed notes in his latest Washington Post column. "Carlson's entire riff about Russia is really about the United States," Fareed writes. Carlson's praise of Moscow is a juxtaposition with often-chaotic American cities, which are not planned and governed with a strong hand, from the top down, but are allowed to grow organically, as the great observer and theorist of urban organization Jane Jacobs held to be the key to safe, sustainable, diverse, and interesting city life, Fareed points out. Carlson's affinity for Russia is part of a trend within the American political right, Fareed observes: "Once upon a time, American conservatives praised the United States' organic communities, rooted in freedom and choice, built bottom-up not top-down. But the new populist right despises these cities, and that disgust is in part a rejection of modern, pluralistic democracy itself. Increasingly, they are dazzled by the clean and orderly ways of dictatorships, populist authoritarians and absolute monarchies. After all, say what you will about Putin, he makes the subways run on time." |
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| Khan Couldn't Deliver Speeches, So an AI Version of Him Did |
Candidates connected to Imran Khan, the popular former Pakistani prime minister currently jailed on a slew of charges and convictions, surprisingly won the most seats in Pakistan's parliament in a nationwide election this month. Observers have called those results a strong rebuke to Pakistan's politically powerful military, which critics allege was responsible for Khan's imprisonment and political sidelining. At the Atlantic Council, Uzair Younus suggests technology has helped sustain Khan as a political force. With Khan's PTI party all but disbanded, his supporters linked up via virtual events, Younus writes; VPNs allowed them to circumvent Internet restrictions. Most oddly, Khan's allies used AI to present a computer-constructed, non-real Khan to address supporters. "Through messages conveyed to his lawyers during meetings, Khan was able to get information out to his party, which then used technology to generate content in his own voice," Younus writes. "This ensured that Khan managed to speak virtually to millions of Pakistanis ahead of and after polls. This kept the base energized and ensured that Khan remained in the news cycle, even though he was physically in jail and unable to engage with audiences in a way that other leaders could in the run-up to the elections." |
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Indonesia's New-Capital Plans Live On |
Indonesian President Joko Widodo is on his way out this year, having steered his country through a decade of relative stability and economic growth. The election victory of Subianto Prabowo, a former army general with a controversial past, has prompted fears that he will govern as an authoritarian strongman. But Prabowo's victory is good news for the massive project, still in the works, of building a new capital city called Nusantara. As Rae Wee writes for Reuters: "Prabowo has promised to follow predecessor Joko Widodo's policies of massive infrastructure spending, which includes the construction of Indonesia's new capital, and turning the country into an Asian hub for manufacturing electric vehicles." Describing the new-capital project, underway "in the jungles of Borneo," Nana Shibata, Ismi Damayanti, and Erwida Maulia wrote in a Nikkei Asia feature late last month: "The new city taking shape in the surrounding countryside is the brainchild of President Joko Widodo … who launched the audacious $29 billion building project at the start of his second term in 2019. But as housing and infrastructure is added, the city's future is far from certain, even as some 3,000 civil servants prepare to move to Nusantara later this year. With Jokowi set to step down in October after two terms as president, the project will be out of his hands. … Undeterred by naysayers, Jokowi envisions Nusantara as a 'green and smart global city' that will help spur development in the eastern half of Indonesia and eventually lift Indonesia into the ranks of developed nations, as well as help to fulfill its pledge of net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. About 65% of the city is expected to be forested, helping it achieve net-zero emissions by 2045 through renewable energy." |
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